Coming back to a favorite place

I went back through my old blog to look at some of my previous July 16 entries (last night I did this) and found myself jumping around to some other posts, in part because I've apparently been pretty boring/bored on July 16. I find myself wanting to write, but then I find myself not wanting to take some time to sit down, organize my thoughts, and type them up.

Looking at my old diary -- because that's what we called it back there on Diaryland.com, though I more often referred to it as a journal -- some of my best and favorite works were either college or shortly post-college entries transcribed from notebooks (in my obsessed-with-Kerouac stage, I carried a spiral pocket notebook and pencil to write my thoughts just as he had), or those I wrote in the early hours after I'd come home from the paper and got on my computer in my bedroom at my parents' house. That's when my days were spent driving around the Shore, going on photo day trips, or covering high school sports and minor league baseball. I was out and about, didn't have Flickr or a digital camera or an iPod or Facebook. Or a house. I had time.

But as the entries faded in frequency (I'm not going to count the number, but I split the 2001 archive into three pages, the 2002 into two, and kept '03 and '04 as one) and then in quality, my tasks and responsibilities each day rose. I moved into an apartment. I started dating. I switched jobs. I repeated two out of three of those, the first one three times.

I used to write extensively about my trips and vacations, often at the end of the day on the road. At the very least, I'd put down my thoughts in a file every few days, then polish them at the end of the trip. It was only today that I finally finished off a post about a baseball game back in May, and I still have dreams of something of a travelogue about the rest of the trip. We'll see.

I'm headed home now, and in the morning, we head west to Cleveland for a short weekend trip. But I'm not going to write about it now -- let's see if I make the time to write about it after it happens. And within a few days.