Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

‘Bleakly ironic and spent’ might be my word phrase of the year for 2025.

It is so amazing to be heading into my 20th year of blogging that I have to remind myself to stop and consider 19 years of blogging first.

Most blogs last 90 days, those that continue last 2-3 years, and then there’s us – the survivors of the Golden Age of blogging. I know more than a few such survivors. Several have surpassed 19 years, others nip at our heels.

Steely Dan’s Hey 19 could be about a lot of things – middle aged dude creeping on a 19 year old, middle aged guy reflecting on getting older, generational shifts, etc. I was nine when the song charted, melding into the easy rock fm dial of my childhood.

While the temptation to analyze the song is real, I’m just here to appropriate the nostalgia and give 19 its due before careening gayly forward to year 20.

I have only two other ’19’ accomplishments in my life – turning 19 in October 1989 during my sophomore year of college and 19+ years of my relationship. I held no job for such a length of time, nor was I involved with any community group or recreational activity.

What should a blogger say at the setting of nineteen years of dribbles and drabs that started and stopped a hundred different directions, more a pile of archaic thoughts than any cohesive whole recognizable as anything other than a blog?

In 19 years, I have published 8543 posts. Most I wrote, but not all – notably the 317 contributions to the #AMPLIFY Project. 2025 will mark the ten year anniversary of that archive, something I hope to expand upon.

I look around at my blogging colleagues and see great things churned out of this medium. We aren’t relicts or relics (there’s a difference). Still here, still blogging, still part of the conversation. But I see change on the horizon, notably the rise of the email newsletters a la Substack. And my heart rejoices because I know that what comes next for me does not silence the storytelling, but amplifies it anew. We are part of a hand-off in a relay that never ends – resisting, describing, proscribing, and immortalizing the moments of ordinary lives that are simply breathtaking, but usually overlooked.

When you pass the baton in a relay, the next sprinter is gone instantly drawing all eyes to their speed and power, their contribution to the win. It is a mistake however to assume the previous runner has stopped moving forward simply because they no longer carry the baton. Physics requires more steps and perhaps stumbles as they slam from full throttle to past-tense in milliseconds. No one can stop on a dime without great physical harm.

I am so glad to see new voices in new mediums moving the mark forward. I am comfortable with my contributions during these past 19 years, enough so to pass the baton with joy and anticipation. Of course, we all know I have my own baton tucked inside my waistband. We all know the relay continues in perpetuity. I may be called upon again.

Or I simply may keep running at my own pace, leave the track, veer back, and stop to participate in an entirely different event for a bit. I’ve always fancied synchronized swimming.

All of this is to say that we don’t really know what 19 years of blogging means because it hasn’t happened very often in the grand scheme of things. For all we know, I could be updating this post on December 29, 2043 at the ripe age of 73. That’s entirely possible. Hey 38?

We do know that while bloggers still standing may be fewer by the day, we are not the sole survivors.

I found this quote about the titular song of the this post.

However, it can also be read as a commentary on the type of mindlessly enjoyable, leisure-time-soundtracking popular music it embodies.  It’s bleakly ironic and spent in that 80s kinda way, suggesting the constant threat of nuclear annihilation and the hopeless existential wasteland between nihilistic drug-fueled oblivion and cold-blooded capitalistic ambition.

I would not want to be considered ‘mindlessly enjoyable, leisure-time’ anything. ‘Bleakly ironic and spent’ in an 80’s sort of way, wasteland between oblivion and capitalistic ambition, maybe.

‘Bleakly ironic and spent’ might be my phrase of the year for 2025.

FWIW, I am not an especially big fan of Steely Dan. I would have preferred a framing element that didn’t begin when I was nine, BUT I shudder to think of my musical tastes when I was myself 19 so perhaps I just need to grab the obvious metaphor and not overthink it.

Happy 19!