L'Envoi

Three years ago today, more or less by accident, I started blogging. Wednesday before last it struck me, within a brief span of hours, that I am through with blogging. I thought I'd wait a week or two and see if the prescript reversed itself; but it hasn't.

Several factors came together into alignment. Main factor is, it's getting harder and harder for me to find anything new and fresh to blog about. In my very first blog post I expressed reservations about eventually running out of things to say and falling into repetition. So. After five years in the blogosphere, three years blogging, and 951 blog posts, I reckon it's time to hang it up.

In the often uncivilized Wild West of blogdom, I've been unusually blessed in the caliber of readers and commenters my blog has attracted. Good, decent, intelligent, civil people, every one of you. I want to thank you for making these past three years worth all the effort. It really has been a joy.

Thanks to my commenters, regular or occasional. Thanks to Ben, Lucy, Trey, Jay & Deb, Richmond, Bill, Sam & Jeremy. Thanks to Dean, Mark, Casey, Fran, Travis, McGehee. Thanks to David in Madison. Thanks to Richard. Thanks to David in Japan.

Thanks to my lurkers, and that means first and foremost thanks to Refugee from Houston, who's been with me from the very beginning. Thanks to my brother Steven. Thanks to Greg in Madison, and John in Las Vegas. Thanks to Eunice and Val and Norlin.

Thanks to those lurkers, regular or occasional, whom I've come to recognize in my stats, even if I can't put a name to them: Netscape 4 ("OS Unknown") from Dublin; Opera 9 from Zionsville, Indiana; Firefox for Linux from San Jose; Cleveland, and Boulder, and Seattle, and Tampa Bay, and Phoenix, and Arlington Virginia, and Springfield Illinois, and Hillsdale Michigan, and Vancouver BC; those two cohorts from Emeryville California and Dublin Ireland; and Konqueror from Paris, and Google Reader from Berlin, and Feedchecker from Japan; and Cambridge and Nottingham in the UK.

Once upon a time, about 45 years ago, a young grade school boy was leading an intolerable existence. There were school bullies. The boy also was radically undersocialized, which didn't help. As a matter of survival the boy turned within, and drew the cadmium control rods out of the reactor core of his imagination. He underwent a radioactive core meltdown of the imagination. A meltdown that spilt through the doors of perception, spilt over on several fronts into something rather akin to synaesthesia, spilt over into an entire constructed language of his own. And that radioactive imagination has never really let up since.

Poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that perception and conception can be bound together, the gap between them mediated, only through the tertium aliquid of imagination. I know what he meant. I've been living it in spades, for most of my 51 years. And I think I fathom it somewhat more deeply after blogging it these past three years. Hope you've enjoyed being along for the ride.