Back again

A couple of weeks ago, I was gedankening and the topic, morbidly enough, was death. Part of this was due to the seemingly large number of unhappy news stories; part of this was a couple of conversations that I'd been having; and part of this was due to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard (one of my favourite plays).

Guil: "... Death is not anything ... death is not .... It's the absence of presence, nothing more ..."

And this got me to thinking about death, since the only person that I've known that has died was my great-grandfather, who was 87 at the time and on a holiday in Spain. He died coming out of a bar, after being chased by a 55-year old woman all evening. But I digress. For me, death has only been witness at long-range and I've never had to see it close up. I've never seen the slow roll down from sickness. It's only been "yes, there", and then news that they're not there. And that's the extent of my experience.

I know that there's the urban legend of the old person who lives by themselves, and dies, and nobody notices until the corpse is discovered weeks later being eaten by Alsatians. It's not entirely impossible, and it actually happened to a family friend of mine. She and her housemate were friendly with the old man who lived in the neighbouring apartment, and would always say hello and stop for a chat. And then one day, she realised that she hadn't seen him for a while. She knew that he had no family in Australia, no one to check up on him, and so did the knock-on-door-check, heard no reply, got worried and then phoned the police. They came and broke-in ... and found the old man, passed away. No Alsatians. And while it was good that he could go on living, till the end, in a self-sufficient manner and the like, I think it's sad that a living being can pass on and spend the final moments alone, their passing unnoticed.

Which led me to effectively kill one of my lives, or identities. I wanted to see if my online identity passed out of view and effectively 'died', would anyone notice? What would it be? Now, I know an 'online death' is stupid and bears little resemblence, both in cause and result, to the real thing, but I wanted to see what it was like to have disappeared. So I changed the url of my blog (as if I would or could delete all of that which I'd written!) and put in a couple of entries occasionally. And stopped.

So what is the answer? If no-one reads a blog, does it still exist? Well, yes ... and no. It still exists as a blog because I'm still reading it, and writing occasionally. Yeah, I know the content, but I still care about it.

And then I started thinking about all the other blogs. The blogs that are no longer being written ... the ones that the author writes one entry, and then loses interest. With emails, there's a 6-month "don't use and loose" but this doesn't seem to be the case with blogs. I came across several blogs that were ghostly ships from years and years ago, without looking. I wanted to write to the authors and find out why they stopped, and also why the started. What were they planning to write - rants? Stories of unfulfilled ambitions? Small joys? Existence in general?

Regardless of their intentions, those blogs are still there, eternal (at least for the moment) even though the author, for all we know, could have passed away. And then my head started hurting.

So why did I put mine back? Well, I was sick of it not living. I wanted it to breathe again. Kinda fitting that it's now midnight.

Gotta sleep.
x el j