NOTICED:BURNED

My burnt-out Le Creuset ketttle in classic Flame

I don’t know if it was a case of life behaving like art, but I think that the Le Creuset kettle I left, forgotten, on “immolate” on the stovetop the other night while I was absorbed on the Internet looking at other blogs seems like a metaphor.

Now I have, in the past, been accused of pyromania. There is no fireside I can get close enough to no matter how high or hot the flame. But when something comes to an end and you’re looking for a new start, I am all for a flaming pyre. It clears the air, like a Native American smudge stick, except that I don’t recommend using your Le Creuset kettle as it actually smells like Chernobyl.

How, you might ask, can a kettle (which, interestingly enough, came originally in the classic Le Creuset colour ‘flame’) have come to burning as a result of Al Gore’s invention?

The answer is simple, yet complex.

Recently, after my Noticed column was “retired” by the Globe & Mail (Canada’s national daily newspaper, which, feeling the heat of advertisers’ mass desertion for the ‘net is busily reconfiguring the paper around same), I left the kettle on the burner and promptly forgot about it. It should be noted that I had left the kettle on while surfing the evil blogosphere, to see if I could really make friends with it, when of course I lost all sense of time and space and didn’t recall I had even put the kettle on until I started smelling this horrid odour emanating up the stairs. Really, it was so bad, I had to run outside coughing and gasping for air and open every window in the house even though it was freezing.

And so, the Internet was the cause, in both a larger, and more specific sense of the kettle’s demise. And now both my happy Le Creuset that I smuggled home from Paris in my suitcase stuffed with illegal French sausages–and my column, which has been the beloved centre of my working life for close to decade, have gone up in flames. And I feel something like I remember as a child with the smell of burning leaves in the fall, that something has died. But after the burn, and the cleansing smoke, there is also a new sense of possibility.

To blog or not to blog?

What became clear in the cool fall air after all this surfing and then immolating was that as I suspected, real writers still don’t really write blogs. Blogs seem mostly about pictures, written by aspiring photographers or stylists. Or they are personal pr, or maybe, in our over-shared universe, even journals. Writing for people to read onscreen was not going to be the same as writing for a newspaper. But that didn’t mean that it wouldn’t be an interesting experiment. Or that I couldn’t still keep Noticing, and even write Noticed as a blog, on the ‘net.

So stick with me, because this is a learning curve, and it’s already proving dangerous. Who knows what other fires I might have to set or what else I might have to crash and burn along the way?