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Monthly Missive // March 2022

You know, it has been my goal in these Missives, and elsewhere on the blog, to be very honest with you readers. So I feel comfortable positing to you one

2 years ago

You know, it has been my goal in these Missives, and elsewhere on the blog, to be very honest with you readers. So I feel comfortable positing to you one of the questions which has haunted me for the last few years: what happens after Heavy Blog? Don’t get me wrong, the blog is going strong; while we’re not “comfortable” yet, things are sustainable and we’re making headway towards improving them. But let’s be real here, nothing is forever, least of all a music blog on the internet. Someway, sometime, somehow, the blog will end. Maybe it will be with a bang; we’ll all decide to just quit one day, exhausted by life and the efforts needed to keep this thing alive. Or, more likely, it will be with a whimper, a slow realization that whatever worked for so long no longer works. But however it happen, rest assured that it will happen.

So, what comes after? I don’t mean for you readers or for the “metal community” at large; I’m not pompous enough to overstate and overestimate the importance of what we do here. It’s important and good but it won’t shatter anyone or anything by going away. I mean more for myself. The ways that I consume music, for example, is inherently tied into the blog, by which I mean it “forces” me to listen to ungodly amounts of music (my Bandcamp collection recently crossed 1,000 albums bought, by the by). Fun aside: I am constantly haunted by the idea that it will take me years to return my inbox to anything resembling normalcy after the blog stops; the emails will keep coming for ages. It also changes the cadence and timing of my listening, funneling different types into different times in the day, when I have the attention span for different types of listening. Oh, it’s also created more of those types; I still listen to music for fun but I also listen to it critically or when researching a theme or idea for an essay.

And it’s not just music. My daily schedule, the way I communicate with friends, what I spend money on, and more are all determined by the fact that I write, and run, Heavy Blog. How does that all look once the blog is gone? For now, these questions are, fortunately, hypotheticals; there is no rush in answering them because the blog is not going anywhere anytime soon. But if, once again, I am being honest, these questions are also closer than they haven’t been before. It hasn’t been an easy couple of years, as I’m sure you know, and that makes the question of what comes next all the more present as things I used to do very easily for the blog become harder and harder.

Of course, at the outset of this intro, it should be said that I’ve been thinking about these things for ages now but have never written them down because every time I come to do so, it’s part of a Missive or something other big blog thing. And those things always remind me why I keep doing this and why I would like to keep Heavy Blog alive for as long as possible. However, I think it’s important to be able to look at fatigue and hardship even when you are not currently experiencing it. Only speaking about things when they get too much to bear or when they actively hurt is a great way of not resolving them or even of exacerbating the causes for these pains. So, here I am, telling you that I’m tired but not done yet and, at the same time, thinking about how life will look when I do get too tired to keep going.

In the meantime, of course, here’s a lot of really great music and writing about music which makes me want to guffaw and wave all of those dreary questions away. I don’t have any answers for them anyway so we might as well focus on the here and now, right? And the here and now, frankly, kicks a lot of ass; all of the columns, and features, and reviews, are chock-full of the kind of exciting music you get whenever March rolls around. Spring is coming and the industry has awakened from its frosty slumbers, delivering to us fuel for another month. Or a year. Or a decade.

See you then.

Eden Kupermintz

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Published 2 years ago