It happened once before. I logged onto the computer on a particularly challenging day to find that my blog was gone. Just like that. After countless posts, telling stories, complaining and rejoicing...poof. I was on WordPress at the time. I called the help line and frantically explained the situation. Weeks later I got the data back, unformatted and imported to a new web address.
I was crushed. Not just about the loss of all that writing, but more because the conversation had stopped. The unidirectional talk that I had been having with myself and my readers came to a sudden unexpected end. And when it finally came back, the connection had severed.
For a long time there was silence.
My writing is now hosted on blogger. Four hundred and seventy six posts later, the self expression dwarfs that of it's forebearer. Yet, I have taken no actions to record or backup my posts. Like a game of Russian Roulette, I keep hitting the publish button in complete denial. I have no explanation why I am paralyzed in taking such precautionary measures.
Poof!
Many have told me to collate my posts into a book. They say to self publish or get an agent. I have contemplated many times. But I could no more anthologize than I could backup my blog. We don't record our conversations with our friends, our loved ones. We remember them.
And this, my friend, is my conversation with you. I spew forth the randomness and you sometimes respond. You comment, email, or retweet. We have a relationship, real or imagined, I can't always tell.
I guess it was never really about the specific words.
I was just trying to tell you things.
3 comments:
It's lovely to be in conversation with you -- I'm glad you persevered after the loss of all that writing.
One day, please do back this collection up. You really have something here. I find a commonality with your essays and words and my husband's thinking and practice of medicine. I learn so much from him about how practicing the best good medicine saves lives and costs much less in the near and long term. Real, truly preventative medicine, not the pap that Medicare rolls out, much less the "Evidence Based Medicine" with its built in standards of review that permit-nay, encourage ignoring clinical medicine and science. It also results in worse health outcomes and supports that sad and horrifying re-entrenchment of the old stereotypes and myths.
You and my husband and some other doctors I know still do medicine right. It is hard work in its own right, then next to impossible with all the regulatory algorithms of insurance companies, Medicare, hospital administrators, etc. ad nauseum. (My husband is "retired" until he can get well enough to jump back in. He inbuilt a clinic in an old building and for ten years, even as his own illness worsened, proved that doctors can bring world class medicine to a very rural area and succeed in delivering it and truly making a difference. Every time I go to town I see people that but for him, wouldn't still be alive, or would still be suffering. It is amazing! We were WNVE central in 2006 and his patients forced a change in the state law that made it much easier to make mosquito abatement districts. He testified at the first hearing for a district, while the local health district administrator howled in protest. The district was formed immediately. WNVE is endemic in my state now due to the denial of its existence by the health districts. But some counties are in better shape to improve the chances of another epidemic lower. Important. I had heard about the "flight from science" but seeing it in action-wow.)
Please keep writing and telling us. More people are hearing you and listening than you may think.
Lois
I love your writing, I want to see more of it. I feel as if I am in your head listening to how your mind works. Please keep writing and keeping us in your thoughts.
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