Here’s to you, Big Man

Former Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band member, Rock Sax legend, Clarence Clemons, seen here performing last November, died June 18, 2011 from stroke complications (AP/Rhona Wise).

A WILLful Assist
This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been inspired by something that Will Stegemann wrote. You may know him as @BeTheBoy on Twitter, who, coupled with his equally brilliant and lovely spouse, TeeVee industry writer Nina Bargiel (@slackmistress), comprise a one-two punch of avant garde creative goodness that’s sometimes hard to describe, but always a party for the imagination.

And while I really dig both Nina’s edgy hipness and faster-than-your-own-neurons-can-fire wit, Will’s stories just have a way of ‘getting to me,’ particularly when he writes about his late father, who passed away in 2009.

Will seems to use his blog as a vehicle similar in style and purpose to my own; he doesn’t appear to seek engagement with an audience so much as with himself, particularly on subjects of family and his childhood memories. And whether or not that’s actually the case, it is how his posts speak to me.

Yesterday was of course, Father’s Day, and I was hit with a double-dose of BethePoignancy. Will posted a wonderfully-woven tribute to both his late father and the renowned Rock Saxman, Clarence Clemons, who died Saturday from complications of a stroke suffered last week. Clemons’ was a that loss I felt deeply but initially struggled to find a way to accurately express when I first heard the news late Saturday morning. He was 69 years old, a fact that alone was staggering to me. It didn’t seem possible that he could have even been in his sixties, let alone pushing seventy — which in and of itself is a testimony to the passion with which he lived and played music.

All in the Family
A number of aspects to Will’s story touched me profoundly, not the least of which was his experience of first encountering Springsteen’s music as a child in the 1980s, when he internalized his Pop’s everyday-affinity for the Boss’s sound to the extent of play-imagining the E Street Band as stand-ins for his own flesh and blood.

I was particularly tickled by Will’s reference to a live version of Springsteen’s Rosalita that was a particular favorite on his Dad’s car stereo cassette deck. It just so happens that the song was recorded at a club show in 1978 that I myself had desperately tried to attend, but was unable to get my hands on what few actual publicly-accessible tickets were available. I ended up having to settle for listening to the show being broadcast live on the radio, on now-defunct Los Angeles FM Rock station, KMET (I’ll relate the sad story of my own ‘Sunset Boulevard Freeze-Out’ at another time).

However, I mostly wanted to give a tip of the cap to Mister Stegemann for so accurately highlighting the concept of Springsteen’s band as a family, and as such, a pseudo-extended family that of all of the Boss’s fans can relate to — even through the eyes of a kid. It’s a most fitting metaphor and something that has escaped my ability to properly process over the years, as I’ve sought to find a meaningful framework on which to hang the feelings I’ve always had for Springsteen and Clemons in particular. To me, the two have always been a family; a nearly inseparable entity. And while Bruce’s solo work has always been great, I’ve never felt it matched the impact of that achieved together with he and his musical siblings: Clemons and the E Street Band.

Will’s post caused me to ponder just how much that connective vibe of Bruce Springsteen’s persona and early music resonated with me as a 19 year-old in the mid-70s, a point in time when Will’s life was just beginning.

I became cognizant of Springsteen’s music, late one August evening in 1975, hearing Born To Run on the radio for the first time, and as such, being immediately introduced to the soprano sax of Clemons (a.k.a., The Big Man), busting through the airwaves as a part of the E Street Band’s signature sound. For me it was a wonderful new discovery. However, compared to Will’s father, I was merely an AJ-come-lately.

Having grown up on Long Island, NY, Will’s dad (who was just two years older than me) had the unique perspective of being in the same geographic area as the Asbury Park, NJ phenomenon, perhaps knowing of him or actually being a fan before Springsteen hit the big time. Stegmann’s Pop had been a well-seasoned fan for years and went on to raise his kids with an appreciation for The Boss as well. Will’s blog post, Riding With The Big Man is required reading, whether you were an avid fan of Clemons or were only marginally acquainted with his contribution to the sound of the artist who quite frankly was The Beatles of his generation.

As part of my previously mentioned aborted blog post on Springsteen several months ago, I began to write about my initial encounter with The Boss’s music, of which Clarence Clemons’ dynamic presence played a huge part. I’d like to relate that anecdote right now, in The Big Man’s honor.

My World: Rocked
Like so many others, I was blown away by the sound of Born To Run, Springsteen’s third album — but the one that truly made him a household name when it hit the airwaves in the summer of ’75. For me it was one of the truly seminal musical moments of my lifetime; the kind of deal that makes it impossible to forget the first time you experienced something so different, so powerful, that you simply had to stop and say, “Wow! WHO. WAS. THAT?!”

And that’s quite literally what happened, late one night in August 1975, within a few days of when the album was first released. At the time I was three months into my first experience of living away from my parents’ house; sharing a two-bedroom apartment with a pair of roommates in a highly-questionable neighborhood in North Long Beach, California.

On the night in question, I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, but the chronic insomnia that was my constant companion during my teen and early-adult years wouldn’t allow me to. As usual, my clock radio was tuned to 95.5 KLOS in Los Angeles, and as also was my habit, I was listening to music while waiting for the Sandman to show up. Since it usually took more than an hour for me to fall asleep each night, I always figured that I might as well spend the time enjoying one of my favorite pastimes: listening to music. It never occurred to me that perhaps my indulging that fave pastime also had plenty to do with why I’d always had trouble falling asleep in the first place…but I digress.

Anyway, I remember just lying there, like so many other nights; staring at the ceiling. I had to get up at 3:00am to go to work at the grocery store the next morning; I remember feeling particularly anxious that I might sleep through my alarm if I didn’t grab some shuteye soon.

Then it happened. My little clock radio nearly jumped off the nightstand — or so it seemed.

The introductory signature blast of Max Weinberg’s booming drum beat, along with The Big Man’s foundational sax note, and Springsteen’s guttural, biting lead guitar riff sent a chill down my spine. Born To Run was rocking my world.

“Who IS that?” I thought.

Initially, I turned my head and stared at the radio, reaching in to turn the volume up and continuing to lean closer and closer until, by Clemons’ bruising mid-song staccato sax bridge, I was completely perpendicular, with my feet on the floor, seated at the side of my bed, fully engaged in a sound like none I’d ever before heard.

There was NO way I was getting to sleep now.

I’m not sure if the DeeJay ever gave the artist’s name after the song was finished, because I remember having made it a point to listen extra hard to the radio the next day, in hopes that I might hear it again and learn the identity of that awesome new band that played it.

I also remember that the part I liked best of all was the sax.

It was without a doubt, the most memorable moment from the five months I spent in that dingy old apartment on 56th and Orange, in an area bordering North Long Beach and South Central Los Angeles. We were located just a couple of blocks north of the gang-infested Carmelitos Projects and a few blocks south of the Compton city limits. It wasn’t a real fun place to be, but it served its purpose for the brief time that I was there. I roomed with a buddy I’d known since junior high school and another acquaintance from my church group, but at that point I probably would have shacked up with Freddy Krueger for the chance to get away from the Nightmare on Lave Avenue that was my existence at the time living at home with step mom Maxine.

I am most happy to say that my love affair with Springsteen and Clemons has lasted considerably longer.

A Window into the Soul
It’s abundantly easy to canonize the departed, especially artists, the output of whose professional lives have touched you in a manner such as that of something as accessible as popular music. It’s like falling in love with a painter, based entirely upon his body of work; never mind that in real life he was a pretentious jerk, who kicked his dog, beat his wife, and ignored his children in private — or even in public. All we know is how awesome his works of art made us feel.

By all accounts, Clemons was a genuinely good guy, and while I could be wrong, I rather doubt we’ll see any ‘Daddy Dearest’-type tell-all accounts from either his four sons or five ex-wives. Does that mean his closets were completely skeleton-free? No, but then, whose is?


One thing is certain; the bond between Clemons and Springsteen defined their music; which in turn defined my love for it from the moment I heard that first note. Even without having heard a note, you could see it in the cover photograph from Born To Run (above).

In a Huffington Post article, posted soon after Clemons’ death, entitled, Why Clarence Clemons Matters to Race Relations, Ben Mankiewicz offers a poignant rendering of the classic image, featuring Clemons & Springsteen:

“Iconic is a wildly overused word, but the cover photo of Born to Run — Bruce Springsteen grinning and leaning on Clarence Clemons' broad shoulder — is a powerful and memorable picture, one that meets the standard for iconic rock n’ roll images. And its status is rooted in the beautiful story that picture tells.

