mono

• Scribbling.net

  "They always blame the parents," my mother said. "These therapists."

  "My therapist is great, Ma."

  "Let's hope so," she said. "You're paying her enough."

  I rolled my eyes.

  "You could come over and talk to me for an hour every week," she continued. "I wouldn't charge you. I'd make coffee."

  It was less of an invitation and more of an announcement of my mother's loneliness, her regret about the place at which we parted, and never met again. But she doesn't have to tell me. It's threaded through her speech, when she's telling me about her prayer group, or the retired teachers' luncheon, or how the baby looks like Dad. I see it in the motion of her hand, when she waves from the front door, as we pull away from the curb after a Sunday at her house, when she's spent the day simmering sauce and frying meatballs, just to watch us all leave again that night, go home with our families. I am implicated in this. I am also helpless.

  Gina Trapani

• little. yellow. different.

  Do you remember the house that you grew up in? I sure do.
  I lived in a house in El Cerrito, California, on the corner of Richmond and Moeser.

  Richmond Street is just another street in suburbia, admittedly, but Moeser Lane was a piece of work - Moeser snaked up an incredibly steep incline and into the El Cerrito hills. The community center with the swimming pool was only four blocks up the hill, a manageable walk. Two blocks past that was the junior high school. Anything past that made driving a better option, but once you walked to the top of the hill, there would be a breath-taking view of the San Francisco Bay Area. An old man would set up a Christmas nativity scene in the hills every year, and we weren't quite sure whether to stare at the gawdy plastic camels or at the lights flashing off the Bay Bridge behind us.

  If you walked the other way from my house, you would hit San Pablo Avenue, where the Baskin Robbins was and the Payless and the Safeway. Oh yeah, and the adult bookstore. "Ina," I would say to my Sunday School teacher as she would drive my sister and I to church, "can we go in there? It says 'Arcade!' I love video games!"

  "Uhmm, no." she'd hastily reply.

  My memories of that house are limited, but vivid. I remember getting yelled at by my mom for standing in the front yard in my bare feet, spraying passing cars with her garden hose. I remember the track lighting in the living room when my parents would let me stay up late for New Years Eve. I remember standing in the kitchen watching a policeman and my father dragging my sister away the first time she had a skitzophrenic episode.

  I was five years old. She was wearing pink socks. I remember waving at her, saying goodbye. Some things you never forget, no matter how young you are.

  My mother would always complain because we lived on a corner. She would always catch me in my pajamas in the middle of the night, staring out the windows as cars sped down the street or turned at speeds that were faster than she was comfortable with. "It's too noisy," she would complain to my father. "No wonder he can't sleep."

  We lived in that house when until Junior High, when my parents decided that one of those cookie cutter housing developments were a better real estate investment, the kind of houses that all look alike and are all inspired from those adobe houses in New Mexico. The new house was larger, sure, but I suddenly felt isolated: trips to the market now involved a 10 minute car ride, going to school turning into an ordeal, my father dropping me off at school on his way to work at six in the morning, waiting for an hour and a half for classes to start. The junior high school that was a two-minute walk from the old house in El Cerrito.

  And there I lived, for better or worse, until I left for college. And the childhood memories, both the good and the bad, begin to fade away and you begin to disassociate the memories as mental Polaroids that you can picture, but not with any emotional attachment.

  Until today, when at around 1:20pm, when a large truck lost control on Moeser, slammed into a couple of cars and crashed into a house, bursting into flames. In this picture, the house I lived in is off to the left. At least seven adults and one child were injured, three in critical condition.

  And suddenly, the memories come back. That and the hypothetical questions, of course. "If I still lived in the house, would I be helping anyone to safety? Would I have been a hero or would I have hid for safety? Would I be dead?" And then you realize that you weren't living there, so there's no reason to ask such things, and then you feel guilty for thanking God that you moved to the middle of nowhere years later. Which leads us to now, I guess.

  Oh well. Just your moment of Zen.

