Genusfrog [ 10:45 am ] | 0 comments

MY MODBLOG

In The red street diner, i wrote about a girl who goes home to discover that her hometown and family have disappeared.

after writing that, a part of my life also disappeared. it was my old blog.

goodchristianboy.modblog.com was in many ways the heyday of this corner of the internet. i remember attracting 80 hits every day, mostly from the small but supportive modblog community. it was the blog on which i started blogging.

i had a voice when i was there. i blogged about my journey of faith, philosophised about god, life and christianity and preached like a legitimate preacherboy with a pocketful of relevant verses and an altar call at the end.

modblog closed down in january 06 and along with it died my voice.

i wonder, how did i lose my voice? was it work? was it time? or growing old? maybe i started learning that christian material without the edge of cynicism came across as uncool. i stopped talking about jesus online. the blog of a flawed guy trying to get it right became the blog of a flawed guy trying hard to get it more wrong. by march 07, this place was already steeped in defeat. by july, it got about as bitter as it could get.

sometimes we lose things in life. and we replace them with new things. i found myself a home here on blogger. for the first few months, my modblog could still be viewed but i was so stupid, i never backed up my posts. i kept saying, one of these days i'll back up all those posts. one of those days became one of those weeks. one day, it just couldn't be viewed anymore. in its place, a page error.

i'd lost all my posts.

two years of my documented life, erased from the internet. maybe it was just as well. i had seemingly lost the same heart that posted them.

*

last night, athalia told me about something.

she told me about webarchive.org. they have this search engine there called the wayback machine and what it does is, every two months, its robots crawl all over the internet and archive web pages. it's been doing this since the 1990s.

athalia told me that it's there. that's she's found it. my modblog. she found my modblog.

today, i saw it for myself.

ripped around the edges, with pages falling off the spine, sat my modblog in the middle of some monster filing cabinet of digital garbage. some of the posts never got archived. but many of them are there. i'm not making the same mistake twice. today, i started backing them up, from 2004 onwards. i'm even reposting peoples' comments with the names they used back then.

it's strange.

rebuilding your past in a new home is like putting old photos behind new frames. and as i read what fergus wrote at 24, i'm starting to wonder if it's really a bunch of posts that i've recovered, or perhaps a voice that had been dead for too long.

Labels: christianity, housekeeping, identity, memory and nostalgia