Blogging with apathy

I have a love / hate relationship with blogs, as with most things in life. I will blog with vigor, then something will happen in my life of some mild significance, and I will then delete said blog because it has been made obsolete by this event. Then, the effects of this happening slowly fade, and I am left blog-less and alone. I could blame my fickleness, or a momentary shame in my posts' lack of substance, personal embarrassments, hopes unfulfilled, etc etc.  The feeling one is left with is akin to destroying an ex-lover's letters or the photographs of a friend-turned-enemy. It didn't leave me with the euphoric void that I sought... there is no pleasure in destruction.

I've been pondering death quite a bit lately. Not because I'm morbid (questionable) or suicidal, but because I am writing an essay for a course concerning the subject in terms of photography. (There is an irony in this choice, as I've never encountered a person more terrified of death than I. The personal crises are constant.) Roland Barthes claimed that the photograph testifies to both the existence of a thing at a particular past moment, but also exposes its pastness in absolute terms. Photograph becomes both witness and memorial, evidence to a past life and an eternal death.

I wonder what Barthes would say about the blog. More immediate than a memoir, more transient than an op-ed... Perhaps not a death, as the photograph, but certainly a witness. And when the witness is destroyed? 

"Thus, History consists of tiny explosions of life, of deaths without relays. Our human impotence with regard to transition, to any science of degrees... (Death, real death, is when the witness himself dies)."

Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 362

Despite the implications, its uses are more simply explained, at least in my case... blog as the ultimate tool for procrastination. I really don't want to write this essay.