Why do we do it? I mean, it isn't just for posterity. Some people really get into it, as if the internet has blessed everyone with their 15 minutes. Yet that 15 minutes is just a tease. Like a Scott Sigler podcast-only novel, that first taste is never enough. Then we come back jonesing for the next fix.

It takes me a while though. I don't write very often. I sleep for days because I want to forget. I wake up to the hot July night air. The cicadas buzzing, stirring up the humidity just a little. August is almost here. This monsoon has been a fairly weak one this year.

I'm going to digress, a moment, but damn, I still remember that October night in '93 when my car took on water when the Six Points flooded at 19th, Grand, and McDowell. This year, did you hear, the National Weather Service gave up its traditional gauge of when Monsoons start? Instead of their usual dipstick of dewpoint hitting 55 three days in a row, now they just picked a date. June 15th through September 30th. Laughable. That's right, expect rain now *staring at wrist* a week before through a week after Summer. Arizona weather forecasting at it's finest. Yup, Jim, it'll be Sunny and Hot, except in the Summer, when it will be Rainy and Hot. Back to you.

Back to my original point, though, if we ever had another storm like that, people would just whip out their camera phones, grab some video of the trash in the streets floating by their knees, and then post it all on YouTube. Folks here already drive like morons when water falls from the sky like it's some doomsday Perfect Storm swirling around Tempe Town Lake. Shit, I remember when the Mill Ave bridge washed away because the Salt River, before it was turned into a fucking marina for land developers to rape, actually flooded. That I remember seeing on the news. Hell, I think that was 1993 also, but earlier in the year.

God, I sound like an old fart. I'm only 36 for fuck's sake. Now Malcolm -- there's a storyteller. He is, or was, the definitive Old Phoenix Fart, yet he looked younger than me. Here's a link to one story he shared with me. It always blows me away. Maybe that's why we do it. I mean, he would argue that an oral tradition is more potent. The written word to him was more fragile, more corruptible.

I think our digital word is perhaps more fragile than clay, papyrus, or stone. They could go silent faster than a race whose only record is some cave drawing somewhere. What might some future archaeologist make of our arcane magnetic storage? Will our blogs go black? Will our podcasts fall silent?

Still we leave them for others. We call into our favorite podcasts and leave voice mail. (Dan finally played mine. I'll admit that was cool.) We twitter our lives away, hoping someone reads it. Someone smiles or cries with us. Someone cares.

So here's mine. Once again, I ramble, and haven't shared the story really. I've posted my old entries, from the McJournal of old. Locked away before, but open for you now. No longer trapped in a book, but bared for you.