The Aaroneous Monk Blog

 

It’s a screenshot of one of the very first posts I uploaded to my new blog 20 years ago.  I had been using the pseudonym “Aaroneous Monk” while posting comments on community websites like “THEOOZE” and blogging was something that was becoming increasingly popular at the time so I jumped on the train.  I actually started out as “Augustinos” in deference to my patron saint and then transitioned to “Augustinos aka Aaroneous the Oft-Mistaken” and finally to “Aaroneous Monk”.  AM seemed to strike just the right balance of self-deprecation and piety I was looking for plus I was a lover of Jazz music a la Thelonious Monk.

The photo of the blue window was taken with my newly purchased digital camera (Canon Powershot) which was also something new and coming onto the market at the time.  Digital photography blew open the doors to express myself creatively with its instant results and the ability to download the images onto my laptop to further manipulate and post them on flickr.com .  This website was an online community for folks who love photography and provided a place to share images, comment on them, add them to themed groups, and participate in contests.  I learned a ton about photography on this online community and made some good friends with similar interests (having small children of similar ages mostly).  

At this point I must mention Jim Forest of blessed memory.  I connected with him early on flickr.com when I found him there.  I had read his book “Praying with Icons” and attended one of his talks several years previous when I was newly Orthodox.  It turns out he was an enthusiastic photography hobbyist and soon thereafter he gifted me a professional account that allowed me to post as many photos as I liked which further fueled my creative output.  He became a confidante of sorts during my deployment to Iraq and a treasured electronic pen pal thereafter.  In honor of Jim’s passing I printed and framed the last photo he took on a walk in Alkmaar for my office wall.

There’s a song from the early 80’s called “Video Killed the Radio Star” which was actually the first video played on MTV circa 1981.  In the same way Facebook (FB) killed flickr.com over the next several years as most everyone migrated over there for a more full social experience that was not exclusively tied to photography.  The downside was (and is) that photos uploaded to FB automatically have their quality downgraded to save space.  And flickr.com still exists for photography purposes but is greatly diminished.

My blog continued on unabated but not used much until 2013 when I became more intentional with it after deciding I wanted to start writing more.  This motivation was mostly triggered by a SciFi story idea that I thought would make a cool novel, but I needed the writing chops and more experience to be able to tackle it.  My postings went from a handful a year to about 50 per year on average which has continued to the present day.  

The novel has yet to materialize, but early last year I did self-publish a collection of short stories culled from my blog and late last year I followed that up by doing the same thing for a collection of stories from my childhood.  They are both the same length and comprise the yin and yang of one fiction and one non-fiction with 2 stories that appear in both, interestingly enough.

Circling back to the beginning, I love that photo of the window.  My wife’s mother was visiting us in Washington DC where I was doing my residency and we’d just finished dinner when I glanced up and saw that deep blue glow coming through the window surrounded by the warm glow of the dining room light.  There was a deep snow cover outside creating this phenomenon in the early evening.  I grabbed my Canon Powershot and instructed everyone to move away from the table so I could take a picture.  They laughed at me and my strange request but when I saw what I’d taken in the small digital screen on the back of the camera I felt like I’d captured something truly beautiful as well as ephemeral.  It was the beginning of countless images to come.

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