Here we go again…

If you remember the early 1990s, you can undoubtedly recall the advent of something called “the Internet” that seemed incredibly futuristic… all you needed was a computer with a modem that could connect to your telephone line, and you could marvel at this newfangled “cyberspace,” or even become a part of it yourself.

My high school had (theoretical) “high-speed” Internet access, and when I discovered the (now defunct, R.I.P.) free hosting community called Geocities, I was obsessed. I had to plant a flag there, and so my biology teacher lent me his copy of a gigantic book called something like Teach Yourself HTML in 14 Days. We didn’t have web access at home, but that didn’t stop me from devouring the book, meticulously writing HTML code using Notepad on our home computer, saving it to a 3.5″ disk and uploading the resulting conglomeration to the web.

Realistically I knew that no one really cared about my musings on Star Trek: Voyager, and that I had all the credibility of the New Bark Times (a rubber squeaky dog toy shaped like a newspaper), but I was part of something exciting and new, and that was enough. I was “in.”

All of that is prologue to note that I have essentially had some sort of personal web presence in the form of a website off-and-on since 1999 or so, though my interest in maintaining what eventually turned into a shrine to my own vanity seriously waned after I graduated from college. By 2009, having a website or blog was already becoming a bit passé. “Been there, done that,” was my mindset… plus, with the explosion of social media that Facebook (and its predecessors MySpace and Friendster, to be fair) brought, I actually started to recoil a bit from it all.

So, for the better part of the last decade and a half, this domain has alternated between holding various “coming soon” pages or an empty directory listing. And yet, I kept paying to renew the domain name. Something in me, I guess, knew that at some point it might be the right time to reboot this website for the umpteenth time–this time, though, discarding my younger self’s overly ambitious attempt to create an online persona (I think that that version of me would probably be a “content creator” today… I shudder to think).

This time, I’m just going to stick with what’s important to me. I’m 41 years old now; I feel like I haven’t got anything left to prove, nor do I particularly care to expend the energy to create an online façade that will fall away the moment you meet me, should that unfortunate occurrence come to pass. Nah, I’m going to just let this be my brain dump.

So, like the signs you’ll see at any landfill or dumping ground, “Enter at your own risk.”