home_again home_again

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

i used to blog here. almost every day. but that… that was blog ages ago.

before my lovely, fiery, sad, maddening, and enlightening experiences at Docudharma, i’d found myself in the company of a certain bunch of bloggers . . .  buhdydharma and ek hornbeck, riaD, undercovercalico, jessical, one pissed off liberal, exmearden, jayinportland, keirdubois, and cronesense, among others, at teh Daily Kos. not a home. but most certainly, a community of bloggers crusading against the great evil of BushCo.

we had common purpose then. and common enemies too. we were all joined in the same dance . . .

buhdy was, as he is now, a well known blogger at dKos. i’d often end up in his diaries there and we kinda became acquainted. at some point, buhdy got an idea to create his own blog and invited a group of us to join him here, at DD (as we started to call it). that’s when i got to know melvin, on the bus, Magnifico, Jay Elias, srkp23, armando, edger, tahoe, rusty, and so many others. oh yeah… cosmic debris and pluto, moneysmith, Compound F…

this place became my blogging home. really. i never found much need to go back to dKos, although I did post there on occasion.

it was ek who started those silly pony parties. he lassoed a few of us to post them regularly. i don’t think i ever thanked him, but it was there i met masslass (we eventually became dear friends in real life) and dear nocatz. my heart (and ria’s too) was stolen by a poster who called himself fatdave. we had fun there. sometimes those threads would generate 100s of comments and it’d just be four or five of us and our rapid-fire repartee…

i loved writing essays, reading the ideas of others, and the swing of this place. it was, for me, alive.

ah. but things are never static. pretty much like all other homes and families…. sometimes things happen and happen in such a way that people stop talking to each other. there is a perception of grievous wrongs being committed and things are said and and and . . .  wham0, home is never the same again. that’s kinda my story. no right. or wrong. it just stopped working. shelf life, everything has a shelf life. mine was maybe 1.5 years here.

none-the-less, home is always home, i think. maybe you can’t go back. maybe you shouldn’t even just visit, but hey, it’s still home.

i’ve been drawn back here, to DD, a few times. this time it’s because of exmearden, or exme, as many of us call her.

exme and I, we don’t know each other very well. still, we have known each other for a few years now. i am an avid reader of her work and have lived a small part of her journey, with her sister and her daughters and her dogs. huh. and a few times over these last days, i find myself in tears. i don’t know if it is about shelf life or the odd way life has of pouring freezing cold water over you, but for me, she is part of this place. and truth be told, i didn’t know where else to go.

reading exme’s essay this morning, Roy Rogers is riding tonight. Cancer and me, i saw a comment by melvin. melvin . . . he left DD early on and i’ve missed him terribly since. seeing him here again…  perhaps we both felt the same way… not knowing where else to go… except maybe back home . . .

The family.  We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

^{Erma Bombeck}