bombs in bottles
I recently got introduced to "digital gardening" as a term, if not a concept:
Maggie Appleton: A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden
I have a long history of being ahead of trends but behind the names people give to trends, and this is no exception.
I had a Professional Blog for over a decade. In all that time, it was never "polished." My "professional blog" was, for the most part, a digital garden. I'd have an idea, toss it out there, and see what happened.
...Strike that. It wasn't even a digital garden. It was a digital compost heap. I'd have an idea, toss it out there, and ignore it until it fermented with all the other ideas into something new.
This blog, too, is a digital compost heap at best. I aspire to the kind of "cultivation" digital gardens have in the form of links between ideas, indicating some kind of throughline of thought or development. But I'm also too interested in Current Thought to go back and organize or round up all the Previous Thoughts.
Even blogging platforms/CMSes/etc. that have tagging and categorizing systems built in don't help much. My Professional Blog's tags were a hot mess. The category system wasn't a lot better.
Around 2017 I went through a big "let's do the trunk and branches system" reorganization of that blog - have a few "pillar" pieces to which everything linked and which linked to everything, thus attempting to communicate to Google the vital importance of those pillar pieces. This project, while it made the blog somewhat more organized, did not clean up my tag/category system.
I sort, organize, and attach metadata to things all day long at work. I don't want to do it at home, too.
Lately, though, I've been thinking about committing a little more time to organizing my ever-proliferating collection of personal writing. I did the Alan Lakein Life Goals Exercise:
Alan Lakein Life Goals Exercise
One of the things that kept coming up, to my surprise, was a desire to Get My Shit In Order for whomever comes after me. Maybe it's not so surprising. Nearly Dying has a way of reminding one that death is inevitable and that it likes to pounce from nowhere. I had to clean up after my spouse died suddenly; I'd rather leave a slightly tidier pile of crap for my own surviving family members.
For some reason, attaching some kind of metadata system to my Giant Pile of Writing That No One Will Want and Let's Be Real Should Probably Just Be Burned feels important to me. I'm sure my surviving family would prefer a well-drafted trust that eliminates the need for probate. I can do both! I contain multitudes!
I call this blog "dr molly tov cocktails" for the pun, but let's be real: Welcome to Molly's Compost Heap.
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