{"id":801,"date":"2015-02-07T22:43:02","date_gmt":"2015-02-07T22:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/?p=801"},"modified":"2020-11-29T04:24:34","modified_gmt":"2020-11-29T04:24:34","slug":"51-stories-down-infinty-symbol-to-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/51-stories-down-infinty-symbol-to-go\/","title":{"rendered":"51 stories down. [Infinity Symbol] to go…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have finally added in the last of the first fifty-one stories from my old True Life site<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I started writing True Life back in 1998 as a hand-rolled web memorial to my past family, events, and themes. It was then, and remains today, my personal mirror and cathartic echo chamber, and a place where I can polish my stories, refine my memories, and find patterns and meaning.<\/p>\n

I stopped adding to the original site sometime around 2005 – maybe I just got burned-out, or bored with the way the site looked. It had just stopped exciting me, so I let it be for what it was. Not long after, my personal Linux server started to die, so I took it offline, and True Life (which was hosted on that server) went down entirely.<\/p>\n

Strangely, I didn’t feel much loss from “de-publishing” the True Life project – maybe I even felt liberated. I didn’t have to carry that self-imposed burden of a shrine on my back, if I didn’t want to. I began resenting Mum and Dad for all their failings as parents, and then moved their little framed photographs off the top of my dresser, and down to a low corner of a bookshelf, where I wouldn’t be reminded of them so often. I decided that it’s okay to not want to see them, and to feel sick of them and of the one-sided story I’d been telling about them for almost 10 years. I decided that we were a failed family, and they were failed parents to my sister and I. Kids can’t choose their parents, but as an adult, I could sure as hell scorn mine, post-mortem.<\/p>\n

I have noticed that I tend to obsess over people who are no longer in my life. If there’s nothing to be learned from conversing with ghosts, I really ought to let them go unanswered.<\/p>\n

However, I eventually came back to my family background, as I always have. Reminders of past joys, sorrows, abuses and achievements kept entering my mind. Writing my memoir as “True Life” may be a compulsion now – a deep part of my identity. As they say, I might be done with the past, but the past ain’t done with me.<\/p>\n

So, I’ll boot up Scrivener, or get my pad and pen, and start sketching out snippets of a path that will take me from 1976 towards the early eighties, when things got much, much worse.<\/p>\n

It’s time to bite off more than I chew again, and choke down what I can of all those random scraps of daily life, and digest it all into some kind of coherent narrative. I will stick my head out, and see where the process takes me.<\/p>\n

Should only take a few hundred more stories to get True Life up to the year 2000. At this rate, it may never get done, but I think the process is the important piece.<\/p>\n

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I have finally added in the last of the first fifty-one stories from my old True Life site. I started writing True Life back in 1998 as a hand-rolled web memorial to my past family, events, and themes. It was then, and remains today, my personal mirror and cathartic echo chamber, and a place where … Continue reading 51 stories down. [Infinity Symbol] to go…<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,10,7],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genealogy","category-memoirs","category-research","category-stories","tag-to-do"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=801"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1907,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions\/1907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}