Mike and I have moved many times in our lives. We’ve lived in a total of six places in the Salt Lake Valley in our twenty-five years of marriage. Every once and a while, I get the urge to drive past those old homes where we used to live. Sometimes I look at old pictures I’ve taken when we lived there. We sit in the car and notice the differences in the exterior or yard and I think,

I used to live here.

The same is true for the Internet. I have lived in many places on the Internet, even as far back as the old BBSs. But unlike the old houses, so many of those places I can’t visit anymore. My favorite BBS was the one Mike and I ran back in the early 90s and I can’t go there to talk anymore. Sure, we have all the old data from the BBS on a floppy disk, rotting in the garage. Even if we could fire up that old Atari ST, I doubt we could bring that beast of a BBS back to life. And that makes me sad because I can’t go back there and say,

I used to live here.

There was a DDR forum that I used to visit every single day. When I was at work, wishing I could play DDR, I would log on and talk about the game there. It was called DDR Freak and it’s still there, just like my old apartment on 600 East, it sits there, alone. The last post I’ve seen logged was in 2011. It has been almost four years since anyone said a word there, but

I used to live here.

Even this blog has been slowly abandoned. I’m spending more time on Facebook than I do writing here. It’s not that I really write on Facebook. I just scan the feed, liking things and commenting here and there. It was kind of like what I did on the DDR forum, except about a wide variety of subjects instead of just one video game. But this blog is like a home I own, but don’t live in anymore. A summer vacation spot with no vacations taken. A rental home that no one rents. Sometimes I show up, clean the comment spam out of the corners and shine the entries where old formatting no longer works. But, mostly I go there to say,

I used to live here.

Atari Telenet image via: ATARI BBS GATEWAY