On Change

Another train trip gives me an opportunity to write for Malaise again. It’s strange and awkward. For most, blogs are life streams, and as such change occurs in them as it does in life: so gradually that it’s imperceptible over the din of the quotidian.

Many things conspire to prevent me from writing here as often as I once did; some are distractions, some pursuits of higher aims, some are just lame insecurities. Regardless, months often pass between posting here. A failure in regular posting is the most common cause of death among blogs–pressure mounts on the writer, people stop coming by to read, and before long it’s easier just to close up shop. I’ve considered that.

After a while it becomes harder to find something to say that matches what’s been written before. I feel a need to write for Malaise only what belongs here. Articles about politics or web design are simply out of place. But trying to continue along the same trajectory is frustrating. I look at what I’ve written and frown. I’m no longer the writer who wrote any of this. Things change. People change. Everything changes. How can I correctly carry out the work of another? Further, given that he was only me before, why should I be condemned to complete his work, when I am him as well?

Certainly, I understand we live in a universe formed by cause and effect. I understand consequence and the one-way flow of time. Still, I have no illusions that to resign myself to complete what I started (ha!) is to resign myself to failure. Even if I were able to write again as I ever have, many of the things I’ve written–even on Malaise–I would not want to write again. Others I explicitly disagree with.

Nearly three years ago I wrote an entry on a company called TerraPass, one of the first organizations to make carbon offsets available to the general public. At the time I questioned the dubious notion of a company that seems to offer forgiveness for one’s sins against the environment. I characterized it as a dot of ash on the forehead of your car, an absolution that would make further sins easier by removing their consequences. The price for admittance to the temple? A mere seventy-five bucks (for my vehicle, a small truck). At the time I said I didn’t feel that guilty.

Things change. I sold that truck. I had sort of a hard time doing it, too. It’s hard enough for people to afford to emit carbon these days, much less pay to be absolved of it. Things change. This winter I bought a TerraPass gift certificate for my wife–now the carbon emitted by the hybrid we share is offset. Of course, I haven’t abandoned my incredulity, but, given a reasonable set of assumptions (that cap and trade is preferable to no cap at all, that commodifying carbon is an essential intermediate step towards a carbon-neutral economy, etc.), the benefits of carbon offsetting are real. Three years ago I would have said that the realest thing that a TerraPass gets you is a bumper sticker and a sanctimonious warm glow.

Things change. Six years ago I was neck-deep in street rods, intoxicated by the wiggle of power oversteer, and spending every extra dime I had on a absurdly overpowered, computer controlled and fuel-injected engine for a 1946 Chevy truck. Two years ago I went to Alaska to write and inadvertently learned web design. Now I’m back in school and nursing a small business that’s selling, perhaps quixotically, sustainably-designed websites.

Things change, and what was unclear to me then is apparent now: Malaise is a chronicle of change. Virtually every entry here is an examination of change, of situation, of the future and the past. Our big train trip earlier this year went bust in a big way, as did my opinion of this mode of transport. Before I described it as civilized. It’s not. I described it as efficient. It’s not efficient enough.

In this manner another few changes are recorded here, in another piece of writing that almost belongs. I’ve become the executor of the wills of the self I was, the self I will be, and the self I am. It seems easy enough to say that I’ve been wrong before about some things, but implicit in that statement would be the assertion that I am no longer wrong–at least about those things. However, from the perspective of the self I was, I am wrong now. Correctness is transient. My opinion is different from the opinion I held before. It changes, even moment to moment.

Things change. People change. I’m just trying to write it down.