Now that this site is a year old, I am going to step back to reflect on the project that I set out for myself—writing for the web ecology.

I should first point out that I have stopped thinking about ‘writing for the web ecology.’ Mostly, I just try to come up with something to put on the site twice a week, which is really a matter of looking back through my old stuff to see if anything looks reparable, or trying to shape some nugget of an experience or thought or feeling into a little piece of prose or a poem.

That’s just writing. The medium little matters, except that the web provides an interface and my ground rules about length and format provide the constraints—including the troublesome 200 word count rule (which I occasionally break, like now). As for what I write, I have been deliberate about a couple of things.

First, I don’t write anything topical, like commentaries on the day’s events. I guess that stems in part from being the kind of guy who is always thinking about something else. Also, I don’t find my own political views—or other people’s for that matter—terribly interesting. In any case, I need not reiterate that ISIS is an abomination or global warming is real. There are better sources for such information, and this web site, I fear, won’t tip any debates.

Second, I am not ‘blogging’ in the sense of keeping an online journal. Believe me, no one wants to read my journals—a lot of maudlin junk. More than this, I have always had a sense that my daily comings and goings, such as they are, are in a profound way, irrelevant. If I reported that I had dinner with colleagues at the Gasthaus Wickerl on Porzellangasse, why? Did the experience change me? Or is it rather more notable that nothing changed at all? I walked out feeling all the same.

And there is one other thing, and I think it comes of writing fiction, that it has always seemed to me that scenes could be made to make sense with every particular rearranged. That if I had not gone to the Gasthaus Wickerl, the Gasthaus zur Oper might have done just as well. And if the Oper will suffice, what’s the point of the Wickerl at all, except to crow that I ate my food in Vienna. And what could be more tiresome than crowing?