As we see from the three-day gap here (when the initial idea was A Post A Day, Without Fail), I am very bad at this. I always have been.

I'm not bad at periodic tasks, for the most part. I don't forget garbage day and I take my one prescription pill every night at more or less the same time and I mostly remember to observe my calendar reminder every other Friday for a set of unautomatable work tasks I have to do. But when it comes to personal journalling, history says I do very, very badly.

Some of it is that it seems inconsequential even to me. As I write this, I'm in the home stretch of my latest story and I'd much rather work on that -- which is what I have spent most of my time doing this past week, to the exclusion of a number of things, including posting journal entries. I feel I have justification for these priorities. I mean, unlike my fiction and my occasional essay, I can't even maintain the illusion to myself that anyone is interested in reading this. I'm not sure I'm interested in reading it.

For the moment.

And that's the kicker, there.

See, I'm also very, very bad at remembering my personal past. My brain is filled with trivia and story plots and reference material and other crap. It has never assigned a very high priority to personal history. That includes you, Hypothetical Reader. If I knew you back in, say, 1998 when the web was small, there is a better than even chance I don't remember your name now, much less your face (if indeed I ever knew your face -- the web is an inherently dehumanizing medium).

I flinch when people do memes like "share some story from your childhood." I don't have any stories from my childhood (at least, none I care to tell), because I don't remember any of it. Occasional flashes, perhaps; a sensory impression once in a while in odd places. When we lived for three years in Washington state -- I would have been about six -- apparently I (a Louisiana child) had never seen terrain that vertical before, because among the few things I retain strongly, two have to do with altitude:

1) We had a hill right behind our house (which my mind sees as a steep bluff, but y'know, I was six), and I could sled down it on one of those dish sleds you sit in, the kind shaped like a contact lens (I had surely never seen enough snow to sled on before then either). And one day I wiped out spectacularly. I mean, ass over head, sled in the air above me, Charlie-Brown-kicking-the-football style.

2) The building where my father worked was built on the side of a hill and you could go in at the ground floor and find, that when you walked across the building on that floor, that you were no longer on the "ground floor" at the far side. I think this must have really jolted my six-year-old ideas of physics. I even, in the strange way of my brain has of retaining facts, remember the name of the building. (It was the Kimbrough building on the Washington State University campus in Pullman. Good luck getting enough information from that, stalkers. Also, my father's been dead for years.)

We lived in one half of a duplex house, and I remember that because, again, I had never encountered something like that in all of my six years at sea; but I retain nothing of the interior of the house -- the floor plan, the furnishings. I used to play with some kids who lived two houses down, and my mother and their mother became good friends and did things together. I retain the names of the entire family -- father, mother, the two daughters, including their surname (which I'm omitting here because, y'know, stalkers) -- I remember what the father did for a living (he coached football) ... I don't remember any of their faces. Midway through our time there they moved to Alberta, and I'm sure we went to visit them once because that was when I went to the Calgary Stampede. I know I went to the Stampede; I remember nothing whatsoever about it.

I remember the library. I remember sitting in there with a big illustrated version of The Wizard of Oz. It had a green cover. (I was an extremely precocious reader and was already being encouraged to plow through whatever level of book I could handle, just to keep me busy. I was a difficult child to keep entertained, but a book was reliable as long as you had a large stack on hand because I went through them fast.)

And that is the entirety of everything I remember from three years in Washington.

OK, sure, Col, I hear you say, but you were six! Nobody retains much from when they were six. Well, sweetheart, let me make it clear. I don't retain much from when I was twelve. I don't retain much from when I was eighteen. Hell, I don't retain much from when I was fifty.

It just seems to not get stored. My brain very clearly does not think this is information it is a priority to keep, not when faced with the need to store much more important things like the name of the guy on the highest denomination of US currency ever circulated (Salmon P. Chase) or the German for "association of bagpipe makers" (Dudelsackpfeifenmachersgesellschaft).

The problem is, I disagree with my brain about its priorities.

I'm [counts on fingers, gives up, gets out calculator] fifty-eight this year. I have reached a point in life where I would like to be able to retain more than the last five days of my existence. I'm tired of being asked, "Oh, you went to Finland? When was that?" and having to say "Hell if I know." "I don't remember where I was last week" or "You're talking to someone who has had to go through records of prior paystubs to figure out when they worked at what jobs for their resume" are two of my stock brush-offs for this kind of question, and I'm tired of having to give them.

