The Move

So, this blog has moved from Wordpress to Blogger, for boring tech-y reasons we don't really need to delve into (apparently, Wordpress is too overpowered to be trusted in my aged, non-digital-generation hands). In addition to making me feel terrifically old -- largely thanks to the constant digs of one Gibson Praise -- it's also got me all maudlin and nostalgic, in a way I try and avoid.

Here's the thing: my life has a lot of loss. Everybody's does, but the work that Dr. S. and I have devoted ourselves to led, fairly directly, to a lot of our loved ones losing their lives. Our losses were not merely the steady march of time, or the capricious designs of chance; our losses have been, more often than not, tied to the will of the powerful, men -- and it is almost all men -- who act without consequence and with no regard for the humanity of others. I was, in some ways, complicit, chasing the truth so heedlessly, even -- especially -- once I knew what the stakes were.

This is all a new(ish) way of looking at this stuff, at least for me. It used to be a matter of pursuing the truth at all costs; nothing else mattered, and in the truth I was certain I would find my absolution. Dr. S. had a certain scientific curiosity about the matter but her commitment to the cause was not in the name of truth, but its close and better cousin: justice. I told her once that the truth would save us but when I found it I was terrified and paralyzed, and salvation, it turns out, is an active verb.

Now, we are acting on that truth, seeking to bring justice to a world that men of power would so easily abandon. The truth is just the first step.

When I was fiddling around with Wordpress I had the same impulse I've had for a decade now, the unanswerable need to call some friends who are no longer. Byers, Langly, and Frohike, three of the most solid friends I've ever known -- almost comically paranoid but unfailingly genuine, even if they would've given me heaps of shit for not being able to figure out all the details of blogging software. They were the good guys. They were truth-seekers. They acted on it, too. They lost their lives acting on the truth which they discovered, and I miss 'em like hell, even still.

I've been thinking about those guys a lot lately, getting back into blogging. It can seem so silly, and their paper could seem silly sometimes too -- but in the end they found something real, and they fought for justice, and they saved lives. They got mixed up in big things just because they decided to go ahead and write what they saw.

I'm trying to save the world for a lot of people: for the memories of my sister and my parents, for Dr. S. and the entire S. family, for Gibson, for humanity at large, for a ten-year-old boy I last saw as an infant. But this particular facet of it -- this blog -- this one, I'm doing for my boys over at the Lone Gunman, and I hope it matters as much as they did.