You’ve got this enormously talented, giant black man -- literally “The Big Man” -- saxophone between pursed lips, essentially supporting Springsteen. The look on Bruce’s face is honest and authentic, a genuine moment captured in a photo shoot. There's a giddiness in Bruce's smile: “I'm working with my friend,” he seems to be saying, “and our music has never been better.”

The photo made an instant impact on me, long before their music did.”

Actually, for me the events were reversed. It wasn’t until weeks after I first heard BTR that I actually saw the album cover, but I too was mesmerized by the volumes that photographer Eric Meola’s image spoke in just a glance.

The combination of how the music and the imagery made me feel was nearly indescribable; the feelings of joy, inclusion, friendship; a shared passion for life; an unbridled excitement about the future’s unlimited potential.

Thirty-six years later, my feeling of loss is nearly as indescribable, as no doubt is Springsteen’s. In eulogizing his friend via a statement posted to his website yesterday, Springsteen confirmed with insightful eloquence what I already knew, yet couldn’t express:

“He carried within him a love of people that made them want to love him.

“He created a wondrous and extended family.”

Here’s to you, Big Man, our big brother. Thank you, so very, very much. Rest well.


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For the 11,680th Time, Marry Me?

Mixed Messages
I know I haven't officially announced it here yet, but something wonderful is in the offing. This past February 14th, my daughter, Amy, became engaged to a young man that Michelle and I both approve of and like very much. No official wedding date has been set as of yet, but if the stars align properly, it’ll be sometime late this fall.

Naturally, for about a month now, the wheels have been spinning in earnest amongst my two favorite females. It’s an extremely exciting time for Michelle and me. We, like most parents, I would assume, will be experiencing a rite of parental passage unlike anything else in seeing our daughter make that all-important next step in her life; in many ways becoming the complete person she’s always dreamed of being.

But believe it or not, that’s really not what this post is about.

There’s another blessed event to be celebrated, today, as a matter of fact. It’s an annual event that is at the same time exhilarating and frustrating for yours truly: Michelle and my wedding Anniversary.

Exhilarating, because it still gives me the same goosebumps and lump in my throat that it did on St. Paddy’s Day, 32 years ago today, when I stood before a brightly sunlit window, gazing into the morning sky and pronouncing, vocally, “I’m getting married today, and my life will never be the same.” And 11,680 days later, indeed it has not been.

However, it’s frustrating as well, as this year, like many of the years before, the most we can afford to do to celebrate our anniversary is go out to dinner and exchange heartfelt sentiments via the poignant-as-we-can-find anniversary cards from the local card store.

But this year (knock on wood) the reason is a good one; I started a new job after more than a year of unemployment, after being laid off by The Company I had worked for eleven years previous. I’m still in my 90-day probationary period, so I don’t have any available vacay days until the first of next month.

So we’ll perhaps postpone any plans of a real celebration for later on in the year, when I do have plans and will take Michelle on a genuine vacation. We just can’t do it now.

However, to be honest, it’s not like we never do anything special on our anniversary. We’ve managed to celebrate the ‘big ones’ like the 10th, 20th, and 30th in style. The most recent of course being the weekend we were able to enjoy at the Opryland Hotel two years ago. Now THAT was fun, and something I really want to do again. I guess once you get the taste for something like that, it makes subsequent occasions when you don't do it seem that much less satisfying. But no doubt I’m being harder on myself than I probably need to be.

Michelle is no diva. She’s not high-maintenance. She is as unassuming and undemanding as a man could want in a life partner. Each and every day she makes me realize what an incredibly lucky guy I am to be the man she chose to love for the rest of her life.

And thus is revealed the twain of my daughter’s impending nuptials and the anniversary that marks 59% of Michelle’s and my current lifespan, spent together.

Wait. Did I say twain? I meant Train.

Early Adoption
I could (and likely will, someday) devote an entire post to my longstanding admiration for a band from San Francisco that was more or less discovered in Nashville.

Some of my fondest musical experiences in this town occurred in the late 90s, during a series of music festivals designed to highlight local and regional, unsigned talent: the late, great NEA Extravaganza. It was a week-long celebration of nightly, multiple-venue showcases that was wildly popular in Music City before petering out near the decade’s end. Music industry officials mixed with fans in packed clubs and concert halls throughout downtown Nashville, hoping to see ‘the next big thing’. For music hounds like moi, it was beyond great.

At NEA’s 1998 festival, Train headlined the Aware Records Show at 328 Performance Hall. Within a few months of that appearance, the band was signed, and hits like Meet Virginia were all over the radio, nationally.

Without hijacking the story any further at this point, let me just say, I came, I saw, and I was smitten, particularly when soon thereafter, Train also performed a free, Who’s on 3rd show, at 3rd & Lindsley Bar and Grill. That evening nearly everyone in attendance got the chance to meet the band, and came away really feeling as though they’d gotten in on the ground floor of something special.

From the subsequent release of their 1998 self-titled debut album to their current, 2010 smash release, Save Me San Francisco, Train has subsequently established itself as one of the great American pop bands of their era.

Lead singer, Patrick Monahan’s soulful, yet wildly resourceful voice is unlike any other I’ve ever heard, and particularly on their current effort, runs a gamut I previously didn't believe possible.

However, it was the lyrics to one of his new new songs, one bearing his trademark improvisational style, that really wowed me.

Guilty Pleasure
I’ll have to admit it, my wife has won me over on a few TeeVee shows I once swore to myself I’d never watch. One is ABC’s, The Bachelor. I started watching it with her three years ago while, in the midst of moving into our new house, we had to spend six months in an apartment, with but one decent TeeVee to watch.

This season’s finale was last Monday night, and as part of the final video montage of bliss, depicting glimpses of the reality series’ final contestants’ love connection, a tender ballad played in the background.

It was soft enough (and my hearing is bad enough) that I couldn't quite make out who the artist was. However, what was clear was the predominant phrase in the song’s chorus: Marry Me.

It was totally appropriate as The Bachelor season’s swan song, as Brad, the young man looking for love, made no bones about the fact that he was looking for permanent love; he was looking for a wife.

When we heard the song, Michelle and I immediately looked at each other and said, nearly in unison, “What a cool song!” We didn’t have to state the obvious; we were thinking bout Amy’s wedding.

Michelle immediately commissioned me to find out who sang that song and where we could get it. I agreed and began searching online. I was both delighted and embarrassed that top Google search result for “Marry Me” was a YouTube link to the video below:



I was obviously delighted because it was so easy to find. There were several links to Train’s official website in reference to the song. A little further down the page was yet another link to a The Bachelor-related blog that confirmed the song’s appearance in season finale episode, suggesting that “...we’ll always associate this song with The Bachelor.”

Weeel, maybe, maybe not.

By now you might be wondering, if I claim to be such a dedicated Train fan, why I didn’t immediately identify the artist when my wife asked; surely I already owned Save Me San Francisco, right? How come I didn’t know the song?

Well, that’s the embarrassing part. Fact is, I knew that Train had come out with a new album last fall. However, buying music wasn’t quite at the top of my disposable income budget during the previous year and a half, when I was out of work for 14 months.

Sorry, My bad.

However the song is definitely on my radar now; in fact I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for the last three days.

After watching the awesome video and investigating the lyrics, I have decided that whether Amy wants Marry Me to be played at her wedding doesn’t matter; I now associate this song with my marriage instead.

You see it’s not about one special day. It’s not even about a single marriage proposal. It’s about the daily commitment; the daily renewal of the ever-elastic bond of marriage; it’s about is the way I feel toward my wife.

Thanks to Train for putting into words what was for me, a previously indescribable feeling; for one of the greatest Anniversary gifts I could ever receive, or give.

And today, for the 11,680th time, I give it to you, Michelle.

Happy 32nd Anniversary, Sweetheart.


Forever can never be long enough for me
To feel like I've had long enough with you

Forget the world now we won't let them see
But there's one thing left to do

Now that the weight has lifted
Love has surely shifted my way

Marry Me
Today and every day

Marry Me
If I ever get the nerve to say
Hello in this cafe

Say you will...Say you will

Together can never be close enough for me
To feel like I am close enough to you

You wear white and I'll wear out the words I love
And you're beautiful

Now that the wait is over
And love and has finally shown her my way

Marry me
Today and every day

Marry me
If I ever get the nerve to say hello in this cafe

Say you will...Say you will

Promise me
You'll always be
Happy by my side

I promise to
Sing to you
When all the music dies

And marry me
Today and everyday

Marry me
If I ever get the nerve to say hello in this cafe

Say you will...Say you will

Marry me

_{Words & Music © 2010 Partick Monahan and Train}


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Oh-fer-August

Nope…not gunna duuh it…Wudn’t be prudent
Believe me, I know. I know my tendencies. And if you’ve read this blog or have known me for any length of time, you know ‘em too. But I’m not gonna do what I normally do in this circumstance; I’m goin’ a different way.

