For the past few months, I have been the boy who cried blog, dropping hints right and left about the final fate of this blog as the year winds down. Well, there's no more winding...or whining. It's sh*t or get off the pot time, as my dear, departed, not-so-saintly father occasionally said.
This has not been an easy decision. I pay roughly $135/year to maintain this blog in the manner to which I see fit. It is not unlike some kind of very low-rent mistress (one is reminded of that scene in Eurotrip when the four young travelers find themselves stranded in Bratislava and have only like $1.17 between them...what can they get for that paltry amount of money they wonder and find themselves in a 5-star hotel with spa service and a sumptuous meal...that's the kind of mistress my $135/year would buy, no doubt, in a former Iron Curtain country). My first inclination was to kill this blog. I had had enough; 7 years was a very long time; over 3,300 posts make it even longer. And let's face it, blogging isn't much more than masturbation, just with a couple of 100 people watching daily. And I'm not an exhibitionist. If anything, I'm quite the opposite.
My second inclination was to put it on life support and downgrade my payment plan to $9 or so a month, just to maintain it in the event that I might have something to say on occasion. But then I went looking for some redesign advice related to that possible downgrade and stumbled upon something that made me think otherwise, something that--quite frankly--excited me and kind of rejuvenated my thought process about this whole blog thing.
Tomorrow at this same Interwebs address a new look Innocent Bystander will debut (there's just something about the whole new year thing that makes it seem more fitting for a rebirth). I'm not going to promise you anything, other than to mention that my photos will take on a new role in all of this. You'll see what I mean tomorrow when I relaunch. I can't promise a lot of writing on my part but I do know this: I WANT to write. Not just about comics and stuff, like I do at my job, but the way I've always wanted to write. Hopefully, I'll be able to do that here and continue doing it for a while.
The bottom line for me was that this has been an important part of my life for the past 7 years, and I would hate to just walk away from it, or let it just waste away on the Internet, a veritable ghost blog, visited only by people who see Susan Lennon for the first time on a Saturday night on the news and go search and end up here (trust me, she's worth searching for, even if you do end up here). Or "always bet on black"...that one gets a lot of hits, too. While there's a part of me who wants to end this, to retire, so to speak, I can't right now. It means too much to me.
There is a wonderful quote by the great mystery author Raymond Chandler that sums up my entire philosophy about writing in general and this blog specifically. If anything, it's my mission statement:
"...and there comes a time when that which I write must belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine."
Tune in tomorrow to see what happens next. And thanks for reading.
