meandering creativity, symbols and emotion

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

going through the old notebooks

In high school I wanted to be Jim Morrison. For about a year I carried around a paperback copy of his biography No One Here Gets Out Alive. I poured over it with the religious ferver specially reserved for 16 year-old white suburban males.

I also carried around notebooks of my own writings. Tons of them. I filled them up with poetry, song lyrics, thoughts - all of them deep and profound to be sure. Or maybe not.

It's really too easy to look down on that seriousness. But I've come to forgive and accept the 17 year old version of me. At least most days. And I cannot ignore the fact that those notebook scrawlings did serve as the foundation for the lyrics I still write today. Lyric writing is a craft you develop afterall.

This week, Lara and I have both been going through our myriad of blogs trying to consolodate and settle on homes for all of them. This is a challenging as we were both early adopters (2001 was my first I believe) and we also moved from several different sites and formats as the medium matured and different sites gained and lost popularity.

Thankfully it's easy to get a domain and just point it wherever. I suspect we'll both eventually settle on a wordpress hosted option. In the meantime it's been nice to revisit those thoughts we held dear back in 2004.

Here's an example - January 2004 Voicemail From the Dead

2 comments:

  1. "the religious ferver specially reserved for 16 year-old white suburban males." Okay, first of all, here is a Shannon I remember. Also the same Shannon I can distinctly remember saying, "Jesus IS my hero, dammit!"

    I'm glad you've come to a point of accepting and forgiving your 17 year old self. I am closer to forgiving but nowhere near accepting 17 year old me. What a mess.

    As far as platforms go, I know Laura and I are both very happy with Typepad, but since you seem much more comfortable with the techie side of things, I think you'll like the flexibility of WP. At Simple Kids, I only have to enter copy and hit Publish, but I've seen many, many impressive design work on WP blogs.

    Thanks for sharing the Voicemail post. Kind of gave me goose bumps. I hope you'll link back to more of your buried archives!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I do remember saying that Jesus was my hero. dammit.

    I probably didn't realize just how heroic he was until I read through the entirety of the gospels in the summer of 1995 but I'm almost positive that I actually believed it.

    Immaturity and lack of experience comes with being 17 which is why it's easy for me to accept and forgive.

    It's a lot easier for me to be critical of how adult leaders in the church channeled our ferver in directions that upon reflection have very little to do with Jesus.

    ReplyDelete

older