Although I’ve been “blogging” in some form since 1995 or so, well before the word ‘blog’ was coined in 1997, in the form of various crappy personal “home pages” and a relatively popular unofficial fan-page for the band The Badlees at the height of their commerical success, the project which you find yourself currently reading has been on-going, more or less continuously, since 2002.

Since January 14, 2002, according to the pre-wordpress archives. That means, dear reader, that I’ve been doing these relatively unfiltered brain-dumps to the web for exactly ten years.

I suppose I should honor that anniversary somehow. When John Scalzi hit that milestone, he released a successful, Hugo-winning book collecting a selection of entries from the first ten years. However, he’s a bestselling novelist, and, you know, has a market. I get as many hits in a year as he gets in a couple of hours. I can’t imagine I’d sell any except the copy I printed for myself.

Plus, you know, putting together a book requires stuff like preparation and copy editing. I haven’t done any of that. Doesn’t mean I won’t try someday; print-on-demand, self-published books are a totally doable thing now. Even without the need for up-front inventory costs, it would still probably a losing proposition, if I’m to be honest with myself .

Lacking a ready-to-sell product coinciding with the anniversary (I hated taking those business classes, can you tell?), I shall have to fall back on my usual means of acknowledging things – by going on about it in a text editor. I am nothing if not consistent, in practice if not in content.

Looking back at the first couple of pages in the archives, I can say for certain that I have been anything *but* consistent in terms of content – there’s a definite evolution. I’ve gone into examining this phenomenon before, recently in fact. In that post, I broke my output down into discrete eras, which I admit, is rather self-indulgent (at least I didn’t name them). But then, what personal blog isn’t self-indulgent? That’s kind of the point.

In thinking about this milestone, I read the first couple of pages of the archives over again, something I haven’t done in a while. What I noticed more than anything else was the fact that the writing pretty much sucked. Almost all of it is exceedingly enthusiastic and superficial, with way too many exclamation points. Sure, during those first months of this project, I had a lot on my plate: dealing with the impending birth of my son, the drama inherent in that birth (which still occasionally raises nightmares – funny, I never really talked about how scared I was in the blog), the immediate aftermath of said birth, and the subsequent stress and excitement of almost immediately starting a new job (it was a full three months or so), so I can understand why the writng wasn’t up to par (doesn’t excuse some of the middle years, though). I suspect, early on, I was trying to convince *myself* that I was that enthusiastic about everything in my life as much as I was trying to convince everyone else.

That’s one thing I’ve noticed in reviewing the decade; eventually, the mask I tried to project slips a bit, revealing the face underneath – which, honestly, is another mask (everything we present to the outside world is really a mask – no one knows the real “us” except us, and often, we’re pretty good about fooling ourselves), but probably one closer to the real individual behind it.

Of course, I’m not the same person I was ten years ago, either, but that’s to be expected. In any case, I think I’m more comfortable with the person I am now, and having ten years’ worth of journals to track my personal evolution has helped me to see how I arrived at that comfort.

So, one day I may do that book – I don’t care if no one reads it but me; having such a record of personal evolution in a tangible, seemingly permanent (if flammable) record would be an interesting thing.