Blog is back!

At some point, we came into possession of a bag of Chex Mix. I say “came into possession” because I don’t have any memory of actually purchasing that bag. It may have been planted by someone trying to frame me for something.¹I’ve been watching a lot of Columbo and Perry Mason lately. In any case, it somehow ended up in our kitchen snack repository and I saw it.

Emblazoned across the front of the bag in large letters was a phrase both exciting and puzzling: “BAGEL CHIP IS BACK!“

Not “bagel chips are back” or “the bagel chip is back,” either of which would have made more sense grammatically. I guess they were so excited, they just put whatever their brain blurted out first on the bag.

Apparently, this was a big deal—the culmination of a decade-long struggle to return tiny, stale, salt-logged wafers to the collection of other salt-logged tiny things that make up Chex Mix. Sure, society has suffered a lot of setbacks over the past ten years, but this is a true victory for the masses. They even convinced²Presumably with money. Sir Mix-A-Lot to share the news.

Of course, not everyone was a fan.³The existence of an entire subreddit dedicated to Chex Mix is both incredible and not at all surprising. Oh well. As George Bernard Shaw once said, “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Pretty sure he was talking about reformulating snack foods.

Hold on, there’s an actual point to all this

Of course, you’re (probably) not here for year-old news about salty vittles, so let me finally get to the point: much like bagel chip, BLOG IS BACK!

The timing may seem a bit random, but rest assured I’ve been working towards this for a while now. As our more seasoned readers will recall, I wrote quite a bit in this space back in the ’00s when my children were tiny and blogs were still a thing. This website has actually had quite a few deaths and rebirths since I first fired it up way back in 1994, but it’s been mostly dead for the past decade or so.

Why, you ask? Well, mostly just because of life. After we moved to California, life got busy. There were kids to raise, careers to pursue, and new places to explore. The days were so packed that I just didn’t have the time, energy, or inclination to sit down and generate 1,000-word sarcastic⁴And occasionally sardonic. recaps on a regular basis. Plus, the kids were at an age where I didn’t think it was fair or wise to put their lives on on digital display for the teeming dozens who occasionally read this thing.

But good news! Now that I’ve reached middle age, daily life is far more boring and the kids are old enough that I don’t have to care⁵Too much. about embarrassing them online. Besides, as long as I keep this content off TikTok,⁶Or whatever the next thing is. God, I feel old. I’m pretty sure none of their friends will ever see it.

Sepaking of social media, another core contributing factor to the site’s torpidity was Twitter. In 2012, while I was temporarily separated from my family for a few months during the move, I got hooked on the big blue bird. It was a great way to share my thoughts throughout the day and, frankly, have some semblance of interaction with other people. Alas, we all know how that’s going these days. A little over a year ago, I decided that I couldn’t continue to support what it had become, so I quit cold turkey.⁷“Cold turkey” is a weird-ass phrase. I’m sure I could Google it and find out where it comes from within a matter of seconds, but honestly I’d rather let it just hang out there being all weird.

Since then, I’ve tried to use Instagram to fill the X-shaped hole in my life, but it just doesn’t have the vibe I’m looking for. My Instagram feed has devolved into mostly photos of chihuahuas and baseball stadiums, but that’s fine because that’s the kind of stuff that Instagram is really for.

For the past year or so, I’ve subscribed to Craig Calcaterra’s Cup of Coffee newsletter, which is ostensibly about baseball but really touches upon things both important and inane. I’ve enjoyed reading his stuff over the years on various baseball sites and I’ve liked his daily newsletter even more. It reminds me a lot of the kind of writing I used to do. And the kind I’d like to do again.

So I’m back here. And I plan on probably writing more than just this one post.

Some days it’ll be long and rambling like today, other days it will be short (yet somehow equally rambling). Some days there won’t be anything new here it all. Probably a lot of days. I plan on just keeping it casual and seeing how things shake out.

If you want to read it, great! If you don’t, that’s also okay! Do whatever you need to do, I’ll be fine over here either way. There’s just something cathartic about writing and publishing; in putting the metaphorical pen to paper, I’m getting everything I need out of this.

Hard hat zone

At some point during my blogging hiatus, the SQL database was corrupted and most of my old posts look pretty funky at the moment. Cleaning them up is a manual process and will take a while, but I am planning on doing so in the coming weeks. For now, I have about six or seven old blog posts mostly fixed and back up.

Similarly, most of the other pages on the site—things like brief bios of my family that are now 10 years out of date—are also currently missing and will reappear over the next few days after I’ve had a chance to edit them. Don’t worry, though—there’s still some quality non-blog content on here, like my transit ridership stats or a completely pointless thought experiment involving baseball.

But(t) before I go…

In addition to being the world’s most successful singer about butts, Anthony L. Ray (a.k.a. Sir Mix-A-Lot) is a CB radio enthusiast. According to his Wikipedia page:

Ray was interested in electronics and CB radio from a young age. One of his early jobs was working at a pinball arcade servicing machines, and during that time he started to fix keyboards and other musical equipment. He still works with electronics as a hobby.

Sir Mix-a-Lot is one of us. You know, a nerd.

This pleases me immensely.

• 1
  I’ve been watching a lot of Columbo and Perry Mason lately.
• 2
  Presumably with money.
• 3
  The existence of an entire subreddit dedicated to Chex Mix is both incredible and not at all surprising.
• 4
  And occasionally sardonic.
• 5
  Too much.
• 6
  Or whatever the next thing is. God, I feel old.
• 7
  “Cold turkey” is a weird-ass phrase. I’m sure I could Google it and find out where it comes from within a matter of seconds, but honestly I’d rather let it just hang out there being all weird.