Once again, it’s been a while — like five and-a-half weeks — since my last post; in baseball terms I did an ‘oh-fer’ the month of August, and as you may know, my oft-repeated wont after such a lapse in content is to come out spewing apologies for my absence, particularly in view of the fact that as recently as June I publically ‘rededicated’ myself to more regular blogging.

Yeah, I know. “Wolf.”

However I’m not feeling particularly apologetic today. In fact, as much as I would like to have done the opposite, I more-or-less voluntarily took a break from social media the past month or so, partially out of necessity — and partially to see if I could really pull it off.

In retrospect, I’m kinda proud of myself for doing the right thing.

The hardest part was reducing my Twitter stream to less than a trickle. To their credit, several people actually did miss me and expressed some concern that I was in fact alright, physically, which I appreciated a great deal.

But no, I wasn’t abducted by aliens or in the hospital doin’ the H1N1 tango.

I was workin’ like a mofo.

I chose to pour all my time into two freelance web design projects I’ve been working on, the proceeds from which are vital to my family’s bottom line. I decided to give them nearly all of my attention and I must say the results have been extremely positive.

I’ll be back with links when everything is finalized (I’m still in the very final stages of wrapping up both sites), but I can’t help but admit that I’m really proud of how everything is turning out.

In the Pipeline
I’ll have to admit, however, I did cheat — just a little. I spent a couple days two weekends ago, writing the lion’s share of what will be my next multi-part post — a miniseries on the death of a well-known journalist who was a longtime friend and colleague of my brother Alex.

Hopefully, shortly thereafter, I’ll have a belatedly-posted, Mowerly Musings piece of as-yet indeterminate length, that really, I’ve been thinking about for most of this long, dreadfully hot and humid summer that we’ve had here in Middle Tennessee. It’s part ‘tolerate thy neighbor’ rant and part moral object lesson; and I hope it sounds as interesting on paper as it does right now, rattling around here inside my head. You be the judge.

Then there’s hockey. Training Camp for the Nashville Predators starts in a week-and-a-half, and the regular season, just a little more than a month from today. I’ll definitely be jumping back up on the Zamboni and previewing the Preds’ upcoming 2010-11 season on my hockey blog as well.

Ohhh…and I may have a few things to say about my daughter, Amy, and a gentleman friend of hers whom we met this Labor Day Weekend...

So yeah, I’ve been away, but it was an absence with a purpose, and my focus on work, I believe has indeed paid off (no pun intended). I look forward to engaging your comments either here, on PMFF, or on Facebook and Twitter.

The summer of my dis-CONtent, for the most part, is over.

Catch ya again real soon.


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Happy Birthday...To You.

Simulblogging
I really don’t have a lot of time to write today, so if you’ll forgive the cross-pollenization, this is a simulblog; I’m posing identically, both to All Your Blogs Are Belong to Us and Pull My Fang Finger.

This is a note directed at you who for the most part only know me as that goofy guy who wears his heart on his sleeve via his mostly sappy-yet-passionate, personal and/or hockey-related blog posts. And hopefully, you also know that I don’t take a lot of things for granted; usually going a bit overboard in my effusiveness on the various subjects I’m passionate about.

So if my PMFF readers will forgive the off-topic nature of this missive, the main reason I’m double-posting today is because I don’t want to miss anybody; I want to let all of my friends, both on Facebook, Twitter, and throughout the blogosphere, know how much I appreciate you, and how humbled I am at the many Birthday good wishes I’ve received this morning.

Yep, today is my birthday, the day I officially climb into the rarefied air of my mid-fifties. I turn 54 today, so I can no longer say with any conviction that I’m just in my ‘early’ 50s. And that’s kinda significant for people who are still in their 20s and 30s, because if they’re anything like me (and I’m pretty confident they are), they look at you pretty differently after you hit the half-century mark, and even more so as you inch closer to 60 — that magical age when everyone more-or-less officially becomes ‘old.’

I’m pretty confident that I’m as good an example as anyone in confirming the notion that ‘you’re only as old as you feel.’ And I do NOT feel any different now than I did, when I was half my current age. Oh yeah, my body reminds me — often — that I’m no longer that 20 or even 30 year-old who used to fly through the air with the greatest of ease as a gymnast, but it still hasn’t convinced me that I’m not the same person.

I only wish someone would tell that to the prospective employers who've apparently been casting my resumes into the circular file after discerning my age from viewing my job history.

Nevertheless I am indeed wiser for the years that evermore quickly seem to pass, which only intensifies my acknowledgment of the wisdom plied by George Bernard Shaw when he penned the lyric, “Love, like youth is wasted on the young.”

However, I know my love has not been wasted, nor my youth for that matter. It has taken me through a lot of stupidity and halfhearted attempts at self-definition, into a wonderful balance of accomplishment and failure; enough of both so as to fully appreciate the difference between the two; never, ever forgetting the path that brought me here.

I love my life, and the people who’ve allowed me to live it so well.

Thank you, my friends, for making this birthday and each one hereafter, a true reason for me to celebrate.

Cheers.

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A Place Called Blogsville (Addendum, Part II)

By way of explanation, all but one the following screen shots below are no longer available in live web page form, but were accessed courtesy of the cached backup archives of The Internet Wayback Machine project, which is, when you can get the archive to actually return an cached site, another of the things that falls into my ‘greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread’ category. Despite the spotty availability of some of the archived site pages and the inordinate amount of time they typically take to load, there isn’t a more valuable resource on the Net in my estimation, and I wish to express my most sincere appreciation to Bibliotheca Alexandrina, International School of Information Science (ISIS) for this invaluable resource!

With that in mind, in referencing our purposes here I experienced only mild success in pulling together the web site archives from the particular points in time I wished to illustrate. Therefore I cannot say with exact certainty when the site messages below first appeared, only that their messages and design updates appeared by the dates indicated.

* * * * *

Every Picture Tells a Story
They say that it’s always darkest before the dawn, and at Pyra, the fire was just about down to a flicker. 2001 brought with it the realization that the company’s six-person crew was about five more than they could afford.

The funding money they had received a year earlier had run dry and some hard realizations had to be faced. After unsuccessfully attempting to market a paid version of Blogger (Blogger Pro) it was decided that the company would remain in business, but that its operations would be drastically curtailed out of necessity. As Pyra’s CEO, Evan Williams would stay on as the company’s only full-time paid staffer.

The Pyra website told the story throughout the process with updated announcements of the company’s status from March 2000 through May 2002; the frequently-changing homepage became a weblog unto itself.



This is how the Pyra website looked on March 2, 2000 (click to view at full size); still hawking the Pyra app, but speaking in more and more excited terms about Blogger, which had just reached version 2.0. However the wind had already begun to shift.



By May 10, 2000, the website — and the company — was in full re-tool mode, prepping for a full-on, fully optimistic run with Blogger. Oh, and the picture? No, that's not a couple of astronauts in zero-gravity training — it's Meg Hourihan (left) and Paul Bausch burning off some pent-up energy, doing 360s for the webcam. (click to view at full size)



By August 15, 2000, a freshly redesigned Pyra.com began the process of distancing itself from itself, literally. (click to view at full size)

However, the ensuing ‘fall’ season would carry with it a double-entendre. The problems would continue for Pyra, but the money would not.



For “the careful observer” and any other of his friends and readers, who knew where to look, Ev Williams laid it all out in his personal blog, Evhead.com, on January 31, 2001, in an extremely honest and straightforward post entitled, And Then there Was One. (click to view at full size, and in case you were wondering, yes, I did manually photoshop the screenshot into two columns for easier viewing.)

Williams describes in painful detail how the company had laid off all but himself in December, but that some of his team had worked on, for as long as a month for little-to-no pay, in hopes that a new deal with an undisclosed partner would come through. With that reality not panning out he was now going it alone, determined to see things through, to keep the company going, and to continue developing Blogger.



