Whenever I use one of my physical journals, I tend to spend half the time writing about the pen I'm using, the journal itself and how I prefer an unlined journal, but sometimes I do use lined, or dot-grid. I like to try out fountain pens (Lamy, mostly), but I'm super amateur with 'em and they tend to dry out quickly, despite my precautions. I just got myself a dip pen and am waiting on a little bottle of ink, which should be fun just to make doodles with. I write about where I'm writing, whether it's at the coffee shop, or local bookstore with a coffee. If I'm just writing on my phone or tablet, I usually end up talking about how well my current bluetooth keyboard works. It takes me a while to get to the point of writing about anything significant happening in my life, the stuff I might need to process. I procrastinate that way. But writing at all, even about the most mundane shit, is therapeutic to some degree. It eases the mind. Right now? I've got some rain sounds going on YouTube. I think it's working, getting me in a good headspace...

The urge is strong to write about how I might use this blog, on this blog. The danger is that I will get too caught up in considering the medium, and not spend enough time working on the actual content that I want to fill this blog with. Here, at least, is an endless journal that will never run out of pages. I am the one to decide whether it has lines, or dots, or nothing at all. This website, as I mentioned previously, is all homebrew—vanilla HTML and CSS, baby—so every pixel of this website is on me, not somebody else's template, or some other platform that I can blame for anything.

So I'm using this post to admit to this inclination and hopefully get it out of my system.

I had considered recycling some old posts I had written for my former employer at the bookstore. Sadly, it appears the website has lapsed and is no longer accessible except via the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive. So there are some blog posts still available that I could pull. But it is a bit depressing, to be honest, since I built and ran that website for a long time through Wordpress. My last couple years there I convinced him to start a Shopify, since our Wordpress wasn't really doing us much good, and we didn't actually have it set up to sell anything through it. I think he got cold feet on Shopify's monthly fees. They take much less of a cut than eBay does, but he feels loyalty towards eBay, which I tried to talk him out of, thusly: that's commendable, but you don't owe eBay shit if you can do better business elsewhere; eBay will be fine without you. But could we do better business through Shopify? We did have some great sales, and a few that we would not have had on eBay. But, but, but... the man wasn't, hasn't ever been, interested in making connections in the book world, or doing any of the research, or any of the social media, or even how to list a book on eBay... Frankly, I didn't want the pressure any more. It was, in the end, an odd professional relationship. I really so very much wanted to start an online bookstore of my goddam own (but time, space, funds...).

For a minute I considered what it would take to open a physical bookstore. I thought, it could be a hole in the wall place in the back of beyond, but at least it would be a physical location that people could visit, while I do what most booksellers do and conduct most of my business online? I even talked with my former boss about buying his business. He advised against.

I feel some hesitancy as to where exactly to start, as I think of all the old posts I've already written but are mostly in the wind. Better to re-write them entirely, where possible. Back when we first started the website for my old job, one of my coworkers was super confused as to why we might want a blog, and what the hell we would actually write about. It's not as if the day-to-day work was all that interesting. This was mostly true, but... BOOKS, man! You can literally blog about anything your little heart desires, because somewhere there's a book about it. Of course, I wrote all but a few of the posts over the years. We got the most feedback over one of my Weirdest Book of the Week posts about what I figured was a really obscure old children's book with goofy illustrations. Turns out a lot of middle-aged ladies remembered it from their childhoods and were happy to be reminded of it, and was it still for sale...?

This blog, unlike the other more general one I just started, will require a little bit more work, if only in that I want to include a lot more photos, and images in general. Hopefully that won't be too much of a hindrance. Like I said, though, this is my own corner of the internet, where I am beholden to no one, and so I shouldn't pressure myself to always write lengthy diatribes on my choice of subjects. Sometimes it might just be: look at this super cool book I found, isn't it neat? Or even, this random kinda crappy book just so happens to have this FANTASTIC custom bookplate! I wonder who that person was?

The smallest details sometimes prove to be the most interesting. Sometimes, even, the most valuable. Now there's a post I might have to find from the old blog. Sometimes the research and time spent staring at a book actually pays off, monetarily. Sometimes it just pays off in a mental-health/educational/experiential sort of way.

With books, you never know what you'll come across. I hope to share some of the books and things-in-books I've come across, as well as my general philosophical musings about it all.