Jack Steiner

It has been a while since I read this post and others I wrote for The Red Dress Club.

Read this one, this one and this one too.

Didn’t go through them all, though I ought to if for no other reason than to clean up some of the coding issues that add some weird characters here and there.

Many of those posts got a ridiculous number of comments and more than a few questions about whether they were based on reality or spilled out of my head.

I don’t think I ever gave someone a straight answer for no reason other than I didn’t want to or so I seem to remember.

Truth is ten years later I can’t remember who I used to be and I can’t forget either.

There were some pretty good moments there and some very rough ones. If I drop myself into it I can pull it back into focus and I am not sure I need to.

I am sure I will get there at some point, but I don’t have it in me to revisit and relitigate what I can’t change.

And the hard truth is at this moment that is what I’ll want to do. I’ll look back and wonder why I did XYZ and not ZYX and there is no benefit in that.

It is done.

So I’ll check it out when I am not inclined to try to figure out why that younger version of me wasn’t as smart as I am now.

Our word is maecenatism and I am told it means patronage.

Told June a while back that we could talk about patronizing a number of joints together but only when it is safe.

Rumor has it that might happen later this year or perhaps the next. Rumor has it one day we’ll return to living what we call a normal life and we’ll be able to do what we once did without the concerns of the present.

So I told her to hang on and said if she did I could show her a good time out in public in places and spaces we’d enjoy spending time in.

Said sometimes you have to join hands and take a leap of faith because life is short and tomorrow is never guaranteed.

It is a hard truth and sometimes a rough thought to acknowledge. Hard to accept some choices lead to places we didn’t like and hard to shift to see if a different direction might provide something better.

Inertia pushes us to stick with what we know, but sometimes the best thing you can do is jump overboard and start swimming because you can’t know if the ship will survive the coming storm.

So you take a chance and swim for shore because you know you can get that far and if you do there will be other opportunities.

Opportunities you might be disappointed to miss.

So sometimes you listen to the voices you hear in the silence and take comfort in knowing you hear consent within.

Don’t quote me but I think this blog has been self hosted for 10 years now or will be in a few months.

But don’t go looking for a big anniversary party because technically the posts here extend back to May 2004 which means it is a high school junior.

Or maybe I ought to say it is similar to a junior in that it doesn’t laugh at the same silly tricks that used to work upon it once a time.

There is more truth in that than I want to admit and plenty in saying there are lots of issues here that make me crazy.

The detritus of multiple themes, broken plugins and decades of blogging has left their mark upon it and now there are strange characters and broken links all over.

In theory there might be a simple fix I can use to correct all of the additional characters and garbage that occupy posts but I don’t know what it is.

Nor have I put much time in trying to figure that out. Instead I show up and try to make adjustments, fixes and changes on the fly.

It is better, but not perfect and so the blog stays somewhat broken.

Drunk, As Drunk Can Be

And so we find ourselves more focused on trying to provide solid content than upon the clothes which the content wears.

Somewhere I can hear the groans and exhortation of an old graphic design teacher to focus on the looks so that the reader will find it easy to focus upon the words.

Not a bad suggestion, but I am short on time and lacking the energy/interest I once had.

Or more accurately, it is hard to maintain multiple blogs so one gets most of the attention and the others get some attention.

It is the sad truth but it doesn’t provide the full story.

It doesn’t mean this place is dead or that I won’t go through spots and moments in which it is my primary focus.

This is a reflection of now and now may not be reflective of tomorrow.

Ask the Shmata Queen, she’ll tell you many things, not the least of which is she is crazy about me and still my number one fan, at least when it comes to writing.

More to come, posts and changes, but not today. Stay tuned and keep close.