In a more public announcement a few weeks later, in this Pyra.com screenshot from February 12, 2001, Williams glibly channels Mark Twain, announcing the news that the company was still in business, but had indeed incurred, “a major set back” (…and we won’t pile on here by pointing out the misspellings either…). (click to view at full size)



More than a year after turning its full attention to Blogger, on March 30, 2001, the website reinforced that there was “nothing to see here” (except for a link to Blogger.com) and that the Pyra application was no longer being developed (click to view at full size).

This iteration of the Pyra.com homepage was also the swan song of the infamous ‘Pyra Newsletter’ signup box. Funny thing is, in the seven months it was in place on the website, nobody ever got around to creating that newsletter they collected all those email addresses for, as Williams sarcastically pointed out.



Three weeks later, March 18, 2001, the message of Pyra.com is all Blogger and all business (click to view at full size).



By September 2001 The website was again redesigned but remained only as a handbill slapped on the front door of an empty house for another year and a half, with a logo and no other text than that explaining Pyra’s two mottos: 1. “make something good” and 2. “other motto: there is nothing to see here. go to Blogger(.com).” (click to view at full size)



By May of 2002, the site had taken on the appearance that has essentially remained unchanged to this day, that of a one-slogan tribute to Pyra Labs, “making the web more interesting since 1999,” along with the iconic Blogger logo link to the Blogger.com website. (click to view at full size)

Addition By Subtraction
However the great thing about this particular sad story is that it ultimately has a very happy ending. As it turned out, Ev and Meg’s little company was just so far ahead of its time that it simply needed to give the rest of the world a couple years to catch up.

For all the heartache and disappointment experienced by the former Pyra Labs crew, the patience and belief exercised by Williams would pay off in spades.

The paring down of staff allowed Williams the time needed to keep the company afloat, while he worked to stabilize the platform and add servers to address the physical load of Blogger’s continually-rising popularity. Along the way he also managed to negotiate a few small business deals, including licensing Blogger to other countries and forming an important partnership with the website-building software company, Trellix in April 2001.

At the end of June, Williams announced a ‘Moving Sale’ to liquidate all nonessential equipment in Pyra’s San Francisco office. He was taking the business home, servers and all, and would operate things from his apartment, lowering the company’s overhead even more. It was no doubt a humbling experience, yet one that Williams seemed to embrace with a more-than-admirable sense of humor. But over the next twelve months things would turn around dramatically.



By the time I was introduced to Blogger, in the summer of 2002 the homepage looked like this (click to view at full size). Williams’ status blog was brimming with good news, boasting the statistic that Blogger blogs were being added at a rate of 1.5 per minute.

Blogger was co-sponsoring blogging contests with major periodicals, featuring sizable cash prizes; there were ‘Blogathon’ charity events and Blog Meet-ups being planned, along with superlatives about blogging from pubs like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

In short, Blogger was riding the cusp of a new wave of a phenomenon that was sweeping the nation and the world. Things had indeed turned around, but the best was yet to come

Yes, They Really DO Like You!
Ev Williams’ Sally Field moment came on a historically poignant date in his company’s history, exactly three years after that game-changing decision to commit to the development of Blogger over his original dream, the Pyra project management tool.

It was February 14, 2000 when Pyra’s initial funding round through O’Reilly & Associates launched the official era of its sole focus on application development, and three years later, it would be on that same date that all the hard work would pay off, in the form of both financial reward and the reality of resources for Blogger’s ongoing product development.

Search Engine giant, Google showed its love, acquiring Pyra Labs and Blogger on Valentine's Day 2003.



By the time my TK mates and I moved on to a new messageboard home and I made the decision to venture into the wilds of Blogsville all by my lonesome, the Blogger.com homepage not only had a completely new look, but a new audience as well, with the new Blogger reaching greater heights and exposure than ever before (click to view at full size).

There were newly-created XML blog templates designed under the auspices of Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign, offering the new breed of citizen journalism a place to call home; a place to grow; in an ever-expanding community of newsmakers, journalers, social media mavens, gossip-spinners, mommybloggers and the alike.

Ev and Meg’s Blogger lit the match, but the bonfire of Pyra’s vision was ultimately fueled by Google.

Nevertheless, even a year after the sale, in 2005 PC Magazine honored the success of Blogger and the work of Williams, Hourihan & Bausch (despite the latter two having long since left the company), naming the trio among their People of the Year for 2004.

Still Burning
Ev Williams would stay on with Google for roughly year and a half before again venturing out on his own, first in co-developing Odeo, a search and delivery web service centered on podcast technology, the organization of which would later become Obvious Corp, with a new business partner, Biz Stone.

Odeo was sold to Sonic Mountain in 2006 as Obvious Corp turned its attention to developing what would become the social media dynamo, Twitter in 2007.

Williams currently serves as Twitter CEO while enjoying life with wife, Sara and son, Miles.

Meg Hourihan went on to various other tech projects, including, in the mid-2000s, a joint effort with Gawker Media’s Nick Denton called Kinja, which, by her own description was “one of the web’s first news aggregation sites, an RSS reader without the RSS...a reading tool to make it easier for people to find and read blogs. The other hand of Blogger making it easier for people to write them.”

She is currently between companies, enjoying life as a seriously unpretentious foodie, mother to children, Ollie and Minna, and wife of yet another weblogging pioneer, Jason Kottke.

Paul Bausch, Pyra’s first employee and the man credited with being the Blogger’s primary developer, is still involved in web development at online community MetaFilter in Corvalis, Oregon.

I would again like to thank Meg Hourihan for providing such a well-spoken, thoroughly interesting narrative of Pyra’s increasingly difficult-to-find early history, for use as the basis of this story (and for the honor of her personally proofreading and blessing this post prior to publication).

If you’re a Blogger geek like me, I’m sure you’ll really enjoy the actual audio of that interview, which is still available online as part of Halley Suitt’s podcast series, Memory Lane.

Even though it wasn’t exactly how they planned it, Pyra lived up to their name; they took the weblog flame and fanned it into a bonfire that's still blazing.

Smart technology from some very smart people.

Now a decade later, that motto, do something good kinda seems like an understatement, doesn’t it?


finis

A Place Called Blogsville (Addendum, Part I)

NOTE: I had originally intended the following to be the opening of my little tribute to Blogger. It seemed appropriate to me to introduce my relationship to this medium I love by first introducing those brilliant and inspired individuals to whom we owe its existence.

And while it’s a well-established fact that the more elevated of standing among those who lead the medium today would suggest that Blogger is now passé by comparison to other, more elite platforms, I couldn’t care less. Blogger is special — to me and to millions of its continued, devoted users.

I mean, seriously; say what you want about a product, but in reality, who is more important — the person who refines it, or the one who invented it in the first place?

And because of that, I decided to go beyond cursory mention and give what, based on my research in writing this account, is the most extensive biographical sketch of the company that founded the modern blogging medium: Pyra Labs, and their ‘accidental’ phenomenon: Blogger.

Ev and Meg’s Big Adventure
As large and everyday-ubiquitous as the Web is, currently, it’s hard to imagine that as recently as ten years ago it was a much smaller place.

It was a world of fertile ground, untapped resources, and breathtaking discovery. It was a world prepping for a huge growth spurt.

Once the near-exclusive domain of nerds, geeks, and academia, the phenomenon of ‘weblogging,’ originally born very early in the decade of the 90s, emerged from its infancy with the growth and popularity of the HTTP-encoded World Wide Web, popularized by the Net’s first graphical browser, Mosaic in 1993.

_{Blogger.com founders (from left), Ev Williams, Meg Hourihan, & Paul Bausch.}

However it was nearly ten years later before the team of Evan Williams, (yes, the same Ev Williams, who would later co-found Twitter), and business partner, Meg Hourihan, would spur the medium to the new heights we know today.

In a wonderfully informative podcast interview she gave to the website, IT Conversations back in 2005, Hourihan discussed the beginnings of Blogger.com — the blogging portal that she, Williams, and Paul Bausch developed — almost by accident.

According to the interview, Williams and Hourihan formed Pyra Labs in 1999, operating out of the latter’s San Francisco apartment.

Their new company’s original goal was to create a web-based project management application targeted at web developers to improve upon the often cryptic and inflexible Microsoft Project. They wanted to come up with an online tool that would make the process of updating a project plan easier and more immediate —across cyberspace as opposed to the more static constraints of updating a physical MS Project file and then distributing it via email or FTP.

Interestingly, what would become Blogger was a sideline component developed in the midst of that effort, which was essentially a ‘throwaway’; a free feature intended to entice potential buyers to purchase their primary product.