  Ernie Hsiung

• plasticbag.org

  Before the world of the weblog was the time of the homepage. Back before we knew any better, it was the homepage that was going to transform the world. Everyone was going to have them. They were going to democratise publishing. Together we thought we were going to change the world. But we didn't...

  Ten years on from the earliest homepages, and we now find ourselves with weblogs. There are now hundreds of thousands of active weblogs in the world - quite possibly more than a million - almost all of them powered by simple content management systems with names like LiveJournal, Blogger, Movable Type, Bloxsom... There are webloggers in pretty much every country of the world. There are celebrity webloggers, expert webloggers, political dissident webloggers, prison webloggers... Weblogs are becoming "Enterprise Solutions", they're creating empires of "Nano-publishing". Across the world, faster and more randomly than anyone has yet been able to track and collate, webloggers are linking, posting, trackbacking, commenting, aggregating and moblogging their way through the first days of the 21st Century. The world now finally seems to be changing, and weblogging is part of that process...

  This is an exciting time to be engaged with this explosive community of people - and there are many intriguing debates about the nature, function and value of weblogging starting to emerge. Some are debating about whether weblog culture resembles hyperactive academic citation networks - does the "best" stuff rise to the surface? Others are asking questions about the politics of weblogs - if it's a democratic medium, they ask, why are there so many inequalities in traffic and linkage? Others are talking about a 'world-wide free-market in ideas' - with all the benefits and horrors that suggests. Still others wonder whether we're all about to sell out. A few say we already have...

  These debates are heady and passionate and focused with laser-like intensity - and often they are valuable debates to be having. But their focus comes with a cost - we're losing a sense of context - why should we care about weblogs at all? What makes them different from the dying form of the homepage? How do they fit into the wider context of emerging cultural and technological trends? These are important questions because they situate weblogging within a larger shift in the way we relate to the world around us. And in the process, they gesture at our future. Where do we go from here?

  Tom Coates

• BIROCO.COM

  Later, drinking warm Hakutsuru sake at 2 in the morning, a thousand words written elsewhere towards some storytelling idea, all I think is I may have discovered something I don't want to write about. And do I really want to write a novel anyway. I always feel like this. Many times I have wondered whether I really want to write at all. Yet to write fills a void, temporarily. I am half of the mind that if you have something to write you'll be unable to prevent yourself from writing it anyway, so what the hell does all the agonizing about it in between times really amount to. Hassle you could do without. Perhaps there is something about 'throw-away' writing, like this in this journal, that appeals to me more naturally. On the other hand, as a medium for reading, I'm not sure a website is too great. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that people more and more use the web just to look things up, and that they don't have the patience for sustained reading. You come across something by some route or other, you read it, it may even be interesting and well-written, but that's it. I rarely delve back into a blog-writer's archives, even if I like their current entry, and I must doubt that people bother to do that with mine.

  I don't know, I lose track of the things I suppose are important to me. It's all very well whittering away about something and nothing here, but does it really ever get to grips with the underlying emptiness? The sense of going nowhere. I've done a few things in my life that I'm proud of, but you can't rest on your laurels. Sometimes I watch a film and think about how wonderfully written it is, or directed, or acted, and I feel pangs of wanting to create. Yet so soon after I've watched the film it is as nothing to me. It was just one and a half hours of entertainment. Books have touched me more deeply than films, you spend more time with a book, books have even touched me more deeply than actual real experience, yet books I find increasingly difficult to read. It's a real effort to crack open a book, seems like a great commitment of time. Films are easier, you know how long it's going to take.

