Paul Ford Relaunches Blog
Paul Ford, twenty-nine-year blogging veteran, accidentally relaunches his blog. “Once I saw that text box I had to type into it.”
Instantly full of so many new gems.
I’ve seen so many writers try to escape writer self over the years. They lift weights and work hard for amazing forearms. They climb mountains. They pivot to video. They leave their families. They even schedule haircuts. Never matters. They have the stain. Many years ago, my dad came up for my college graduation. He had retired a while ago but had taught creative writing at a state college for decades. We were in his car, parked outside the dorm. My friend and her father walked in front of us. Normal-looking guy with a beard. I’d never seen him before, but I knew my friend’s father was a poet who taught poetry at a college in New Jersey. My father didn’t know that, though. Didn’t know the girl, either. Looking straight ahead out the windshield, he said, “Look at that fucking English professor.”
And:
Unless we tesseract the city, geology will have its way, and that is how it goes. I think constantly about that. The train tunnel is just a stack of geologic eons through which we push our little bodies. Far-future scientists, finding our bones, may prefer to study ferns. Anniversaries are sweet—even ones where you can’t go upstairs—but the world craves to turn us into something very thin and mineral. At some level you need to welcome it.