When I first started this blog 14 years ago, I generally wrote each column after breakfast and just posted them when I was done. Even after I started scheduling them in the summer of ’11 I rarely had trouble coming up with a topic to write about; in fact, I had so many I would sometimes write them as I thought of them and simply queue them up. But back then, I had a couple of decades of frustrated self-expression bottled up in my head, and I was one of the few writing on the topic of sex work; blogs had not yet been largely superseded by podcasts and videos, and Google had not yet begun to suppress sites it deemed too dirty for the tender sensibilities of the internet-dwelling public. This site had such heavy traffic I could usually get at least a column or two a week just out of reader questions or comments, and as “sex trafficking” hysteria ramped up in the early Teens it was all I could do to keep up with reporting the hysteria and debunking the myriad lies. But a great deal has changed in the intervening years: outspoken sex workers are no longer rare, the “sex trafficking” hysteria has given way to newer and shinier moral panics, and my lifelong practice of burning my candle at both ends has resulted in my brain aging far more than those of people who haven’t been running theirs on “high” since the Nixon era. And even had I not done that, 14 years is plenty of time for change; earlier today I was speaking to a young man who wasn’t even alive yet in 2010, and consider the cultural shifts from 1910 to 1924, or from 1950 to 1964, or from 1990 to 2004. Hell, I don’t recognize even half of the names of politicians and celebrities I see bandied about on the internet any more, and my emotional reaction to the majority of news items is, “here we go again.” So I reckon it’s not at all surprising that even with five regular features a week, I sometimes have trouble thinking of what to do with the other two days; I think I can trust my loyal readers to forgive me for that. And I’m even learning to forgive myself for it.
Archive for May 13th, 2024
More Often Nowadays
Posted in Diary, tagged activism, blogging, psychology on May 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »
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