  I thankfully don't have a TV to distract me and waste my time, yet where is my time going? Sauntering around, making pots of tea, seeing people. Where is the grand theme that there used to be? Even the moments of poignancy, the profound sadnesses and joys by which I used to think I could measure the worth of my life, they seem almost manufactured, to taste some lost taste again. I am starting to feel incapable of really living, most of the things that have ever meant anything to me now feel much of a muchness. I am peering into the eye of the needle but all at once turning it round and poking it in my eye. To an extent I no longer trust myself not to make what is known in rock climbing as 'a dynamic move'. A climbing friend years ago showed me what this is. He was showing me how to scale a wall one night. He skillfully placed his toetips in crevices and cracks, curling his strong fingers round tiny gaps. He seemed to have a great knack for finding these in what to most eyes would appear to be a plain and uniform wall. Then he stopped, sprawled out on the surface, high above me. He called down:

  'This is the point where a dynamic move will need to be made. I've run out of handholds and footholds. I can see a position, but to get there I need to make a dynamic move.'

  'What's a dynamic move?'

  'This!'

  He just jumped to the position, for a moment no part of his body touching the wall.

  So that was a dynamic move. Similarly, although I didn't particularly intend to bring up this analogy (I never know what I'm going to write), I guess I'm saying that I too have run out of handholds and footholds. I'm stuck. So I guess I've got to scan the wall for an advancement of my position and forget how I'm going to get there for now.

  Joel Biroco

• Laughing Knees

  Here I am living in the heart of the biggest city in the world, far, far away from hills that I dreamed of roaming, where dew clung to my hair and wool sweater, the gentlest whisper of my breath hung in the dawn light. That is where I always imagined moving within, but somehow I ended up here. The daily fare is of thundering trains carrying hoards of people stuffed between doors, of bread and bananas and pale meat wrapped in crinkling plastic, of rivers stinking of sewage and crows tearing up bags of refuse, of weekend after weekend finding myself, as if lead along by shifting, magic trails, back downtown amidst the concrete, over and over again heading through the same stores, buying the same, heartless magazines and clothes, reacting to people who all look the same, wearing their ties and latest fashions all picked up (not even harvested) from the same, lurking stores, no one daring to cast them off, of cars and cars and cars and cars, of electrical towers strung from house to house, of deserted streets as houses glow, unmoving, at midnight while the moon and the stars wheel unnoticed over the rooftops, of flickering, blue television light, transfixing me and the ones I love so that we sit unmoving beside one another, of distances stretched to breaking with houses and buildings and dams and levees and water towers and roads, roads, roads and bridges and factories and stadiums and wharves and warehouses and shopping centers and shopping centers and shopping centers and shopping centers and shopping centers, until the eye runs out of green to imagine, and no life exists but our own, and our own lives seem to exist only in the reflection in the windows of the trains at night, when hope passes through the darkness like street lights swooping past.

  Miguel Arboleda

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Epilogue

Amidst the slow pace of the recent holidays, a time for reflection and contemplation, it seemed appropriate to add some yin to the yang of a previous post on well-designed weblogs.

While attracting a surprising amount of interest in the blogosphere, I couldn't help but feel that it had somehow contributed to an imbalance in the appreciation of what really matters.

This post came about in an effort to restore that balance, if only for some time. Featured here is a selection of writing, which, though deliberately different in style, represents a somewhat unconventional type of weblog post: longer, more literary, closer in feeling to what you might find published in a magazine, or even in a book.

Only you wouldn't.

Not that there is no place for this kind of writing in printed media. I believe and hope there is. No, the point is that for different reasons these authors chose to publish through this particular medium, on that particular day, and under those special circumstances. The result is something unique; thoughts, feelings, and experiences that most likely would never have been shared in any other way. And certainly not like that; from private to public in seconds, at 5 a.m. in the morning, at the touch of a button...

Therein lies the power of the personal publishing platform: the means to publish, the freedom of style, the inspiration to write. And an environment in which to communicate all this.

So the posts listed here may serve to remind us that even the strongest, most beautiful designs, ingeniously laid out, intuitively navigated, coded with the fastest and most powerful scripts, crafted with the leanest, meanest, and most semantically meaningful markup, and brought to life with the finest examples of the most extraordinarily declared styles, are means to an end, not ends in themselves.

They stand here on their own, to inspire, and, perhaps, to instill a question:

What is it all about?