Belated Happy Birthday To Me!

It all starts with Mrs. Fish & Bicycles’ birthday: October 2nd.

• October 2, 2009: The inaugural Fish & Bicycles post is published.




• October 2, 2010: Reflective of rearranged priorities, nothing is published at Fish & Bicycles…too busy celebrating Mrs. Fish & Bicycles’ birthday!

My sixth year as a blogger just flew by, and reading back on my first Fish & Bicycles post I feel good about how the year went. The goal that I set for myself for this blog, a goal I’m happy to say I’ve been able to achieve, was to shed the ghosts of my previous blog, to escape the depressing and rage-inducing quagmire that is the life of a political blogger, and to return to my original goal of writing regularly on a wide variety of topics.

Here’s the brief description of my first blog from its About page, dating back to June 2004:

Transcendental Floss is a weblog, coming to you from Seattle and Bellingham, Washington.

Arts & entertainment, news/politics, technology, life in general — we write about whatever strikes a fancy.

(Note: We don’t have anything personal against fancies, and any pleasure we take from the striking of them is purely in a figurative sense.)

One of the unexpected side effects of this successful past year is that I feel that I’ve finally made peace with my former blog. I’ve been looking back at it for the first time in quite a while, and I see a lot there that I’m proud of, so much so that I now feel comfortable linking back to it for the first time. My former pseudonym, as you’ll see, was Gonzo, and besides blog posts, I wrote the CD, DVD and book mini-reviews in the right sidebar and I worked closely with my friend/webmaster on the design of the site.

Looking ahead, perhaps those rearranged priorities I mentioned above can explain why I don’t have any lofty ambitions for the next year. I’d love to have more readers, and I’d love readers to leave comments more often, but if I can just continue posting to Fish & Bicycles 5-7 times a week, as I’ve averaged thus far, if I can continue to keep the content here full of variety, if I can entertain and, perhaps, occasionally provoke some deeper thinking, if I can do all of that and have fun, while not sacrificing things like giving my full attention to more important life matters, say my wife’s birthday, I’ll be quite content.