It was another brutally cold February evening. I was working at a doomed dotcom, five months into one of the series of “New Normals” we’ve had in the past couple decades, after 9\/11. I was a newly-divorced single guy, I had a couple kids to take care of, I had all kinds of anxiety about the near future as the software industry began an ugly contraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was also chafing. While ten years of marriage and raising kids had modified my priorities a bit, I was missing something from my twenties, badly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That “something” was a soapbox. I’d had one, fourteen years before, at KSTP-AM – an overnight weekend talk show where I opined about politics and argued with drunks and had the time of my then very young life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Life had moved on, and I went with it. But there was a part of me that missed having the big discussions with complete strangers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That afternoon at work, I’d read an article in Time <\/em>magazine about the new wave of conservative intellectuals and their chosen medium, the”Blog”. Andrew Sullivan was their example. I went, read it, checked out “blogger.com”, thought a bit about the possibility that maybe I could <\/em>get back into writing stuff again…<\/p>\n\n\n\n …and started “Shot In The Dark”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Nineteen years ago today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I gush about this every year about this time – how I started this blog hoping to maybe draw five readers a day that weren’t subject to the vagaries of the various list-servers I was on, how I’d happily keep doing it if five readers were all I had, how thankful I am not only for the outlet, and for the opportunities it’s led me to, and especially for having it introduce me, virtually and often in person, to every one of you – new friends, and old friends with whom I’ve been able to reconnect. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s been nineteen years, and while writers block comes and goes, it’s still just as fun as it ever was. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So I thank you all. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was another brutally cold February evening. I was working at a doomed dotcom, five months into one of the series of “New Normals” we’ve had in the past couple decades, after 9\/11. I was a newly-divorced single guy, I had a couple kids to take care of, I had all kinds of anxiety about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76765"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76767,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76765\/revisions\/76767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}