One Year of the Dowbrigade

Well, the day has finally arrived. One year since our first uncertain post, a year in which we have found our voice, made new friends and a few enemies (notably via the Moose story) and lost a few of our marbles and quite a bit of hair.

Whether it is a portent or a result of where we are physically, but we feel less pressure or even reason to post here, living the simple life high in the Peruvian Andes than at any time or from anyplace during our momentous first year. From where we are sitting, just on the far side of the wired – nonwired world interface, floating above the furtherest tendril of the electronic web which has penetrated down the highway and through the towns along the valley floor, we really see no pressing need to communicate or even really process what we are seeing and feeling.  Experiencing it is enough.

In part, perhaps, it is the realization that some things are beyond communication, that even attempting to communicate them will lead to more misunderstanding and false assumptions than to enlightenment. Some experiences, moments, truths cannot be translated, neither from one language to another nor from the experiential world to the static structure of language.

Oh, we are taking notes, and digital photographs, some of which will undoubtably filter down to the Dowbrigade News eventually. But we no longer feel the need to validate our existence through the Blogosphere, and this is probably all for the better.

For thinking back from this Olympian perch it is something of a madness or a sickness this compuslive blogging with which we were afflicted during long stretches of the year, the near physical addiction to digesting a few assorted scraps of the information overload we are exposed to on a daily basis, and spitting it back out, partially metabolized for our own amusement and enjoyment, and perhaps that of others.

It occurs to us now that this whole blogging phenomenon may be a defensive adaptive reaction to the unmanageable deluge of information, opinion, entertainment and advertising in which modern American culture is drowning. By grabbing a few random tendrils or bits of the mosaic, and making them somehow our own, branding them with an insight or previously unnoted association, we in some small symbolic take control of the slipstream, or at least create an illusion of control. Or perhaps marking our territory like digital dogs would be a more accurate analogy.

Thanks to all my readers. It has been a fantastic year. We have decided that the Dowbrigade will continue is some form for the forseeable future.