Harder than it used to be.

This post was supposed to be about progressive rock.

This website will turn 20 years old this year. I revisit posts from the first ten years and barely recognize this idiot who seemed to know so much and posted several times a day and didn't care so much about being wrong.

Today I stop and think: have I thought this through? Does this need to be said? I've become less confident in organizing my thoughts.

The point I was going to make about prog-rock was about how I don't listen to much new stuff. There are scores of bands creating music that sits nicely alongside canonical, genre-defining work from decades ago. But it doesn't grab me the same way.

Because IMO prog-rock is best discovered when you're a teenager, just learning how to play drums or guitar, and one summer someone hands you a mixtape that blows your mind and for a while your whole life becomes an obsession with odd time signatures and the Mixolydian mode.

Returning to blogging is hard, because in some ways its lost a sense of potential energy. The shared sense of being part of something that is happening right now is missing. (That energy seems abundant on Instagram.)

When I read about or hear people longing for a return to blogging as a respite from the chaos of social media, I wonder if what we're really missing are the days when blogging was the New Thing. Back when everyone introduced themselves with a URL instead of a Twitter handle; when the addiction cycle was email > blogroll > message board instead of Twitter > Facebook > Instagram. And back when we were certain that something good was going to come from all of this.

Blogging may not be dead but it sure feels like it went underground, like prog-rock.