Introducing the Craigslist Poetry Project

My only new year’s resolution is to clean up some personals

I went to the dog park today with my dog, a 13 lb. rat terrier mix named Bubba. We had a great time running around and finding ourselves new places to walk, friends to sniff, and river water to drink. It was a great time as we settled into our third consecutive sunny day in Seattle for the first time in I-don’t-remember-how-long. I mostly have a dog so that I have a reason to go to dog parks and talk to other people’s dogs; by similar logic, I hope to have at least one child interested in LEGO so that I can still buy them for myself. Bubba made a lot more friends than me, but I did talk to a few humans. It was a nice way to spend the first day of a new year.

I’m not a big fan of new year’s resolutions. I don’t feel that I need to decide to change my life based on the hands of the clock forcing me to roll over and accept my own mortality through socially-condoned binge drinking. Time is always moving at the same pace, but it feels more significant when there’s a giant glitter ball dropping at a rate of 1.2 feet per second or counting down to a fireworks extravaganza. But it’s difficult to avoid them, and I get it: it’s nice to know that I can maybe do one thing 365 times in a row. The only way I can know that I can do that consistently is to actually do it and not worry about being perfect.

I talked to one person at the park today who really caught my attention. This, I wrote for her.

The idea became apparent: let’s see if I can’t write something, anything, once a day, for myself, for a year using Craigslist as my blogging platform. The self-destruct date means that these screenshots become the source material after a week, unless I get inducted into the Craigslist Hall of Fame. Hopefully I return tomorrow. If not, maybe my resolution will change to once per week, then once per month, and so on in that fashion until this project collapses into the rest of the arcana on the Internet.