That Keeps Me Searching

Eight years ago today I started my first weblog,Cowpokes and Pearly Buttons. I was a twenty-year-old writing student living in Logan Square having moved to Chicago five months earlier. I stopped posting to Cowpokes in 2006 while I was living in Valenciennes, France. When I lived in Pittsburgh I started Good Eaters with my friend and neighbor to chronicle our cooking and eating adventures. 
It's been two years since my last to any blog. It's a strange creature, the blog, it's part diary, part storytelling, a time capsule when you re-read your past self years later, and I think it's this last quality that is so appealing to me. The weblog becomes a forum for all the little things you wouldn't write in your journal, the weird observations you wouldn't think to tell your sister or friend, the  ideas for cover band names (Lesbian Rumours- Fleetwood Mac cover band). But these are all the little bits that make up a certain time and place in your life and the idea that just one other person might check in to read a post makes you pay attention to it all. 
My life has changed in unexpected ways since I was last blogging and I intentionally let my writing become very quiet over the last two years. Lately though, I try to think of something funny, strange, or lovely that happened at the end of each day and I have been coming up with some gems. I am going to predict that most posts will be funny (hopefully) so maybe it's strange to start off on a serious note. But you don't write anything for two years, it probably warrants a re-cap. 


I've been to Hollywood,
I've been to Redwood,
I crossed the ocean
for a heart of gold.
I've been in my mind,
it's such a fine line
that keeps me searching
for a heart of gold,
and I'm getting old.
-Neil Young "Heart of Gold"