When I started posting to a site called bigmornings.com, it was 2004(?), and I was hosting a radio talk show on a station in Aurora, Illinois, which called itself “The Big One.” This is ironic, because “big” didn’t come close to an accurate description of the station’s size, reach, impact, or listenership. Hell, we didn’t even subscribe to Arbitron – when you don’t care how big your ratings are, you’re either too huge to notice or too small to care. And no one is too huge to notice, so that narrows it down somewhat.
Early blithering to the site constituted the occasional “who we’re having on the show today” posts, a decent amount of coffee-deficient early morning nonsense, a few “you listeners make no sense” writing just to see if anyone was actually reading the damn-fool thing. Very little content. All of these things have been lost to the ages, thanks to the massive failure of a site called Modblog as well as my inability to back anything up. And thank whatever you consider holy for that small favor.
So now I found myself with a Domain Name and nothing to do with it. For a time after I left, I continued to update periodically with little form or reason – mostly I was decompressing from a long, strange trip that had been my radio life at that point. As well as getting just a touch of back information off my chest. So when that was out of the way…well, what was I going to do with it?
As it happened, these unprofessional and idiot blatherings kept getting turned out of my two hands. They eventually turned into a small but continuous “column,” for lack of a better word. Surely there could be no better job than to be paid to produce a thousand words three times a week, constituted of nothing more than personal opinion? Well, except maybe for “lottery winner” or “trust fund child.” Those would be good gigs. I could do those.
And here we are, a domain name later, a bit smarter, a bit more tech-savvy and a touch more comfortable with these here internets. I try to write for as many places as possible, not the least of which is here. Some of these places give me money in exchange for these collections of words. Some of it is worth reading. Others are not, but there’s a learning curve to this whole “writing” thing that I’d like to call a job. So it goes.
All of this is a long way of saying: I write. It is a useless skill compared to hunting, gathering, and producing, but it’s just about all I’ve got at this point. So I shall continue to do it until I see fit to stop. There’s a quote out there that says something to the effect of: “Only fools write for free.” There are a lot of fools on these Internets; of them, I am certainly one.