RAMH@12: Still Here, Just Differently (and a Playlist)

My practice in these anniversary posts has been to open with a playlist. Each such playlist has always included selections from music-related posts over the years… but this year, at least, seems to call for something different. (Not least, because I’ve so seldom done music-related posts in recent years: scant fresh music to draw on!)

So, then, the 2020 edition of the RAMH anniversary playlist includes 15 selections from a single album — at that, an album never discussed here: Silk Baroque, by a performer named (or at least going by the name!) Wu Wei. I discovered Wu quite by accident; if you’ve visited here recently, you probably already know which post‘s preparation led me to him. His instrument of choice is the modern version of an ancient Chinese wind instrument called the sheng; at his Web site, Wu describes this instrument as follows:

The Sheng, a mouth organ, formed out of a bundle of bamboo reeds and cased in a metal bowl, sounds as the singing phoenix from a Chinese legend: silvery and fleeting as the wind.

I won’t promise that the sheng’s sound will indeed say singing phoenix to you (whatever the hell a singing phoenix sounds like; I thought they pretty much just squawked). For me, I’ll say only that the Silk Baroque album has helped me a great deal to retain the frame of mind described in that post from two weeks ago.

Per usual for an anniversary post, I’ll add a few stray blogging-anniversary notes after the playlist — presumably setting the mood for your reading, ha.

I must have mentioned at least once — probably many years ago — that Running After My Hat is not my first blog (although it’s the longest-lived). As best I can recall, I previously posted with any regularity to a half-dozen others (all of them apparently still available in some form, via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine if not actually still “live”):

• Something called flixml.org: a blog set up in the late 1990s nominally to support my books and other writings about a technology called XML (for eXtensible Markup Language). It also included posts and other content on one thing or another unrelated to the core topic, such as an account of my and The Missus’s honeymoon in Alaska in 2000. A Wayback Machine snapshot is here, as of sometime in early 2002 (well after my last post there).
• A group blog composed by members of my family only (hence no link available), where we did a brain dump of various details remembered from our childhood — family history, “big events,” and so on — in 1950s-’60s New Jersey.
• Where Left Is Right: a politically-focused blog — its orientation probably obvious, from the title — composed during the first term of the Bush II Presidency, under the pseudonym “FLJerseyBoy.” A while after I stopped posting there, the blog name having been co-opted by some damned squatter or another; as a result, I reconstituted it — sans images, alas — as Where Left Is Right/The Old Site.
• A Dog Starv’d: more politics, but less exclusively so, in 2007-11, again from “FLJerseyBoy.”
• The Book Book: a book-review blog established by the erstwhile editorial-assistant blogger who then called herself “Moonrat.” Reviews there were by her and others she recruited over the years (including RAMH oldtimer Froog) — I myself was just satisfied with my own initials. (My last review there was in 2011… just about a week after RAMH‘s third anniversary.)

When I started here, I meant the blog to become the centerpiece of a “platform” whence to launch a book, specifically an e-book. I imagined myself at the vanguard of a New Age, you see: an age in which authors would simply post their work online, and readers would pay to read it there.

(Yeah, I know. Hahahaha. LOL. *eyeroll* All that.)

Things didn’t work out as planned, of course. I never had and never will have the stamina and focus of a successful self-published author.

But I found, over time, that RAMH fed some needs in me otherwise. Partially, it was the company of other people going through much the same aspiration/crashing-and-burning cycle of the unsatisfactorily published writer. Partially — as with the whiskey river Fridays series — it presented a periodic challenge and opportunity to break away from mundane everyday stuff: programming, Web development, household life. Some of the other series of posts (particularly the music-related series — e.g., here, here, here, and here) came out of nowhere to give me reasons to learn about and share stuff I’d never imagined becoming obsessed with. It forced me to write openly, without too much embarrassment, at a time in Internet history when readership has wandered away to entertainments not quite so driven (as blogging is) by a performer-audience model. (It even enabled me, for a short but wild few months, to research, compose, and upload something like a novella in something like real time.)

Gone, now, the daily preoccupation with work. And for a good part of the next N months, of course, like everyone else I’ll be stuck more or less at home, my travel more or less restricted to whatever I can do on foot. I do look forward to whatever the next phase in the blog’s development turns out to be. Whatever it is, whatever it becomes, I remain confident the blog will continue to warrant its name: I’m still chasing the damned hats.

Thanks as always — whoever you may be — for joining me here!