Instead, the sideline overtook the mainline.

It is significant to recall that 1998-99 was the crux of the dot-com boom’s initial period of rapid ascension. Thousands of enterprise web sites were being created at that time, often by teams of developers scattered across the country. The Pyra Project’s main focus was to make the management of such efforts easier, more accessible, and more immediate.

It was a great idea, but it spawned an even better one in the process.

BlogStuff
While working in the same room, but not wanting to disturb each other with interruptions to present new ideas that might pop into their heads throughout the day, Hourihan said she and Williams created a simple, internal weblog, aptly named, ‘Stuff.’ Its purpose was to register brainstorming thoughts and other flashes of enlightenment that either one might come up, but in so doing, not disturbing the flow of work in the office.

They later decided that including a similar weblog feature as a standard component of the Pyra application would be a beneficial value-add for their customers, just as it had been for them in developing it.

However, as Hourihan recalled, “through a bunch of…random happenings,” the server that hosted the ‘Stuff’ weblog was a different one than that which hosted the Pyra.com site itself, which had a separate weblog as well.

This would be a problem should they wish to avoid the extra work of posting an entry in both places. So later, for purposes of both internal and external communications, to solve the problem they tasked Pyra’s first employee, developer Paul Bausch, with creating some code that would allow entries written to the ‘Stuff’ weblog to automatically appear the on pyra.com weblog as well. As Hourihan explained, Bausch’s code would become the foundation upon which Blogger was built.

Hourihan described the Blogger ‘Ah-HA’ moment thusly: “Hey, this is kinda neat! You can write something in one place, and it’s appearing in another place.”

But again, the key intent was not to develop a blogging platform, but rather to use this new innovation as an inducement to market the bread & butter Pyra app.

As Hourihan described, the bulk of weblog users at that time were the indeed Pyra’s target audience: web developers. The hope was that once the developers saw how much easier this new ‘push button’ method of weblogging could be, they would then in turn be inclined to believe that Pyra was a cool company that they would want to do business with; purchasing the Pyra project management software tool for use on their web projects, and in general, making the world a better place for everyone.

Som’ ‘bout the plans of mice and men oftentimes going awry…?

By the first quarter of 2001, however, much had changed in the world of emerging web companies. The DotCom boom began its steep slide into full bust mode. Times grew tough for San Francisco internet startups like Pyra.

Pyra’s "Team Implosion"
A change in direction had actually begun a year earlier, in the winter of 2000, when team Pyra, then consisting of four members, decided to seek outside funding for the first time.

The Pyra project management app was still struggling through development. Mucking up the waters further was the fact that the company was actually being supported via contract work relationships that Ev Williams had brought with him from his previous freelance career. One developer worked full-time on the outside contract jobs while the other three continued developing the Pyra app and Blogger.

This model of self-funding “just wasn’t gonna scale,” recalled Hourihan, “unless we kept hiring people to do client work, and that wasn’t really the type of company we were interested in building; we didn’t want to do professional services; we wanted to build really cool web applications.”

Fortunately, by this time, the contacts and reputation that the company was creating, along with the ongoing relationship Ev had with a former employer, O’Reilly & Associates, allowed Pyra to acquire the seed money it needed to really sink its teeth into its work. They could now dispense with the unrelated contract work they’d needed just to make ends meet. It was the opportunity to finally be the company they wanted to be.

The initial funding round for Pyra began on February 14 — Valentine’s Day, 2000; for the company it would be a significant spot on the calendar, not only at that time, but later on as well.

They decided to suspend work on the primary Pyra app, and focus on Blogger, the former spinoff that ironically was receiving increasingly rave reviews, and in fact became Pyra’s first officially released product.

They would build out the team, adding another two people, bringing the total compliment to six, and as Hourihan put it, “see what we could do with it,”

However not all would go as planned. Over the next eleven months the DotCom bubble would finally burst, sending tech stocks tumbling and bringing most startups to their knees, financially. Most tech development went into a deep freeze.

At the same time, from the opposite end of the spectrum, Blogger was facing its own problems. The platform’s tremendous popularity created more traffic than their existing servers could handle, leading to lapses in reliability. New features weren’t being added fast enough, leading to more customer complaints, including, ironically, one that led directly to the development of what would become one of Blogger’s chief competitors, Movable Type.

Mena Trott and her husband, web developer Ben Trott, created Movable Type as an answer to Mena’s frustration over Blogger’s period of arrested development in 2000.

Trott, originally a Blogger enthusiast, confided in Hourihan that she felt such loyalty to Blogger, that she couldn’t bring herself to use a competing product, so she decided to develop one for her own personal use. That effort, designed by Mena and coded by Ben, worked out so well that within a year the Trotts indeed decided (at the insistence of their other friends) to market it as a competing product.

Later, under the umbrella of their new company, Six Apart, the Trotts would additionally develop two other varietal blogging platforms: TypePad and Vox, in addition to the premium Movable Type.


Next: Addendum Part II: Every Picture Tells a Story

A Place Called Blogsville (Epilogue)

Urban Renewal?
I was a year and a half behind the onset of Twitter before becoming truly involved with it in July of 2008, subsequently becoming a daily user some four months later.

In so doing, I also succumbed to the urge to join the masses of info-oriented, ‘useful’ bloggers out there whose content was shiny, new, ‘social media savvy’ and would draw advertisers to my site so that I could ‘monetize’ and make my blog an actual, viable income-producer. I mean look around — that’s the way it’s done these days.

My initial push to accomplish this was a complete flop. At the end of 2008, still buzzing from my newly acquired Twitter-inspired game plan, I mapped it all out, worked on a new template for weeks; I even wrote a few re-introductory posts for those outside the Neighborhood. I went so far even as to announce the 'rebirth of my blog, both in a post that was soon thereafter pulled, and on Twitter, only to back out when I realized I really didn't know what the hell I was doing it for.

Then the recession smacked me in the chops, big time. Right after the Holidays, The Company I worked for announced what would be the first of two workforce reductions in 2009. I was spared from the first one that came down in January, and then fully engaged myself in the subsequent yearlong scramble to try and save my ass from the second, later that November. On the second count I was obviously unsuccessful.

Now a year later and a half later, with nothing left to lose, I’m ready to try again and see just how good this blog can be.

As far as monetization goes, I’ve recently made a few small in-roads in that regard, but have vowed to myself to do it right. Fortunately I’ve become involved with a wonderful new organization of folks who are dedicated to teaching blog marketing techniques that are effective without being obnoxious. It’s called The Third Tribe and if you’re curious you can check them out here or anytime from the Third Tribe badge located in the blog’s right-hand sidebar. It’s pretty cool stuff, really, especially for someone like me who has always been repulsed by traditional Internet marketing methods.

But even if I do end up going with a few affiliate links here and there, there’s no way it will ever become my main focus — that’s not what AYBABTU has ever been about. Like I said earlier, I have struggled mightily with the idea of making my blog a more topically-based destination, and will always seek to exercise brevity in any way I can, but not at the expense of being who I am.

I do realize that my long-windedness can be a handicap to gaining and keeping new readers. But then I always have to return to the Hamletian maxim of, “to thine ownself be true.”

I can publicize this blog. I can monetize this blog. If the readers come, they come; if they stay, they stay. However I cannot be someone I am not, nor can I write like someone I am not — well, I probably could, but why? To what end?

I do consider this the start of a renewal of sorts, but I’ll just have to take it day by day and see what the future brings. I hope you’ll feel inclined to tag along.

But Just For Fun…
As I write this, it has now been exactly 30 days since the opening segment of this series was posted — not that taking a month to write five posts is such a rarity me, but this time it had a lot more to do with contemplation than procrastination.

Part of what has taken me so long to get back to this series has been in deciding how to end it (which is what I should have done before I even began the thing...but I digress...again). It took awhile for me to resolve the issues surrounding that which drove me to write it in the first place.

But I think I’ve got it now.

You see, this was more than simply a trip down memory lane. I’ve come up with a much more practical application for this piece — if I can manage to pull it off.

I’m getting the band back together.

I’ve recently spoken to a couple of my ol’ Blogsville neighbors on the phone, and it was absolutely fabulous. These two, I hadn’t had any significant communication with — quite literally — for years. Like many others, they’ve been around, just not out on the front lines like they were years ago. Some of my other former neighbors have become active on Facebook in recent years, a few more on Twitter; some have even remained active in their original blogs, although often with a largely different readership and/or social group than before.

