Another Closing

DragstripGirl is gone. Or closing, anyway. I don’t follow the details closely enough to know if there’s a difference. I just know that a space I used to visit—not often, but consistently, the way you check on something that matters—is disappearing into the internet’s graveyard.

I’ve been reading Sara’s work for years. Not religiously. Just enough that when something showed up, I’d recognize it. Rock The Casbah before this. Guten Morgen Spinner. SeptemberRave. She’s been blogging longer than most people have been alive online. Each project, each diary, each temporary home eventually becomes a closed door.

What strikes me about Sara is that she’s never seemed comfortable. Not in a fragile way—in an intellectual way. Restless. Extreme. She fills the internet with stories that don’t sit still. They’re unguarded. They’re the kind of writing where you realize the author doesn’t care if you’re listening because they’re too busy figuring something out in real time. That’s rare. I’ve watched blogging for twenty years, and the people who can do that without performing it—you can count them.

There’s something in how she moves through projects, how she builds spaces and then burns through them. Always looking for the next room, the next medium, the next thing that’ll let her think more clearly. It’s the opposite of someone trying to build an audience or a brand. She’s trying to disappear into the work, and when the work stops fitting, she leaves.

Now DragstripGirl is shutting down. Another digital diary closes. Another collection of thoughts and images and provocations goes dark. Part of me feels that ache you feel when something permanent suddenly isn’t. But another part of me thinks: good for her. She’s finally putting down the pseudonym. The person beneath it—the actual person, not the avatar—that’s where the realness was always going to live anyway.

Sara will be fine. People that serious about thinking and moving through the world always are. Maybe there’s another blog. Maybe not. Either way, she’s done performing the diary. That’s its own kind of freedom.