I like to consider myself a blogging pioneer. In late 1997, shortly after moving to the strange border town of Douglas, Arizona, I began to keep an online journal on a GeoCities webpage. At the time, there were no local ISPs or even local AOL dial-up numbers in Douglas, so I was only able to update my webpage either between classes at Cochise Community College or at the town library where you were limited to 30 minutes of internet use per day. I really believe this limited access drove me to make a genuine effort, and I even took notes throughout the day when I really wanted to remember something for my page update. Obviously there were no RSS feeds back then, but we had guestbooks and email, and that's how my "followers" would communicate. Now, most of my followers were high school friends 2000 miles away or a few of my new friends (including my girlfriend at the time) who were taken with the novelty of some yankee outsider writing about their dirty little town. But that was nearly 13 years ago, several lifetimes in the world of the internet, and those files are long since gone. I departed Douglas in the summer of 1998 for Flagstaff, and almost immediately I had a social life on top of work and school and I quickly forgot about my blog and eventually my password.. Since then I've dabbled with other informal versions of blogging; a six-month stint of LiveJournal in the early '00s, a few years of MySpace and a very late acceptance of Facebook in 2008. But you really can't use any of those fora as your soapbox without alienating or offending people you don't want harboring ill will toward you.
I stumbled across my uncle Dennis' blog quite accidentally in 2009 and to this day participate as a rabblerouser and nonsensical commenter, surely often to his chagrin. I once tried talking him into letting me author a guest blog entry, but he wasn't having any of it. Well, to be honest, he gave me a set of parameters that I just couldn't fit my topic of choice within, and we ended up scrapping the idea. Now that I am free of his wisdom and common sense and over-protective parental instincts towards his blog and reader base (but who can blame him - nobody likes a turd in their punchbowl), I take my inspiration from him and mix that with what's left of my energy at the end of the day and here's a new blog. Enjoy.
