David J Bauman

The History of My Life Online

If you’ve spent a long time hanging about this David J. Bauman website and blog, well first of all, I’d like to thank you from the bottom of my page footer to the breadth of my sidebar. Of course, lately, there’s probably not much action in the footer and the sidebar has been discarded for wider pages and the ability to display in multiple formats, from desktops, to phones, iPads, and even television screens.

I started this blog in 2008 a little before my old “online journaling” website, Journalspace, bit the dust. Do you recall online journals? A movement beyond MySpace, and just prior to my becoming familiar with the word “blog.”

It was also around the time when MSN Groups closed up shop, something I saw coming and so tried to recreate my online community as GayFatherhood.com by using PHP forum software. It didn’t last, partly because it meant the members didn’t want to learn the new technology and partly because my best friends and I, particularly Keith and Vince, were getting to the stage where we no longer needed the support; our children were growing up.

Back then, this page was called The Dad Poet, a bad pun off of Dead Poets’ Society that almost nobody got, and if they did, they groaned. Come to think of it, that’s still the WordPress page that DavidJBauman.com is based on. If you type in dadpoet.wordpress.com, you’ll land right back on my home page.

The idea was for me to have a place to work through what I increasingly knew would be the end of a ten-year relationship by focusing my writing on the things that brought me joy: Being a dad, poetry (both the reading and the writing of it, as well as performing poems online), and a love of birds. Focus on the good things and hopefully, keeping my fingers typing would lead to new poems being written.

Up Until Now . . .

And here we are almost seventeen years later. My posts are much more infrequent. I haven’t posted on YouTube since a couple of birding clips last year, and it was a four year drought of posts before that. It’s been five years since I’ve uploaded a poetry reading to SoundCloud.

These were the places where I challenged myself to create a poem reading each day during National Poetry Month for a few years, and where I pursued my love of reading poems out loud, usually without permission. Honestly, most poets didn’t mind, in fact, took it as a compliment that someone would share their work for others to find and hopefully purchase. The big publishers make more money than the authors and we’re a lot more careful of copyright concerns these days, so I’m more cautious.

Of course, I’ve also spent more time submitting my own work to literary magazines and anthologies and even published a few small poetry books, thanks to quality small press publishers like Seven Kitchens Press. You can follow that journey a bit on my Publications page, though it may need updating. I no longer have anything in the “Forthcoming” category so I need to get back to sending my work out.

Now What?

You may have even seen some of my side work lately on Jeff’s Song of the Day, a semi (stress semi) daily music blog in honor of my brother Jeff, the one-time radio disc jockey. JSOD started as a promise to him to keep the song of the day posts going, but it’s been two years, and his dementia has him in continuous cognitive decline, and honestly, I think I need to let that project go soon, or find someone else to take it over, even if it just becomes a song-of-the-week sort of thing.

I’ve also been working to cut back on some of the extras in my life, a board I got myself involved in because it was poetry adjacent, but my responsibilities there have had very little to do with poetry itself. And I’ve gone in the last couple of years from running a small library to running a small county system of four libraries.

I’m trying to get back to focusing on the poetry and birds. My boys are grown, and I still want to have a great relationship with them, of course. In fact, we just had dinner together on Tuesday, and Micah, my youngest and I have published a collaborative chapbook of poems and are working on a longer project. But they don’t really need me the way they did when they were younger.

Micah and I are both working on books and publications separately as well. We meet once a week or so online to work on these, and I meet with an editor, a best friend, and a new friend, three wonderful gay humans, to workshop new poems with each other.

I have so enjoyed keeping in contact, almost naturally, over social media and through public readings, both in person and on Zoom, with a wider variety of poets, writers, and editors. BlueSky has opened up even more community in the wake of the death of Twitter.

I’ve communicated and kept up with many poets on newsletter forums like Substack, but it’s just seemed a bit cumbersome. Maybe I’m a little like the gay dads in my old MSN group not wanting to learn a new thing. But the fact that Substack makes you jump through some hoops sometimes is annoying. Besides, the newsletter thing, I already have an email list of subscribers right here:

Why would I want to lose the history of this place, rather than enjoy the revelation of its evolution?

I Said, Now What, David?

Sorry, I’m really journaling today, aren’t I? So, I have this great platform here on WordPress, which supports blogging as well as other projects, so why not prepare to renovate and relaunch something new?

I realize I haven’t written much here over the years about my convoluted CV. Beyond libraries and restaurants, and I have over a dozen years experience in radio and broadcasting. I miss reading poems on SoundCloud and YouTube, especially once I did finally start reaching out to people for permission to read their work, the living ones, anyway. I never reached out to a dead poet. The rumors are just not true.

I have good pair of Sennheiser headphones that Brian’s sister gave me and an excellent Rode NT mic at my desk, given to me by a client and employer who I was doing translation editing (that is, I edited translations to put them into better English) and voice-over work for. And I have some other equipment, including a few extras I can borrow from the library.

And the dear pianist I have spent my life with these last sixteen years even wants to create some theme music for me!

So, I’ve revisited something that first came up a decade ago. It was only one sentence in my head back then, but over the last several years, it’s taken shape, combining my love of reading poems aloud, the fun of broadcasting itself, and the whole world of poetry, including the many new friends I’ve met in that world over the last 16 or 17 years. And I can still do this project with my headquarters remaining right here, in this old-new place I started building back then.

And with that, I’m going to leave you hanging. Enough journal space today. You’ve already figured it out, though, haven’t you? Let’s talk about it in the comments. Stay tuned for what’s next!