And here we are. Ten years of this blog. Damn near a quarter of my life. If you dig around in the darker corners of the Internet, you can go back even further, to 1999 or so. Most of my adult life after leaving college and coming to DC is documented for historical memory. This is an incomplete record, obviously, because I haven’t put everything in here by a long shot, nor would I. But I at least have some points of reference, some places to think about what I used to say or think or do.
I don’t know if anyone is still reading this. I think sometimes I write as if nobody is, which is incautious at best and stupid at worst. It’s unconnected to anything else, certainly to any of my social media, and I think the RSS feeds into previous blog solutions are long since broken, so I sort of feel like it’s all right – I certainly wouldn’t do the same with the Twitter accounts or the dummy blog attached to one of them. Wheels within wheels. Erase a dot and it’s gone…you don’t think about what’s under the dot.
It hasn’t always been cheerful, this blog. It went along with the collapse of my time at Apple and the corresponding collapse of Cal football, from which it has never quite recovered. It began with saying that 5-6 wasn’t going to be good enough for Vanderbilt and arrives at a time when 5 wins is a consummation devoutly to be wished. It’s gone through three Presidential elections, each more apocalyptic than the last in importance.
And yet, it all seems to boil down the usual stuff: endless wankery about this phone or that gadget, bemoaning terrible sports, lashing out at a broken political system and more broken society around me, and of course the endless timeless woe-is-me sad-sack reminisces of days gone by as if somehow I can rearrange it in a way that forms a sailboat. Or a schooner. Or a worthwhile outcome. (It’s not lost on me that this blog has also quietly seen three different antidepressants and four different mental health professionals, none of whom was ever able to do more than stop the bleeding for a while.) I’d like to say that in the new season and the months and years to come you’ll see better and more interesting content, but you’ll get exactly what you paid for and there’s no point pretending otherwise.
Onward, then.