I don't know how other people do this. I'm exceedingly fortunate to have my spouse, who somehow manages the trick. I can ask her "Hey, what year did we go to Helsinki?" and she can tell me instantly. But, you know, I hate forcing her to be my safety net. And obviously she can't help fill in the gaps about things that happened before she met me.

I suppose I could ask my mother for some stories about my past, but I really don't like to talk to my family about my past because the only stories they ever seem to want to tell about me are the humiliating ones, and those are usually the only ones I remember on my own, and not only that, they're the ones I least want to remember. (I am not a 'look back on my past mistakes and laugh' kind of person.) Maybe if once in a while they wanted to remind me of the good bits ... I'm sure there were some. I wish I remembered them.

I don't think I can save my childhood. I think it's probably too late for that. If I'm pushing sixty, my mother is pushing eighty, and she won't be around forever and there's only so much I can get out of her, especially since current political and physical conditions make me extremely reluctant to get on an airplane for anyone or anything short of a genuine disaster, and she's sixteen hundred miles away.

But I might be able to save some more recent years. If I'm willing to do a little archaeology.

I began online journalling, in some form or another, pretty much from the first point I put up a personal website of any kind. But I don't know that I have any copies of the earliest stuff, unless I later reformatted and reposted it. Initially, if I recall right, I did some things I called "postcards" -- the idea being they were just supposed to be brief impressions that hit my mind, close to being poems in many ways. But that didn't last.

From June 1998 through May 1999, my journal was called "Alewife Bayou," and I think I may have lost the text explaining why, but I can fake it when the time comes.

In May 1999 I got bored with the visual design, redid the whole thing, and called it "Scherzi & Sospiri," and you can go look up the Italian yourself. That lasted through March 2001.

In March 2001 I pivoted again and this was the first appearance of the phrase "Eccentric Flower," which is still with us today (witness the URL of this site). The "Pihua" era of that title lasted through January 2005.

Simultaneously with that, I did Utopia With Cheese -- the original Utopia With Cheese -- which was not a journal, but bits of observations and commentary about news of the day, advertising, pop culture, etc, and had a comments feature so people could discuss the posts. But because I can't do that kind of thing without loads of opinion, it had some journally aspects. That was from May 2001 through November 2004.

The second era of Eccentric Flower, the Faces era (you'll see why I call it that when we get there), lasted from January 2005 through July 2005; the third era (the Days era) lasted from August 2005 through December 2006.

And then we have a bit of a chasm.

My LiveJournal was active from November 2005 through May 2009 -- or at least, I have a backup file of it for those months; if there was more than that, I don't have it. I didn't originally intend to use LiveJournal for more than announcements of posts elsewhere, but it was very convenient for journalling and I neglected my own website during that time.

Then, when I did return to my website, I made the mistake of using MediaWiki, which is great if you like to post a lot of crosslinked and crossreferenced words like I do ... until you have to maintain the fucker. It's a needy beast, and the problem is its pages are not displayable or readable unless its database is running; you can't access the pages when the software's not operating. (This is one reason that the site you're looking at now operates entirely on flat pages. Even when I edit and post them -- no database. Direct edits to the HTML pages.) Anyway, the wiki held sway from 2009-2011. Though it was still running for a couple of years after that, I don't see much activity after 2011. The export I did of the contents is dated May 2013.

The final era of Eccentric Flower, the Fates era, ran from September 2013 through November 2022. But don't be fooled by that comparatively long stretch. The entries got fewer and fewer and further between. If I recall right, there was one entry for all of 2022. (I would like to try to avoid that happening here.)

You'll notice all of this is framed as "I think" or "the data seems to indicate," because I'm having to deduce all this from the archives. The saved files. The backups of websites past -- three or four different sets, made at different times in different places. (And on different computers. Some of these files have been painstakingly transported across three or four different machines now.)

I would very much like to clean this shit up.

So. The Dredge.

Periodically, when I have the energy, I'm going to be dusting off some of these old files. Not all at once, not fast -- I guarantee it will not be fast. Maybe a month at a time. Maybe less. Probably not more.

I'll start with the oldest, which means we'll begin with a trip to Alewife Bayou and we'll see what we can see there. And, of course, there will be latter-day comments. A lot of those comments will be things like "I now have no idea what this entry was about" or "I have no recollection of this person whatsoever." Which is unhelpful. But we have to do what we can.

Ultimately, is there a point to this exercise? Will it have been worth doing?

I'll let you know when I reach the bottom of the pile. If I get there.

I'll tag any archaeological entries with "The Dredge" so you can see them coming (and run the other way if that's your inclination).