Big Time Not
When I started blogging in 2007, I entertained the same quiet fantasy many people do when they first begin publishing things online: that somehow I might become known. Not famous exactly but discovered by cool people. Maybe not read widely, but passed around among those that matter.
The early days of blogging encouraged this kind of thinking. The web still felt open and full of possibilities. (Boy does that sound like an old person ranting or what?) People linked to one another. Search engines felt democratic such that you could convince yourself that if you kept writing thoughtful things, eventually the audience would arrive.
So, I wrote. A lot.
Travel posts. Language observations. Museum visits. Notes about hikes, signs, maps, software projects, organizational systems, food, language, travel tips and all manner of sundry subjects. Over time, the blog became less a publication and more of an accumulation. A long trail of things that caught my attention strongly enough that I wanted to pin them down in words.
Eventually reality arrived, gently and without much drama: most readers came through search queries. Someone wondering about a mural in Seattle. Someone researching a museum in Florence. Someone trying to understand a hike we did. The audience was niche, fragmented, and almost always accidental.
The comments were sparse but meaningful. Every once in a while, someone would write to say a post resonated with them or helped them see something differently. Those comments meant disproportionately more because they were rare and specific. Someone had not merely landed on the page—they had actually read it.
Somewhere along the way I realized something else: the fantasy of becoming “known” had quietly faded. Not because I failed exactly, but because the work itself had changed function. The writing stopped being an attempt to enter the culture and became a way of narrating my own life. And I’ve come to realize that feels better.
I can imagine what it would be like to be widely observed. Who hasn’t imagined that at some point? But I also understand the cost. Visibility has consequences. It can harden experimentation into persona. It can turn curiosity into brand maintenance.
Meanwhile, obscurity, or partial obscurity, leaves room to wander. There is freedom in being lightly observed.
Unexpected Conclusion
The unexpected conclusion after years of blogging was this: making things becomes much more enjoyable once you stop imagining an audience large enough to validate them. And more accurately: once validation stops being the engine, what remains is curiosity.
You can write exactly the strange thing you want to write. A post about Italian impersonal grammar constructions. A meditation on clutter and organizational entropy. Thoughts about navigation systems south of Milan. Notes on politeness in Japan. Posts celebrating album cover artwork. Long reflections on a personal Scrapbook system that accidentally begins behaving like a tiny science-fiction memory companion.
None of these are market-tested ideas. They tickle our curiosity. Our writing no longer feels like output aimed outward toward “the culture.” It feels more like connective tissue. A way of arranging experience into patterns that make sense later. Especially now, in a world overflowing with expression.
Today, words, music, and images are everywhere. There is infinite commentary layered atop infinite commentary. Entire ecosystems are devoted to producing more content than any human could ever absorb. So, what does it mean to make anything inside this abundance? To release an album, publish a book, make a film, or maintain a long-running written project once required passing through gates. Now nearly everyone can pass through these gates instantly and continuously. The result is both wonderful and overwhelming.
And yet people still make things.
Not always because the world is waiting for them. Often because creating itself is a form of noticing. A way of orienting oneself. A method for stitching together places, conversations, moods, disappointments, jokes, weather, signs, meals, and passing thoughts into something that resembles continuity.
Luck plays a role in who becomes visible and who remains obscure. Sometimes the line between “unobserved” and “observed” feels absurdly thin. Timing. Algorithms. Connections. Cultural mood. Accident.
But there is another truth too: some people truly dedicate themselves to mastery for years or decades. There are artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers whose visibility is not merely luck but the result of enormous discipline and deep study. The gap between amateur curiosity and practiced craft can be vast and fully earned.
I admire that but at the same time, I no longer feel compelled to measure my own work against those scales. The act of creating serves a different function for me now. It is less about arrival and more about continuation.
Let There Be Music
Recently I added music to the mix. Or perhaps better to say: musical blogging. That’s because it's how I think of the songs, connected to the writing rather than separate from it. They inhabit a similar emotional center for me: weather systems, static, memory, motion, transmissions, fragments, recurring imagery, private references. There is crosstalk between songs and posts.
What surprised me was how quickly music repeated a lesson I had already learned through writing. People often react more to the fact that you make music than to the music itself.
“Oh, you’re making songs now.”
The category arrives before the engagement. And I think I understand why. Modern attention tends toward classification. We absorb labels quickly because there is too much to absorb deeply. Am I a musician, writer, photographer, traveler, content creator, or what? We sort one another into recognizable containers almost instantly to keep ourselves sane.
But categorization is not the same thing as attention. Listening carefully is rare. Reading carefully is rare. Both probably always have been.
And maybe that is what caught me off guard again when I started sharing songs. Music feels strangely vulnerable because it asks for a sustained presence. A song says, stay here with this for four minutes. Enter this atmosphere. Listen closely enough to notice the texture and intent, ...and...most people understandably do not.
Even friends often engage lightly. They acknowledge the existence of the thing rather than inhabiting it. The reaction becomes social instead of immersive.
But then there are exceptions. My companion. A few close friends. The rare people who actually listen. Who notice lyrics, recurring phrases, references to older posts, emotional callbacks, certain sounds or moods that connect to conversations we had years ago. And with those few people, the work becomes something else entirely. It becomes sort of an inside joke, a secret language.
It becomes a shared archive of references accumulated slowly over time, where lyrics recall a trip, a phrase recalls an old argument or a song title recalls a rough spot in the year. Certain themes keep returning often enough that they become sort of a personal mythology. And at this point, I realized that this tiny audience might actually be enough.
But categorization is not the same thing as attention. Listening carefully is rare. Reading carefully is rare. Both probably always have been.
And maybe that is what caught me off guard again when I started sharing songs. Music feels strangely vulnerable because it asks for a sustained presence. A song says, stay here with this for four minutes. Enter this atmosphere. Listen closely enough to notice the texture and intent, ...and...most people understandably do not.
Even friends often engage lightly. They acknowledge the existence of the thing rather than inhabiting it. The reaction becomes social instead of immersive.
But then there are exceptions. My companion. A few close friends. The rare people who actually listen. Who notice lyrics, recurring phrases, references to older posts, emotional callbacks, certain sounds or moods that connect to conversations we had years ago. And with those few people, the work becomes something else entirely. It becomes sort of an inside joke, a secret language.
It becomes a shared archive of references accumulated slowly over time, where lyrics recall a trip, a phrase recalls an old argument or a song title recalls a rough spot in the year. Certain themes keep returning often enough that they become sort of a personal mythology. And at this point, I realized that this tiny audience might actually be enough.
Still Transmitting
Maybe that’s what all the writing and music making has become: a running commentary on a life lived. Not content. Not branding. Not a bid for recognition.
It’s a private cinematic universe for an audience of a few people. A secret language built over years of trips, jokes, references, observations, signs, songs, software projects, maps, museums, and repeated phrases.
The blog posts, photographs, notes, and songs now feel less like separate outputs and more like one long interconnected system. The work talks to itself over the years. Certain emotional frequencies repeat (noise). Certain imagery keeps resurfacing (graffiti). Certain obsessions refuse to leave (language).
I’m writing the script and now composing the soundtrack of my life and those close to me, whether they want it or not. And perhaps the most surprising part is that being lightly observed may be exactly what allows it to continue. There is enough audience for resonance but not enough scrutiny to calcify into performance. There is enough attention to feel heard occasionally. There is enough obscurity to remain curious.
And when careful attention does appear, from the small handful of people who truly read and listen closely, it matters enormously precisely because it is rare.
Maybe careful attention has always been rare. Which, annoyingly, is probably why it matters so much when it shows up.
