To my astonishment, every single month since this column's inception is populated by at least one post.

And, excepting the first month, which begin on the 31st of May, 2002, only one month actually stoops to the low of 1 post, and that was Jan 2009, when the author was wholly focused on another gargantuan writing project.

The monthly peak of 50 occurs in July, 2003, when the author should have been preoccupied with the production and directing of a full-length play, but seems to have been so energized by that experience that he nonetheless wrote multiple times daily. And during that month, he wrote this:

My dear, I am hounded by much Evil these last twenty-four hours. I have many times been distracted, confounded, slacked, sun-baked or drink-soaked into inaction. Six or seven times the metaphorical digital pen has touched its imaginary paper and brought up nought but some intricate paragraphs leading to no end. . . .

Reading these old archives makes me laugh and cry—but happily. Oh, the ferment in those heady days!

A few years ago, it became fashionable amongst the classic bloggers (those that started in '99 or '00) to lament the passing of the age, saying blogging "isn't the same anymore." (By a couple of years ago this was already a stale sentiment.) I've been wondering why this is, why blogging could lose its allure in just a half dozen years, when people can enjoy tennis or sailboats for a full thirty or fifty years.

A typical complaint was that "At the beginning, you could find all the blogs on one page, and read them all." The problem wasn't just a lost cachet, I'm sure—not just another moan of "I liked that band before everyone else." And it's not just that there are too many crummy blogs—those desultory logs of breakfast foods and banal interactions that started to appear by the tens of thousands in ’04. In fact, the social meta-filter seems to prevent these from clogging anyone's consciousness very badly.

Quite the contrary, today there are surprisingly many good blogs, on every topic and with every conceivable tone and frequency of posting, from architecture to mathematical computer science and mothering: blogs of consistently high quality and sometimes even a distinct personal voice.

Essentially, what we lost was the intimacy of those early days, and the specialness that came with it. We felt special because we were finding our voices in this nervous new medium, and occassionally attracting strangers' attentions. What was a cozy cocktail party with unknown friends-of-friends now seems to be something like the intersection at Times Square, with plenty of interesting stuff going on but far too many attractions and attractees to really get a fix on anything.

And it's not just that the competition has raised the bar; the medium itself has become more fixed, more ironed out, and therefore less fun as it's become less fresh. When the presses started rolling on this here column, there was a sense that someone like me could attract a tiny and so far unknown readership: some bande a parte, perhaps a tribe under these "liberal arts 2.0." It was early in a new millenium and I—or we—felt an energy breaking out around us, even on the streets and signs. Nobody knew what made a great post, and we were trying all our tricks to see what would make a sound.

But the world surely remains vivid and wonderful. Most of all we ourselves have changed. We've fallen into timeless traps of jade and ennui; we have sometimes gotten old and let that get the better of us. We are in too much of a hurry.

It falls to us to convoke new intimate communities, to agree to share again, to love like we've never been hurt. Maybe in the 2030s we can get nostalgic about the old days, moan about the whippersnappers, and give interviews for posterity. But I hope not even then.