Origin Of Retro-Blogs

The majority of the posts I have made, and may yet make, which are indicated to be a "Retro-Blog" were written between 1977 and 1987, one youthful and tumultuous decade out of  my 52 relatively mundane years, and compiled into a boxed set of 11 volumes, numbered one through twelve, skipping eleven because I had some inexplicable problem with the number eleven at the time, yet just as inexplicably I had no problem with there being a page eleven in every volume.  The title of this collection of some 687 hand photocopied pages is simply "I".  It was commissioned in 1987 by a friend of mine who had seen a smaller volume of selected works and wanted to have the "complete works".  Only three physical copies were made, one each for my benefactor, myself, and another friend who I believe also contributed funds.

The page count of 687 isn't nearly as much writing as one might think, given that many pages are line drawings, collages, and other visual works and artifacts.  The density of words per page varies widely as well, as much of it is poetry, and most of it is presented in photocopied facsimile of original formats, which varied widely in format and print density.  The only works to be manually transcribed to digital form and neatly printed were those that were in my nearly unreadable handwriting, or were written specifically for the collection to provide context.  Of those, no digital copies remain, so this retro-blogging is a by-product of a halfhearted new effort to digitize the entire collection.  It has all been scanned to multiple PDF documents, which have in turn been processed through an OCR engine and saved as rtf documents.  Not surprisingly, only a fraction of the OCR efforts rendered text that could be read with a reasonable amount of editorial repair.

I should also point out that the vast majority of the writing is simply dreadful, and only a few comparatively less dreadful selections will be presented publicly as a Retro-Blog or in any other form.

I promise I am very nearly as bored of writing about this as you are of reading about it.

This is where I would normally bemoan the the lack of readers of these blogs, but I am well past caring.  I know my place in the world, and the insignificance of my undisciplined works of writing.  I care just enough, maybe, to carry on posting this evidence of a younger and more energetic version of myself, for awhile.  I don't know exactly why, but I have theories, which I don't care to explore at this moment.

On occasion my Retro-Blog entries may mine sources other than the "I" of 1987, primarily saved copies of entries from my now defunct Facebook "notes" and MySpace blogs.  Of that, there is probably nothing even marginally interesting beyond 2009.  Time and failure and 4 1mg doses of Clonazepam a day have dulled my wits and eroded the edges of my psyche.  I barely have enough delusion of self worth to remain alive, much less write, which begs the question of why I am doing this right now.