About

I've been blogging for almost 10 years, with varying degrees of regularity. For the duration of that period my "main" blog was JACkory's Listening Room. When I first began working it the plan was to write reviews of records, movies and stuff like that. I realized early on that I wasn't quite the record reviewer I thought I was. Certainly not to the extent where I could keep up a blog for that purpose. Not that I don't think I can write reviews...I've written several that I'm fairly proud of that litter the pages of the Listening Room. But consistancy is a problem as well as motivation. So I basically turned the blog into a place where I could share videos, photographs, stuff from the Internet and other more personal stuff. I called it "a place for my junk" and that's a good description.

In November of 2011 I decided to put the Listening Room to rest. I wanted something more consistant, much more personal. I decided to create a blog that would be primarily for friends and family, though anyone would be free to visit. To be more specific, it's for my children and grandchildren (the latter of whom I have not met and who are too young to be introduced to me for a few more years).

I know so little about my father, who passed away in 1999. Oh, I knew most of the general stuff...he liked country music a lot, he enjoyed driving trucks, he loved beans & cornbread, he spent at least a couple of hours every day in a coffee shop with some of his friends...little stuff like that, but I would love to have known about his past, his childhood, his particular tastes, the whys, the wheres, the whens, all of that stuff. I think how awesome it would be had he been able to keep a personal blog.

I want this to be a cyber-autobiography of sorts. Memories being made in real time. Opinions and beliefs. All that kind of stuff that I'm sure my son would love to know about his grandpa as well. And with each passing generation it becomes more valuable to those who want to know where they came from. Perhaps a one-way conversation, but a conversation nonetheless.


I realize that this blog will come off as self-obsessed or narcissistic. I try not to let that bother me because, after all, it's not really for me. I will try to make it more cohesive than the Listening Room was, even though there will be resemblances. It will remain online as an archive.

Of the other blogs I have maintained, three of them are still online:

Bipolar Confessional...a blog where I have published poetry and songs I've written over the past several years. It is updated whenever the muse strikes me...the average is about 10 times a year, but it all depends on how often I feel like writing. I've posted a good portion of the post-2011 pieces at the Hello Poetry website.

Chromosome 11...as of this writing I have not updated this blog in almost 2 years. It is a collection of short stories and prose writings. Most of the material is in rough draft form and varies from halfway decent to pure crap. I've been meaning to proofread and edit a lot of stuff there but I can't be bothered. If I ever start writing this kind of material again I will certainly publish it on Chromosome 11 but until then it floats rotting in the blogosphere.

No Genius...No Fool......my first serious attempt at keeping a Wordpress blog (after several scrapped tries). Somehow it turned into a very religious/theological/aplogetics thing. Not at all what I originally had planned, but the topic of atheism had come up frequently in my household so I felt like I could/should address it through the blog. Seeing as how I'm not sufficiently steeped in theology and/or apologetics I decided this forum would be better off without me. I still stand by my statements against atheism but I knew I couldn't sustain enough interest in the subjects to keep the blog updated.

Some of the other blogs I no longer maintain that are no longer online include:

A Cyberspace Altar...this was meant to be a place to post religious themed stuff and things learned from bible study. Great blog title, no? The design was really good, too. Like the Genius/Fool blog I just couldn't maintain interest.

Skeletons For My Closet...an experiment in confessional therapy. Each post was a confession of the most awful things I'd ever done in my life. Things I am so ashamed of that I wouldn't dream of telling anyone. I would write them up in detail and the idea was that, as in a church confessional, I would ask forgiveness and move on. Unfortunately this approach had several fatal flaws, not the least of which being the difference between forgiveness and forgetfulness, the latter of which was impossible seeing as how it was all written down. I ditched it a couple of weeks in...

JACkory's Listening Station...just YouTube videos of favorite bands, organized within a very cool design. I probably shouldn't have gotten rid of that one...

UNTITLED...actually this blog is still online, it's just done under a different username. Not really "for" anyone, it's another attempt at a therapeutic blog, this time taking the "journal" approach. It's only a couple of years old, but a lot has happened in those years and you would not be able to recognize the person posting there now as opposed to the one who posted there a year ago.

EROS...nothing but erotic photographs culled from the Internet. No porn, mind you. I'm not into that. These were very tastefully and artistically rendered photographs that celebrated sexuality as opposed to objectifying bodies. I decided to pull it down because I just don't feel comfortable with that kind of thing at the moment. The line between what is acceptable and what is not seems very thin right now to me and I'd just as soon play it safe, as it wee.

...ORINTHIO and Bipolar Confessional are the only ones I'm working with at the present time. I don't foresee the creation of any new blogs any time soon.

The "Simple Template" design of ORINTHIO is used on purpose, not because can't or don't enjoy tooling around with Blogger designing tools. I wanted to do something completely different, though. I was shooting for a stripped down look with no columns. No widgets except for a scant few at the bottom. I like it and don't think I'll change much at all about it.

MORE TO COME