Succulence here, there, and everywhere.

I was looking at my site’s installed feeds earlier and noticed that Sebinomics (a new media and music kind of blog) already closed his blog, I don’t know when, but all I could see on my feed was ‘Last blog post.’ I clicked it which unfortunately got me nowhere since he has already switched his blog to private.

So I thought maybe Google kept a cache of that last blog post so I searched for it using his post title. But Google knows where to bring my attention to. The top search result was entitled the ‘Last post’ which was a dying guy’s last post on his blog, posthumously posted by his family and friends.

His post about the life and death, about his ‘best friend’ and family, and the afterlife is outstandingly positive despite the fear of the ‘process of dying.’

What moved me most is the last paragraph of the post:

A wondrous place

The world, indeed the whole universe, is a beautiful, astonishing, wondrous place. There is always more to find out. I don’t look back and regret anything, and I hope my family can find a way to do the same.

What is true is that I loved them. Lauren and Marina, as you mature and become yourselves over the years, know that I loved you and did my best to be a good father.

Airdrie, you were my best friend and my closest connection. I don’t know what we’d have been like without each other, but I think the world would be a poorer place. I loved you deeply, I loved you, I loved you, I loved you.

This is a post of a fulfilled man. He might not have lived long enough to see the fruits of his love, but the lives he left are certainly blessed to have had him in theirs.

His views about life and death are simple, so simple you could say that in the face of death and accepting it fully gives one a sense of wisdom that cannot be learnt simply by just living. That kind of wisdom you gain only by fully accepting the inevitable fact of death.

This

or this

for Christmas?

I have not written anything to build my very own domain and for that I think I am a bad writer or ‘webmaster.’ This domain has been with me for years now but I have been using it only to access my mail as hosted on Google Apps which I find very useful nonetheless.

I used to blog a lot. I guess I had so much use for it when social networking was not yet in vogue as much as it is today and a few years back. I blogged back when there were no bigwigs in the space, when there were no ‘influencers’ yet, when blogging was a purist’s way of expressing one’s opinion without getting commissioned or set up to do so by brands or by some other hidden agenda lurking around.

I guess I was a travel slash expat blogger then when I was still based in Saigon. I kept a journal of all my new experiences from restaurants, tourist destinations, shopping finds that were unique to Saigon. At some point, my posts became a great source of information for those who wanted to travel to Vietnam and to see it from an expat’s perspective.

New ways to keep in touch with other expressing friends and family changed when Facebook came. Friendster was largely useless because it bred all sorts of rubbish from rubbish friend-add mania to useless posts. But Facebook kind of made blogging passé for me. So with that my blog died a natural death.

I miss blogging though. With Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and all other quirky ways to share with the rest of the world are, while interesting, are ‘guided’ ways to express oneself. All these channels prescribes a certain format, limits what file types can be used, and even assumes that your ‘share’ has an audience. While all that, like I said, is interesting, I think blogging still owns the power to truly express oneself through words that can’t quite be captured in 140 characters, or through suggested formats that Facebook, Instagr.am and others require.

While I would never be an influencer in the ‘blogosphere,’ (influencers and blogosphere are words I find funny) I think there’s merit to finally getting my writing act together. I need it back so I could write down my thoughts as though I do not have an audience. It’s a kind of stress ball that just dumbly absorbs all my thoughts that my other spaces couldn’t quite handle well.

Maybe it’s time to give blogging a chance. Not for others, but for myself to finally get my ‘word’ out even though I always assume that nobody bothers to read rubbish, random thoughts of a random guy who killed his blogging years ago and has never managed his own website well despite being in an industry that advocates the use of it. Well, time is the enemy here but that’s easy. One way or another, we could fake time. Time is always the lamest but easiest escape from the ‘need to catch up with some writing.’