As for my hesitation in wrapping up the series, I really didn’t like the direction it was going when I first began writing it. It was becoming a decidedly negative lamentation of my life over the past 3-4 years, which while true, was certainly not of a hue that I wanted to paint what was always intended to be a celebration of Blogsville — a somewhat melancholy celebration to be sure — but a celebration all the same.

I may use the 1100+ words I’ve now deleted from this post at another time, in a more suitable context. But for now, I’d much rather turn that frown upside down and end this thing on a positive note. But whether it indeed ends up being positive will ultimately be determined by you.

When remarking earlier about ‘TJ’s Place’ I noted that one of the things I miss the most about our old neighborhood were the comment sessions; that was where the community was generated. I would absolutely love it if we could all come together again — even if just this once — and experience a ‘comments party’ like we did in the old days.

My dear friends, LucidKim and Restless Angel have already chimed in. I’m hoping (provided all the old email addresses I have for everyone still work) to alert a number of our other former Blogsville neighbors as to this series’ existence and invite them back to comment as well.

But to make it really special, I would request that each of you who chooses to say hello, will take the time to spin together a few sentences, telling us all of what you’ve been up to, and hopefully, an email address or other contact information, blog or Twitter username, so that we might have an opportunity to continue the conversation elsewhere down the line.

I know it’s kinda nervy of me to expect that anyone would even want to do this, but geeze louise, you guys, do you not realize what a wonderful thing we all had together? It could be that way again, at least for a little while.

I hope you know how much affection I still hold for you all, and how happy it would make me to hear from you again.

So then, Mike? Lovisa? Jack? El Sid? Inanna? ESC? Esther? CCC? Queenie? Gooch? Jennifer? Kenju? Leese? NoMilk? Aimee? Victoria? Melinama? Anyone-else-I-can’t-think-of-off-the-top-of-my-head-right-now?

Whadaya say?

And to those of you whom I may be forgetting, as well as those who only know me from Twitter or elsewhere, thank you for being here too! Please say hello and join in the fun!

Lastly, but not leastly…
As if this series hasn’t taken enough twists and turns, there’s still one more.

As often happens to me, when I begin writing, sometimes things end up growing and expanding and going off in different directions than those in which I first intended.

What was originally supposed to be a few paragraphs in the series prologue sorta took off and assumed a life of its own shortly after I began writing. I let the idea play out, circled back and decided to include what had become two full posts as an addendum instead. What began as the historical backbone for the series, turned into a standalone biographical sketch of Pyra Labs, the original creators of Blogger.com.

It’s a separate story unto itself, but it still works within the context of the series. It’s a look back on the history of Blogger.com from its pre-Google inception, which is actually when I first became involved with the service as a member of a multi-author blog group of online friends. We used ‘The Blog,’ for a lack of a better term, as a message board.

Back then I didn’t have a clue as to whom Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan were, and neither did much of the web world. But as the co-founders of Blogger — the one that started it all — it certainly does now.

In recent years, Williams has continued to push the envelope with his ‘other’ little social media project, along with Biz Stone, called Twitter.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading this account of a great moment in web history as much as I did in researching and writing it.


Next: Addendum (Part I): Ev and Meg’s Excellent Adventure

A Place Called Blogsville (Part IV)

AJ 2.0
Trends come and trends go; sometimes it’s easy to forget that. For example, back when my daughter Amy was in middle school, one of the many fashion trends of the mid-90s was the revival of the styles from the 1970s ― a time that I know quite well.

So enamored was Amy with an iconic man-made fabric of the era that was now once again wildly popular, she one day exuberantly declared to her mother and me, “Polyester will NEVER go out of style!”

Heh, we’ve NEVER let her live THAT one down…

But to be fair, haven’t each of us fallen victim to that same sort of short-sightedness at one time or another? Haven’t we all latched onto something new that we thought was “life-changing,” or was the next-big-thing-that-we-can’t-live-without; confidently asserting to anyone listening that nothing would ever be the same; that we would forever be changed by that wonderful new paradigmatic epiphany?

I’ve decided that to a large degree, personal blogging was that way for a lot of folks heading into the mid-2000s — at least that seemed the case in our Blogsville neighborhood.

In our early years together it was indeed life-changing, much in the same way that chatting was for people in the mid-1990s; a real phenomenon, and very important for a time. But in the end, it was simply another ‘next big thing’ and once it ceased to maintain that fashionable status, people began losing interest.

Don’t believe me? How much have you heard about MySpace lately?

However it’s unfair to totally place the two in the same boat, particularly given the somewhat well-deserved, seedy reputation that internet chat rooms subsequently earned as a breeding ground for cybersex and predatory behavior. Blogging on the other hand has always been on a much different level; it obviously requires a greater, more honest commitment, both emotionally and practically. It’s hard work, and is not an undertaking for the weak-willed — that is, the weak-willed who are also without conscience.

That being said, there are times when I really have to search my own motivations as to why I always return to personal blogging no matter how long my absence — almost as if my life depended on it. I’m pretty sure a lot of my former Blogsville neighbors have thought about it in a similar vein at one time or another. However in the end, not everyone has the time or perhaps the amount of self-loathing of someone like me to goad them into continually getting back up on that freakin’ horse.

I am now convinced that I must write; I am enslaved to the notion. Why? Who the hell knows? But one thing is for sure, when I got bit by this bug six years ago, it actually did change everything for me. Trouble is, the other things in my life that had also changed made it all the more daunting for me to keep up.

A Rude Awakening
With the popularization of the ‘Web 2.0’ movement, which I began hearing about sometime around 2006 (but which had actually been in the process of implementation since the late 90s), I knew I was out of step and wasn’t ready to deal with it.

The constructs of the modern, social web took a quantum leap forward on a number of fronts, from around the time I began blogging in 2004 to just beyond the mid-decade mark; and quite frankly, I was oblivious to it all.

Suddenly it seemed my long-winded, narrative style had become less and less relevant to the now-assumed reality of daily, social information-based posting. Most of the successful blogs I was seeing were no longer static, personal essays, but living, breathing, social organisms, teeming with useful information and comment interaction; cross-linked and shared via Delicious (formerly known as del.icio.us), Twitter, and Facebook. It all seemed to happen at once for me; but in reality, while the changes did come about quickly, they were over a much longer period — I just hadn’t been paying attention.

Looking back on it now, I was stuck in somewhat of a feedback loop. Lots was going on in my head, and even more in my life; I just couldn’t seem to get it all out of myself with any semblance of the consistency I had in the beginning, when the stories of my life and family seemed to flow out of me in a never-ending stream of content.

Besides, what was going on in my life at that time wasn’t stuff I really wanted to celebrate, as had been the motivation for my previous work. I second-guessed nearly everything I wrote, becoming tentative, overly self-conscious, and feeling like a hypocrite for letting it all ‘get to me.’

As I stagnated, it seemed as though the neighborhood was withering as well. Most seemed to begin making the same transition away from daily or even weekly blogging, and moving more toward social networks like Facebook and later, to a lesser degree, Twitter; where we slowly found each other and began re-asserting ties that had linked us previously in Blogsville.

And while I certainly can’t speak for anyone else’s opinion, I think the new landscape is certainly a beautiful one in its own way, but it’s just not the same kind of community we had before.

Having been part of the blogging’s inital wave as a mass medium — an early-adopter even though ‘weblogging’ had been around some ten years previously — there was a certain level of pride one felt in being ahead of the curve.

In 2004, blogging was still relatively unknown amongst the general populace; something that seemed ‘weird’ to the average Joe. It was far from the now-widely recognized medium it has become.

However it all seemed to change so quickly, and by 2006, my once-enviable ‘informed’ position had turned on me — or was it I whom had turned away from IT? I found myself in a position similar, social media-wise, to the one I was currently embroiled in professionally, having sailed through the first half of the 2000s as a web designer who didn’t know crap about something as game-changing as CSS, and was now in a mad scramble to step it up or lose my relevance — even my job.

As a result of both my sudden shift in motivation to become current with modern web technology, and the paralysis of my frustration with the changes in the blogging landscape, my blog post production — as well as a heapin’ helpin’ of my perceived personal relevance — all but dried up.

Now, nearly three years later I’m attempting to kick off that creeping malaise. I have already hit rock bottom professionally, having been laid off from my employer of nearly 12-years last November. And even though I did manage to bring my sagging web-tech skill-set up to standards over the last couple of years, the fact that my job performance was allegedly a non- factor in my demise doesn’t provide me a whole lot of solace. It’s more than a little unsettling to go from being indispensable for years, to suddenly finding yourself thrust back into the job market, entering your mid-fifties; competing for jobs in an industry inherently dominated by twenty-and-thirtysomethings.

