Life and Times

This isn’t the first time I’ve rebooted the blog, and I doubt it’ll be the last.

The reasons that prompted the last shut-down were myriad and varied, and were led in part by a dissatisfaction with what was here, a general distaste for personal writing, and a disinterest in maintaining a site like this when I had so much self-maintenance to go through.

The real catalyst, tho, was a continuous and near-daily barrage of hits I received from what appeared to be the corporate headquarters of a company I covered as part of my job. To be fair, the company in question is in the business of accelerating the delivery of Web-based content¹, and the hits were frequently to pages that were old and in many cases random, all of which leads me to believe that it wasn’t really a person on the other side of those hits, but a bot.

However, me being the incredibly neurotic and paranoid fool I am, rather than continue to update the site with increasingly personal tales of various girlfriends and occasional trysts — not to mention the occasionally embarrassing revelations about my family, upbringing, and subsequent emotional failings — I figured enough was enough. Bot or no², it was time to pack up the blog, at least for a time.

The better question is not why I shuttered the blog to begin with, but why I choose to resurrect it.³ The truth is that not much has changed since last I wrote. I’m still working in the same job, living in the same place, and dating around like no one’s business. I still don’t really have the time to pursue any kind of personal writing, and my inclination to do so on a consistent basis remains to be seen. To top it all off, I don’t really have that much new to say.

If anything, I think it comes down to the fact that I missed blogging, missed the cathartic nature of it. To be honest, Life and Times was never about letting others know what I was up to as much as it was about re-examining the things that were happening in my life. And without that presence in my life, I was a little bored. And lonely. And lost.

So I’m gonna try this whole blogging thing all over again, and see if maybe I can’t sustain it a little longer than the last three or four times I did this. Wish me luck.

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1 This could just about narrow it down for anyone who knows my beats^1a and my coverage areas, tho I am loathe to actually link to the possible offender in question, for fear of drawing attention to myself and being checked out on the regular^1b all over again.1a And my beats is correct1b It probably goes without saying, but much hip-hop was listened to during the writing of this entry

2 It’s entirely possible that, even if it was just a bot visiting, it could be a bot with a human master or nefarious plans of its own, such as (for instance) indexing my site with the intent of having leverage against me the next time I published a less-than-favorable story on the company, which truth be told, happens more often than it probably should.

3 And on Easter of all days! I assure you that any connection between the reemergence of Life and Times and the mythical and highly dubious tale of Jesus digging himself out of a tomb is pure coincidence.