Tear drops by ©Man Ray, 1930
Text by Bruce Berman
Dear Border-Blog reader/viewer.
You will notice there is a three and a half year gap from March 18, 2016 to October 12, 2020.
I have not been lazy. Frustrated? Yes. Bummed? At times. Optimistic? Of course.
Last August we had a malware attack. I maintain and post on five different websites, this one being the grandaddy of them all. Each had to be shut down, suspended and pronto! The entire host’s hard drives would be infected if the site stayed up.
So, we shut it down.
I’ve missed it a lot.
With the help of a friend the sites were stripped of their malware. This took 5 months. Some were back whole and healthy. Others had to be rebuilt but there was plenty to work with. This one, Border Blog, the first site I started and perhaps the most precious because of its content just wouldn’t come back. Nothing worked. The backups didn’t have full content. In a techno-depression, I let it sit, dead to the world. Finally, last week, I went at it again and got everything back except for the aforementioned 3 1/2 year gap.
One site is not back -www.Russell-Lee-Road.com. However, through a laborious process and the help of the University of Texas-San Antonio’s Immigration/Borderlands Web Collection, it is coming back slowly, one article at a time.
The Border Blog loss of three and a half years, is enormous to me. The border has been my beat professionally and personally for forty years. I never expected it but this is where a huge chunk of my heart resides.* Three and a half years equals a lot of stories and even more photographs. There seems to be no way of retrieving them so I must now just consider them lost. The loss represents many nights of pondering, many days of posting my photos or finding someone else’s to put up. But, here we are: the work has disappeared/desesperado!
Some of the content that’s there now is not complete. Photos are gone, here and there. I’ll work on it.
I had intended to do a Border Blog Book: Stories. Not sure that can happen now. Maybe. We’ll see.
But…! We have gotten a lot of it back! That’s something. So, we’ll start again. As people from La Frontera say, “ta bien (it’s OK).”
Lessons have been learned (insert huge understatement).
We’ll go from here.
I hope you’ll find the new work meaningful and useful. It’s a new day for the Border-Blog and for me as well.
C’est la vie/Así es la vida.That’s life.
It could always be worse, no?
*For more of my border work, see: www.bruceberman.com
