One of the best aspects of a personal website, at least of those that I frequent, is the fact that you never quite know what you’re going to get. Because our blogs are so personal, and the human instrument so variable, it is unlikely to feature the same exact post twice. If anything, that is the underlying impetus of much of my life – it’s the reason why boredom and stagnation are my number one enemy. Things can get awfully dull when there is no room for growth or evolution or change or improvement. I will never understand those people so blind and set in their ways that they cannot open themselves up to new ideas, new ways of looking at the world, new experiences, and new hopes and dreams.
This website is what I often wish I was at my very best – and sometimes very worst, because in order to live up to the dizzying heights we ascribe to, it is necessary to wallow from time to time in the very muck from which we wish to rise. It’s contrast, the nice word for inconsistency and human frailty.
And so, as the year begins, the 8th year of www.ALANILAGAN.com (which roughly translates to 80 if we convert blog years to human years), I look to bring you more of the things that interest me, from David Beckham in his underwear to Ben Cohen in his, from Madonna in and out of her underwear to Shirley Horn alive again only in her extensive catalogue, from the safety and warmth of my marriage to the recalled journey of a young man mostly alone.
There will be travels and adventures at home and in lands far away, tales both remembered and yet to be lived, and always there will be the spring and the summer to come. It will be a journey of family lost and gained, loved and recalled and never forgotten, of friendships that have lasted through the decades, and new ones forged along the way. People will come and go, certain friends fade, certain friends renew, but ever and anon the love endures, the loyalty burns, and a laugh lingers forever.
So too will there be art – words to read, photography to see, music to hear, theater to experience, movies to watch – and somewhere in between is the art of this blog – and every blog – for there is indeed an art to sharing what we share with the world. In some ways it is the most accessible form of art – open to all, open to any, and relatively free from constrictions. It is still an art in its infancy, rife with failure and experimentation as it finds its own way. There is something raw and unfettered about it, and therein lies its potent of-the-moment glory. Perhaps its might is in its very temporal nature – both immediate and forever. Once put out there it is just as likely to be lost as it is to be forever embedded in someone’s files and spread and saved a billion times over. Who can foretell the lasting scope of this technology?
That’s where I’m headed – and you are invited to come along. No blog exists on its own. It took about eight years for me to realize that, proof that no one is too old or too stubborn to learn, no matter how much they think they know.
