A Brief History of this Site
In the spring of 2004, my wife started a Xanga weblog and encouraged me to check it out. At first I was sort of haughty and condescending about it—all these egos running rampant in cyberspace—but after I set up my own account and made my first post, I was pretty hooked. I wasn’t necessarily very good at blogging (too many of those early entries were glib and obvious; I’ve deleted a lot of them), but I liked watching the entries build up, and I liked the idea of other people reading what I wrote, and it occurred to me that, if one were disciplined enough, the medium could be used, however slowly and haphazardly, to assemble a body of work over time.
Thankfully I wasn’t aware of all the fathering and mothering blogs out there, or I might have felt inhibited when I started writing a lot about my daughter, who was two. I also started writing about work, but eventually removed most of those entries when I found out how dangerous that can be. Then I started writing about things that happened when I was in college, and things that happened when I was a child, and things that happened between my wife and me—and, well, it all seemed part of the same pleasant, benignly narcissistic impulse that propels weblogs these days, and sometimes I felt self-conscious about it, but the truth is, I really enjoyed it, too.
I attempted to write in a way that was interesting and sincere; for the most part, I tried to give these vignettes some form so they would be relevant to someone who didn’t actually know me. Sometimes I succeeded, and sometimes I didn’t. Many of the original entries are still on this website; I think the writing improved a little over time, and the more recent essays are generally better than the older ones.
It’s my intention to continue using Rag & Bone Shop to document the domestic, although in a more casual way than I have before, perhaps. Also, there are a number of ambitious projects—lengthier essays, some fiction—that I want to complete and post online. It’s still the anxious itch of my ego that keeps the site going, of course. I like taking the messy pulp of my life and giving it some shape, some order.
If you happen to find any of it interesting, feel free to leave a comment or email me.
