In a half-hour the Hilton Atlanta Airport’s automated wake-up computer will ring the phone in our room. That gives me enough time in the dark to shift The Chronicles to a new phase, toward blogging, away from traveloguing, although I am likely to combine the two genres as we head for a month on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Maybe this is travelogging–trogging for short. For the past nine years, I have been refining my Chronicles, dispatches of words and photos e-mailed to a growing list of readers. The first episode was titled Chronicles of the Mouse, filed from Disney World, and it was followed by Chronicles prepared during treks in the Rialta, a 21-foot motorhome that we drove through Canada twice and around the U.S. This blog began as an alternate medium for the last installment of e-mailed Chronicles, the Cannes Chronicles, created last fall during a five-week houseswap with Francoise Philippe.

So this time it all happens on the blog. I’ve been surfing blogs in the middle of the night for the past week, preparing for this transition, as well as looking for blogs for the nonfiction section of the Denver-based online literary journal, Wazee. I have felt a similar excitement exploring the blogsphere to what I felt the first time I found the internet in the mid-1990s on my Radio Shack Model 100. Only instead of the simple discovery that there are people “out there” able to send crude text messages to each other, this entry into the world of blogs is about finding a world of thinkers, writers, cranks, pedants, and critics–my kind of people–all posting unique views on an infinite number of topics, updating daily, commenting on each other’s posts, building what seems like an entirely new take on reality. I am assembling a list of blogs that updates automatically on my computer using Bloglines . They include Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind by Sarah Weinman, the crime fiction columnist for the Baltimore Sun, and Silliman’s Blog, described as “a weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics” by the poet Ron Silliman, whom I hadn’t known of before finding his blog, but whose bio of published books and accomplishments is 43-pages long.

There’s the phone, waking me from my blog reverie–bloggerie? We must now dash to the airport in hopes that US Airways will honor our free tickets issued by United, taking us from Atlanta to Charlotte to St. Thomas. Time to click on “Publish Post.” Let the trogging begin!

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