Milestone: 1,000 Posts

You know what frightens me most?  Not death, but Alphabet pulling the plug on Blogger now that Google is no longer the internet's surest thing.

I have good reason to be scared, too: a website that I developed for the American Red Cross in 2006 has vanished, at least in part due to hiring a design firm that had embraced Adobe Flash, a pioneering technology for accessing media-rich content online.  Don't get me wrong:  I'm not blaming the design firm.  Nike, the World Wildlife Fund and even Disney bet on Flash, too.  But YouTube and Apple killed the nascent technology. That's capitalism, baby.

I was more proud of that project than anything else I've been paid to do.  The content interactively documented how the organization spent the millions of dollars it received in donations after 9/11. Among other innovations at the time, the 9/11 legacy website included video interviews with people whose lives had been forever changed by the terrorist attacks and with key players in the recovery program.  Dedicated New York staffers, many of whom felt that their hard work had never been adequately acknowledged by the American Red Cross national headquarters in Washington, DC, were sincerely grateful. At least there's a paper ghost in my archives and the memory of getting to ask Senator George Mitchell, one of the few politicians for whom I have undiminished regard, to explain, on camera, why "setting aside a reserve fund was one of the most controversial decisions that I made." 

Final Report, September 11 Recovery Program

So why does this professional disappointment obsess me now?  Because at some point during my trip to Portugal, I reached a milestone: one thousand posts on Photo Pest.  I think this gives me the right to call myself a blogger when somebody asks what I do, which is a hell of a lot better than the usual answer.   The first time I told someone at a dinner party I was retired, he promptly turned away as if lack of employment would leave me with nothing of interest to say.  Why, then, is "Retirement Brunch" my most-viewed post?  Baffling.

Photo Pest started out--four months before Instagram, mind you--as a way to share photos I'd taken of friends when we went places together.  I'd already had experience blogging--Chasing Rapture, begun shortly before 9/11, and The House of Six MEs, but both were text-based.  I figured people would be more interested in seeing pictures of themselves than reading about my picaresque sex life or a sharing a summer house in the Pines.  Once again, I bet on the wrong horse!

But over time, especially post-retirement in 2014 (can it really be almost a decade ago already?), Photo Pest morphed into something closer to what I thought some entrepreneur should be doing in the early days of the internet:  creating websites that celebrated the lives of deceased individuals using visual media curated by their loved ones. Instead of a tombstone in a cemetery, I could build a platform in cyberspace to provide evidence that I once existed.

In addition to my travels, I documented weekends in the Pines with my gay family; I added obituaries about famous people who really meant something to me; I began reviewing books and plays (but not movies and television because there is a limit, after all) and I shared my love for New York City by annually posting hundreds of photos taken during the holiday season. 

On one of those Pines weekends, I whined to an actor--I won't drop his name but you've likely seen him on television or in a movie franchise--about photo albums and hundreds of slides I retrieved after my father died in 1992.   "I can't get rid of them, it would be like throwing my parents' lives away."  "Scan them," he replied.  But then what?  Photo Pest provided the answer: I began posting FLASHBACKS which started with old family photos going back several generations, and then chronicling my mother's and father's' lives, their marriage and my childhood in Europe and the United States. 

Why stop there, I thought?  I've loved taking pictures ever since I got a Yashica camera for Christmas in college.  The project snowballed into digitizing and organizing three decades of photos from albums and shoeboxes for posting on Photo Pest, sometimes accompanied by explanatory passages from my journals, which I have kept since the early 1980s (47 volumes and counting).  Next up is selecting and organizing an additional decade of digital photos and uploading them.  By the time I am finished, I will have a nearly complete photographic record of my life online.

Narcissistic?  Probably. Why anybody should care?  My passing won't merit mention outside my circle of close friends and they won't need a photo blog to recall the happiness we shared.  So let me say this.  While cemeteries, the subject of many Photo Pest entries, have long been a source of fascination, I always had dismissed the idea of physical burial until 2007, when I visited Notre Dame Des Neiges in Montreal (blog post to come!).  I happened upon an elaborate, Victorian era mausoleum and took note of the individual's name.  When I Googled Owen McGarvey (whose name was recorded in my journal) back at the hotel, I discovered he had been one of Montreal's premier furniture makers.  I loved the idea that his over-the-top grave and the internet had resurrected him in my mind, however briefly.

Alphabet, my do-it-yourself legacy is in your hands.