Sometimes changing with the times is a personal option; for me, right now, it most certainly is not. I’m in a ‘roll-or-BE-rolled’ position for the first time in my professional life.

As to the extent to which I can do anything about the perception of my age as I seek new employment, only the market knows for sure. On the other hand, the blog world, for the most part, is ageless — and thanks to genetics and personality, I’ve never looked or acted my age.

As a blogger I have begun to embrace the change of the now-dated ‘Web 2.0’ moniker — albeit sometimes kicking and screaming — and I have also begun seeking ways to regain my relevance in this continually evolving medium.

Twitter was the biggest step for me, although it has in some ways been somewhat counterproductive to blogging. As a self-described micro-blogging platform, tweeting not only relieves me of the need to express myself via daily posting, but also of the associated guilt when I fail to blog. And while the association of any kind of guilt with personal blogging may seem an absurd notion to most, that’s just me; I know it’s the way I am and I’m tired of beating myself up for it or trying to change my stripes. I will always feel the need to write, and the obligation to myself of the same.

However, as fantastic a conversation vehicle Tweeting is, I need to be able to go deeper. That, I now know, will never change.

I’ll never abandon this house. No matter the condition of the neighborhood or the number of its residents, Blogsville will always be my home. I may spend some time in other abodes, such as my weekend winter cottage, but this is the place I will always come back to.


Next: Urban Renewal?

A Place Called Blogsville (Part III)

The Neighborhood
It’s amazing to me how slow the first half of the recently-completed first decade of the new millennium seemed to pass, versus the last five years, which appear to have evaporated right before my eyes.

Forever ensconced in the midst of that decade will be the three-year period between 2004 and 2006, when I discovered blogging and The Neighborhood was in full swing.

The ‘Hood was in a town we called Blogsville, in a country known as Blogger.com.

We all moved in at about the same time, discovering each other en masse; visiting each other often, attending each other’s parties, and generally, having the time of our lives together.

That strip club I mentioned earlier? There was nothing salacious or untoward going on there; just a bunch of wonderful stories from a guy who managed a strip joint in Florida.

Life at TJ’s Place was one of Blogger’s most popular sites of 2004, and as such was constantly listed on the homepage’s ‘Blogs of Note’ section. Naturally, newbies to Blogsville would visit to see what was going on, and subsequently, a lot of us ‘met’ each other there in the blog’s comments section.

Kevin, the blog’s author was an incredible writer. Despite what you might think, his stories were extraordinarily human in focus and compelling beyond belief. His blog served as the focal point of our neighborhood.

TJ’s was the ‘Motherblog,’ the first of what I liked to refer to as one of the ‘party blogs.’ Those were the places you could always count on finding a ‘live commenting’ gathering in progress on most nights. It was fun. We learned a lot about each other, were introduced to their blogs, and many of the friendships sparked — both ‘cyber’ and ‘real-life’ — have lasted to this day.

It was all so new; so different; so cool. We grew close; very close — some of us, too close.

We all told our stories, shared our lives, revealed our secrets, and listened while others did the same.

There were disagreements, friendly spats, and all-out wars. There was friendship and there were breakups. There was laughter and there were arguments. But much more; there was encouragement; substantiation and confirmation; hope and belief in one other — and thereby, ourselves.

But just as happens in those of brick & mortar, our online community’s resident’s life-circumstances changed; and unfortunately, after only a few months, our little Blogsville neighborhood began to collapse almost as quickly as it had formed.

Kevin, by his own admission, ‘burned out’ by August 2004. Another popular blog, The Abysmal Life of Crayon, also checked out that month. Over the next 2-3 years, more and more folks were showing up less and less.

Some left the neighborhood altogether; others became all but inactive in the group conversation; some just ran out of things to say, or refrained from being so open as to reveal information that might be passed on to outsiders.

In recent years, the neighborhood has almost ceased to exist. Oh people still own the houses, but they’re rarely home. They don’t come out on the front lawn to talk nearly as often as they once did in the old days; they pretty much keep to themselves, occasionally raising the window to throw out a few thoughts from time to time, but seldom are there others around to listen.

The neighborhood has indeed coalesced; those who have remained active have their individual friends that they hang out with, but the block parties are no more.

Just like Real Life?
It’s amazing how closely the dynamics of my old virtual neighborhood have followed that of the physical cul-de-sac I lived on, in Franklin, TN from 1994 to 2007.

Back in ‘94, when our subdivision was brand new, we started like a house afire, and now 16 years later, only two families among the eleven originals on my old block remain.

At last report, I heard that my former physical neighborhood is now comprised of 25% rental properties. For the majority of the original homeowners, it was their first home. Most of them have since ‘moved on up to the East Side,’ so to speak. The neighborhood hasn’t gone completely to pot, though; it’s still a tidy, middle-class ‘burb neighborhood, but it’s definitely lost that new-‘hood smell.

And that’s life; we’re all responsible, but it’s really no one’s fault. It just happens. Same thing applies to my Blogsville neighborhood. It was a phenomenon in the lives of those involved; a phenomenon that had a shelf life which none of us could foresee.

Yet in some cases, the bonds have remained firm. In my case, one of those in particular required some real-time face-time to become immutable.

LA Stories
Something else was different five-or-so years ago: the economy. I had a good job, gas prices were relatively manageable, and somehow, I had considerably less month at the end of the money most of the time.

My Dad, who still lives in Southern California, is in his mid-eighties and 5-6 years ago I had the money to go see him often. I made it a point to get out to California at least once a year. In ’04, I made it twice; once in May ― just before I started blogging, and a second time in August ― not long after having been swept away by it.

Along with seeing my Dad, I had additional motivation as well: to see my friends; the real-time pals of my youth who have always been a big part of my life and desire to make the numerous visits to SoCal that I have since leaving the area in 1992.

Before heading out on second trip to the ol’ homestead, in August, I decided to throw out a fleece and pretty much blindly arrange to meet someone whom I barely knew, but had recently begun running into often in Blogsville.

Michael agreed to meet me for dinner in Santa Monica and we instantly connected. We’ve remained pretty close friends ever since.

The Light’s On, But There’s Nobody Home…
But within a year of that trip, things began to change. The economy, from my standpoint, anyway, began to tighten. By 2006-07, my job security was creeping onto tenuous ground. Fuel prices went sky high, as did most everything else; at the same time, Michelle and I were buying a new house and adding a third more money to our previous monthly mortgage payment.

While I can’t blame the stress I endured at the hands of the economy, I certainly can say that the uneasiness I felt about my job security had an effect on my writing. I lost confidence in myself on a number of levels. I went from someone who had absolutely everything going his way to just another scared, middle-aged Boomer, suddenly out of touch with a rapidly-changing tech world. To say it took the wind out of my sails would be an understatement.

I found myself staying later at work, studying coding technologies in my spare time that I now had to know, both at work and on the weekends, and experiencing the numb, burning sensation on the back of my neck that makes you feel like you want to just burst out of your skin.

Meanwhile, back in my Blogsville abode, I sat and stared out the window most of the time; too stressed to write, too scared to really talk about what was first and foremost on my mind — my real-time job. I tried, though; I came close to breaking trough a couple of times, but for the most part I was writing more apologies for not posting than I did writing many substantive posts.

People would try to tell me not to be so hard on myself (thank you, Brighton), but in reality, I was really trying to apologize to myself.

Next: AJ 2.0

A Place Called Blogsville (Part II)

Googled
As great as things were moving along, little did we know that behind the scenes, a pattern was developing that would be repeated across a wide spectrum of web-based companies throughout the 2000s, and Blogger was one of the early ‘victims.’

Growing, but still struggling, Blogger.com was purchased by Web-giant, Google, in February 2003. At first, it was no big deal to us. In fact, the news brought with it a sense of pride, given that Google was sort of the epitome of the kind of growing, aggressive, cool, Web company who started out little and just ran with it. Those of us who had been involved with the business of the Internet for years were encouraged to see a company truly emerge from the DotCom Bust with signs that they really were going somewhere; that the Web truly had a future based on measurable success, rather than merely unfounded speculation as had been the case in the DotCom Boom years.

Google had it together, and we all assumed that what was good for Google would be good for Blogger.

Only one thing though; we soon learned that what was good for Google was good for Blogger — it just wasn’t good for ‘The Blog.’

