Still Crazy After All These Two Years

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone

~"You'll Never Walk Alone," from Carousel

I'm afraid they have made the play far too sad. I doubt whether anyone will pay $6 for tickets to have their hearts completely broken.

~Lawrence Langner, on Carousel


As Paul Simon might say, we at Pearls of Mystery (okay, it's just me) are "Feelin' Groovy" and not just because we're kickin' down the cobblestones and looking for fun. You see, it's been two years since the Inception of this blog. I can hardly believe it.

I realize this blog entry is going to be a bit pretentious, but I put a lot of work into this blog and it feels like a good time to write a reflective "legacy" post, as unreadable as this will be for most of you readers. It's been 2 years, and I've written 75 things, and most of them are pretty long (and which very rarely had unjustified noise, for all my fixation on random bullshit). In fact, in the aggregate, I've written the equivalent of a long novella or a short novel (quite a bit more than 50000 words, probably closer to 60000 to be precise). And you know what? That's kind of how I actually see this blog: as some sort of perpetually-evolving, timestamped log of my personal development from this part of my life. A novel, told through its author's vignettes, of narratives yet unknown to me. A semi-fictional autobiography with no knowledge of the ending.



When Jeremy and I started Pearls on September the Fifth, 2009, a lot of things were different:

-Richard Jefferson had not played a single game for the Spurs. It's funny, because in the 24 months that followed, his...Prufrockian tragedy became the central narrative of this blog: his... claymationesque effort the perfect metaphor for this blog.

-Gilbert Arenas still seemed like an alright guy.

-Heath Ledger was still alive. Wait, no he wasn't. It's been 44 months, which is kind of astonishing to me. Four years this January. Christ.

-The Heat were preparing themselves for a solid 6 seed and the Cavs for a likely 1 seed.

-I still had never read anything by Chekhov or, really, by Lovecraft. This is pretty astonishing to me, in retrospect. The blog didn't really get...good in any sense until I had read a lot of Chekhov and gone through a lot of horrible Lovecraft imitation. I don't think the blog is good now, but I think it is a lot better than when I started and was still in the "incomprehensible and unexplained juxtapositions are a sign of writerly depth" phrase. Not to say it was all without value, and I liked a lot of the things I thought of, but I wish I'd done things like this a little more often. I guess I thought simplicity and sentiment and leaving images to the imagination...were bad things. Funny that I didn't ever seem to apply that to things I'm reading. But live and learn, right?

-My favorite piece, by far, that I've ever written is the great Mike Brown-Mike Woodson conflict. As odd as it is to think it was already 20 months ago, it's even odder to consider that there was a time when it didn't exist.

-This is not the best piece I've written by any stretch, but I think it might be the most mature in its style, structure, and content, and I think if I can make its approach a little less dry, a little more vivid, and a little more considerate of readers, I can continue to make really solid improvements. It's something I literally would have not have had the vision and ability to pull off a couple years ago, and maybe that's the only testament to my development I've ever needed. Yes, this blog is the result of an optimist, my patient friend Aaron, my flighty but good-natured friend Jeremy (we're still bros, bro, really), and a lot of hours of work. And it's not very good. But it's getting better. Heh.

Thanks for reading.