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| This is the first and last reference to Kenny Rogers in this post. Apologies to fans of "The Gambler" hoping for more. |
Tomorrow marks a decade since I jotted my first random
thought online. The site has waxed and waned, from periods of prolific posting
to a depository of reprints from defunct outlets. What started as an attempt to
resurrect my university journal writing habit became the launch pad for my
current writing career, even if many early entries were little more than text
messages which I later wiped out.
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| The earliest screen capture I could find of the site, snapped June 2, 2004. |
The ongoing process of reformatting and cleaning up old
entries has revealed plenty of changes over the past decade. In May 2003, I had
long dropped the notion of working at Canadian Tire’s head office for two years
before moving on to something else. By year four, a comfort zone had set in.
Yet old creative impulses reassert themselves. Writing had been a painful process
since the black comedy of
The Ontarion, an experience whose legacy would
probably be diagnosed as a mild case of post-traumatic stress disorder. It didn’t
help that an attempt to restart a written journal/scrapbook died when that
notebook vanished along with the backpack it was resting in. Observing the
world of blogs which emerged at that time, I thought it might be fun to see
where writing one might lead to. One without flashing letters and bad MIDI
files.
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| One of the advantages of working at Canadian Tire was seeing bizarre products merchandisers hoped the public would buy, like celebrity-endorsed fragrance discs. The full post, sadly without long-gone images. |
While early posts centered on outings with friends, few
recent posts touch on those activities. Maybe it was a realization I didn’t
have to chronicle everything to the world. Maybe it was disagreements with
others when I posted material I had no inkling they didn’t want published.
Maybe it was the experience of seeing the shifts in friends over the years, those who moved or faded away. Maybe it was the rise of social media, which allowed
shorter, snappier acknowledgement of these adventures. I’m not going to sugar-coat
it—I have deleted a lot of early posts lest they cause anyone embarrassment in
the future, though there’s always the Wayback Machine to uncover those pieces (I've also deleted a lot of link-centric posts - many were dead, and Facebook/Twitter took over that function).
Going back also shows the genesis of material I wrote for
fun then and for (minimal) profit now. Posts of cheesy advertisements hacked
out of my father’s boxes of Sports Illustrated and scanned from magazines found
at the curbside gave birth to the “Vintage Toronto Ads” column on Torontoist. Short
pieces on local history evolved into my literary specialty.
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| Walking and advertising: the two great themes of the site's middle years. |
Connections were also made through this site. The combination
of reaction to a series exploring the backstreets of Toronto and a
Globe and
Mail article on a walking group with the funny-sounding name “Toronto
Psychogeography Society” introduced me to a world I comfortably fit into, where I
discovered others who shared (and broadened) my interests.
What does the future hold for the ol’ Warehouse? Hard to
say. This site has been on life support for awhile, lending credence to
arguments that
the blog is dead. Yet lately new material is stealthily creeping
its way back onto the site. I would like to do more “DVD bonus features” pieces
for my work elsewhere, or take time to work on material that doesn’t fit
anywhere else in my writing universe. Ideally this site should become a writing
test kitchen, where articles are thrown against the wall to see if they stick.
Thanks for being loyal Warehouse customers for the past 10
years.
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