On May 9, 2004, Google announced the new, massively significant upgrade of Blogger.com. The typical style of blogging, having been incredibly influenced by the medium’s biggest growth spurt: the 9/11 catastrophe, had shifted.

The term, ‘weblog’ didn’t quite apply as it once did. In the 90s, the medium’s early adopters generally held to a style in keeping with it’s name: a log, i.e.: a series of brief, understated, usually off-the-cuff remarks, generally not more than a short paragraph or two.

The format for weblogs was then, generally a galley list of posts, all on a single web page divided only by the week or month.

However, with the citizen-journalist sea change of post-9/11 commentary, blogs were now becoming decidedly more essay-related in length and scope. The new upgrade to Google’s version of Blogger would reflect that.

There would still be the digest front page, containing a dynamically-created run-on list featuring blog entries of a determinate span of time, but now the layout emphasis would be of a format to support longer, individual page blog entries.

The old template we were running still worked, but the publishing process had changed completely.

This rather played havoc with our groups’s faux forum purposes for using Blogger, so on May 9th, 2004, as the rest of the blogging world rejoiced, the TK Bloggers cursed the ground that Google walked on. We walked out in favor of finding new digs, in an actual message board environment that closely simulated our old Blogger home. It took some doing, but thanks to some geeks a lot smarter than me, we got it worked out, and we still meet there today.

But what to do with Blogger?

Curiosity and the Inside Joke
With the new Blogger now up and running, I couldn’t help but remain interested, however in practical terms, I still had no real idea what a blog was, even after being a registered Blogger user for nearly two years.

For purposes of posterity and reference in daily dealings with my TK buddies, I certainly wasn’t going to cut myself off from access to the old account, but I also decided to poke around the new and improved dashboard and see what possibly creating my own blog would be about.

Then about a week and a half after we pulled up stakes on the old blog, somebody posted a link to one of the new, upgraded Blogger.com blogs. The site was creating quite a stir in the local Washington DC media, as it involved the kiss-and-tell-all details of a Congressional page and a prominent US Senator.

The scandalous exploits of The Washingtonienne were, well, interesting to say the least. But even more interesting to me was the concept that one could lay out a story like that for all the world to see, and all you had to do was type it and press a button. I, at that very moment, ‘got’ blogging for the first time.

However I had no illusions of grandeur, thinking someone would find anything I had to say interesting. Instead, I saw it as a way to pull a rather inside joke on my pals.

As I explain in one of my info-pages found in the blog navbar, ‘What happen?’ is this:

We had long since carried on a running joke in the group about a key phrase from an otherwise obscure late-1980s video game called Zero Wing. The mangled-Japanese-to-English transliteration of, ‘All your base are belong to us’ had become a geek catch-all phrase in the late 90s. The application, in varied, crazy forms, was rampant on message boards all across the Internet.

So I decided to create a new blog and call it, All Your Blogs Are Belong to Us, assuming that at least one of my buddies would find it, get the joke, and we’d all get a big laugh out of it.

So I did. On May 24, 2004, I created my blog and started posting — fairly innocuous stuff at first — waiting for someone to notice. But no one ever did.

However, something completely unexpected happened. The more I wrote, the freer I felt; like a great weight on my shoulders was being lifted; it was cathartic. Apart from a few lengthy emails, I had really never before expressed myself by way of the written word, and the feeling was absolutely liberating.

I kept writing, and waiting for someone from my TK group to comment — in my blog’s comments or in our private forum — but no one did…for awhile, anyway.

I posted on disparate subjects; from the etymology of the word, shit, to the mountaintop experience of my very first rock concert, seeing The Beatles in 1964 at the tender age of eight years old.

I found myself in an increasingly comfortable place. I didn’t know where I was going, but I was certainly enjoying the ride.

But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon a virtual strip club that I realized I was in the right neighborhood.

Waaait…c’mon, nah! Get your mind outta the gutter!


Next: The Neighborhood

A Place Called Blogsville (Part I)

In a Blog of my own (Revisited)

While I may not have any sordid escapades to write about like the Washingtonienne, it's going to be kinda cool to just post a little stream-of-consciousness every now and then.

I would like to officially thank my Blog comrades in TK fandom, who on a daily basis, make me meaner, more irreverent and a more than just a sight bit smarter, as the inspiration for my Blog moniker. It has absolutely no significance to me or my life, but it makes me laugh every time I think of it. Those who know where it came from will get it immediately; those who don't, won't.

I'm not exactly sure what I'll do with this thing. It'll probably be a series of random thoughts composed of equal parts friends, family, music, sports, and personal history. I'm kind of excited about the idea of chronicling reviews and thoughts about the many concerts and music shows I attend; just to have a record of the experience. I've never kept anything that resembled a journal before, so this should be fun.

I'd also like to talk about some things that I think about a lot: friendship, loyalty to ideals, genuineness, my wife and kids, and other things that make me happy. If anyone reads any of this and wishes to comment, I'd welcome the dialogue.

Well, here we go...

:)

That was my very first blog entry, posted exactly six years ago today. I really didn’t know what to expect of this medium, which I’d actually already been a part of for nearly two years previous, because I still didn’t have a sense of what was bottled up inside of me that needed to get out.

Mister Tony Made Us Do It
I was a part of a group of sports talk fans who in the early 2000s listened with great enthusiasm to former Washington Post sportswriter, Tony Kornheiser’s daily talk show on ESPN Radio. You may have heard of Mr. Tony’s broadcast show on ESPN TeeVee, Pardon The Interruption, in which he banters in crossfire-style debate on topics of sports and pop culture with his good friend and former colleague at the Post, Michael Wilbon.

If you know anything at all about Kornheiser, it’s that he’s hilarious, whether anything he says about sports has any other value at all. So I began listening — and laughing — regularly, at just about this time of year, April/May of 2002.

I discovered this group of mutual Kornheiser enthusiasts purely by accident, while trolling the ESPN.com message boards. They all used to congregate in the Major League Baseball forum there on the web site. That was the point at which I realized that I could actually listen to ESPN Radio online from my desk at work; previously The Company had blocked streaming audio on our network.

I began to participate, familiarizing myself with the members of this TK group, and had a fabulous time laughing quietly in my cubicle as I worked.

Then in July, the always outspoken Mister Tony was suspended for comments critical to ABC/ESPN management and their handling of the events surrounding the recent firing of Tony’s radio show producer, Denis Horgan. The message boards went wild, and the TK group staged a war of words (and deed) with ESPN.

That quickly got the MLB board shut down, temporarily quashing the voices of dissension. However we continued on with a continuous stream of complaint emails to upper management (along with a few other less public forms of protest).

By this time, we were all connected via email, but given that we had lost our means of more immediate dialogue, it was clear that a new forum needed to be found. But message board software was expensive, cumbersome to install, and time/resource-heavy to maintain. We needed something cheap (read: ‘free’) and easy, and we needed it yesterday.

Hence, ‘The Blog’
As a result, one of our group’s members suggested a new, free online service that supported this new phenomenon called, ‘weblogging,’ which I had absolutely no concept of at the time.

The site was called Blogger.com, and we found that the way it was set up, we could actually use it as a kind of faux forum by assigning each of us as an author.

Blogger’s format (typical to how most people composed their weblogs in the early days) was not so much based on individual page posts, but rather on those consisting of a brief paragraph or two; from the blog homepage, they were displayed in digest format with the author’s name and post timestamp appended to each entry. As a group, we simply had to publish the blog after each of our posts and everyone would then be able to see it, updated online, en masse.

I knew nothing about Pyra, the parent company responsible for this wonderful little service. I knew nothing about their previous struggles and growing pains over their previous three years of existence; I knew only what we all knew: that Blogger was now the greatest thing since sliced bread.

It was mid-to-latter 2002, and fortunately for us, Blogger.com was gaining momentum, both from within as well as without; but more on that later.

Our new ‘forum’ was operating flawlessly (most of the time, anyway), and in it, we happily congregated, commenting, and contributing to each other’s Tony Kornheiser experience. However we didn’t meet only during the show’s three hours each weekday. Someone was pretty much always there most of the time, chit-chatting, spinning stories, telling jokes, whatever. A profound, albeit testosterone-dominated community was forming; and it was good.

Guys were becoming friends. Despite how much we ragged on each other — oh, and believe me, it was merciless at times — there was always a sense of community, and a deep-down respect for all.

Our new community had no official name at this point, but since it was born of a place called, ‘Blogger,’ we universally referred to it as, ‘The Blog.’

We still do.



Next: Googled