I’ve been reading through my journals from twenty years ago, remembering old friends and who I used to be and what I worried about when I was young and single. And goodness, I had forgotten just how much I used to blog back then. Perhaps to excess (and by “perhaps” I mean “without a doubt”), but it was fun and I made lots of friends and I find myself missing it. [He says on his blog, where he has posted twenty-three times this year so far.] [He wants to point out, though, that the booknotes and the link posts of late feel qualitatively different — at least on his end — from the everything-goes type of blogging he used to do, and perhaps that’s what he’s missing and what he now — in what smells like a midlife crisis but probably does not actually count as one, not like the time when he impulse-bought a Nintendo Switch for his kids while his wife was gone at girls’ camp — what he now may be trying to resurrect, with hopefully more success than the seven other times he’s tried to do this in recent years.]

Anyway, here we are, twenty years after. (Which, to digress yet again, I read as a kid and quite liked. Maybe it’s time to reread that series.) If you, dear reader, were reading this blog or one of its sundry predecessors (mostly Blank Slate and Top of the Mountains) twenty years ago and are somehow still here, I salute your fortitude and perseverance, and I think you should poke your hand out of the fog of darkness (commentless blogs being one-way glass) and tap out a short email saying hi. [The author would like to note that — mildly disturbing metaphors aside — this friendly suggestion also applies to anyone who started reading the blog later on, anyone starting now (hi!), and anyone who can’t take it any longer and stops reading after this paragraph mercifully concludes.]