…in an article about the history and future of Canadian supermarkets.
It’s kind of hard to curate posts that are less than a year old, but I tried. This is the final year to be covered in my “twenty years” retrospective. I may talk about the actual anniversary tomorrow and try to draw some broad conclusions. Or I may not. You’ll have to check back by to see which it is.
- Everybody says it so they had to name it twice (several posts follow)
- Gym without class
- NYC pictures
- Still crazy after all these years
- Back to the streets of San Francisco (several posts follow, although I never quite finished the story)
- Not perfect. Just forgiven.
- Another restaurant, another fifteen years…
- Fuck feelings
- Order amid the chaos
- Canada 2015 photos (the commentary never came, alas)
Only two more years to cover before Wednesday’s big anniversary.
Despite an incredibly depressing start, 2013 turned out to be a really good year for me. I relocated to the house where I grew up, traveled a lot, and started having the slightest hint a social life again (which is about all I’ve ever really been able to stand anyway). And then there were the antidepressants–both the pills (which helped a LOT) and the cat with whom I had a brief relationship (which helped more than I might have thought as well). Music was a big help too.
The web stuff was maybe not some of my best ever, but that’s OK. Feeling like a human being again was nice.
- I do not have a cat
- Au Canada (several posts follow)
Let’s just say I visited some very dark places in 2012. I’d love to say I handled it with my usual good humor, but that might be a stretch. Maybe the best thing to say is that I lived through it. And lost weight. What i really hate is that the big entries on the site stopped being about anything other than me. The big anniversary comes on Wednesday.
- North of the border
- Canada, urbanism, etc.
- Traditional, biblical marriage
- I don’t want to while, but..
- A dad I never met
- West Coast trip begins (several posts follow)
- US Tour 1997 (in which I posted edited 15-year-old video, several posts follow)
- DC, Labor Day
- Work and vacations
- Thinking out loud on a Sunday afternoon
- On the road. Really. (several posts follow)
- Charlotte sometimes
- Perfect beach weather (several posts follow)
I thought this one was going to be harder to put together than it actually was. which says, I guess, that I’m finally over the worst year of my life. Or that I’ve gotten better at ignoring it. Or something.
In 2011, I lost two of the most important people in my life. Neither of them actually went away; they both just changed in ways that drastically altered our relationships. My ex and I split up after almost ten years, and my mom developed dementia. I’m not sure the website ever quite reflected how devastating this was to me. I actually wrote more about the latter than the former, but that doesn’t necessarily correlate with the proportionate effect of each. Sharing specific details about the breakup didn’t really seem fair or appropriate, although it is possible to read between the lines de temps en temps.
Despite everything, I was very successful at establishing my new career during 2011, and my October trip to Canada (the start of a new tradition) resulted in a lot of positive changes for me, not the least of which was the fact that i started listening to lots of new music again.
For the record, some of these posts were made public after the fact and did not originally appear in this same order (basically I “sneaked” them in retrospectively) so regular readers may have missed them.
- Danny Elfman, 1 October 1983 (inside joke)
- Dating? You’re joking, right?
- Updates
- Season premiere (the linked page that this teases is one of my favorites)
- October
- October II
- The great Canadian road trip of 2011 (several posts follow)
In 2010, I got my first tenure-track position (which is working out quite nicely, thanks), my ex and I recommenced living together full-time after five years of the bicoastal thing (that didn’t end well at all), and I didn’t write much of any consequence. Highlights follow on the march to the big anniversary on 13 January.
- I have this vague memory… (“vague” being the keyword here as I was alluding to things I preferred not to discuss at the time)
- My stomach hurts (see “vague” above)
- Videolog plus: Pretend we’re dead
In 2009, I got my master’s, got my first professional library job, thought a lot about cities, and bought a house in Pittsburgh. It was perhaps a more interesting year than I gave it credit for at the time. Anniversary in six days. Highlights from 2009 below.
There was better reading in 2008 than in 2007, maybe because I was tying (at least for a little while) to generate content for four different websites, all of which eventually landed here. I’d call this year “reflective” and “hectic” with grad school and all. I also worked a very odd part-time job, continued with my freelancing, and migrated the site from static HTML to WordPress. I’d sort of forgotten what a busy year it was.
- The geekiest pornography store ever (all this SF nostalgia was part of a short-lived rebirth of Planet SOMA)
- Making preserves out of history
- Sunset people
- The atheist homosexuals who stole Christmas
- Advice column (sad foreshadowing)
- Why I generally don’t vote Republican in the South
- Charleston and Pittsburgh (several posts follow)
Past the halfway point now, and only eight days until the anniversary. Highlights and favorites from 2007 (the year I started grad school and actually started working toward having a real career) follow. I have to admit very little of it is especially entertaining or inspiring.
- A long week
- Richmond (one post follows)
- Roanoke
- The wizard of ID