"The Mighty Middle"

Sounds like what I'm in danger of getting from too much time plopped on the couch and drinking McEwans Ale, but it's actually a fine blog that stands heads above the crowd by virtue of being independent-thinking and fearlessly written.

Michael Reynolds, the man behind the curtain over there, recently marked a ... is "blogiversary" a word yet? In doing so he told something of himself.

I've been a waiter, a janitor, a law library clerk and a law librarian, an editorial cartoonist, a bowling alley pin-jammer, a stock clerk, a restaurant manager, an antiques dealer, a property manager, a restaurant reviewer, a house painter, a political media consultant, a writer.

If you put a gun to my head I couldn't tell you when I did any of those jobs, with the exception of writing. 1989 we sold our first book. That I remember.

There are hundreds of disconnected bits in my memory, scenes cut from a movie, and I have no idea where they fit. Me and two girls in a van, driving through France? When? That girl on a Greyhound bus in, maybe Saint Louis, the one who got all weepy? Where was I going? And how did Katherine and I end up in Annapolis? I'm sure there must have been a reason. That restaurant where it was a buffet and I just served drinks? No idea. That red tablecloth place I worked for like, a week. Why?

There's a Tom Waits song in there somewhere.

Those two girls? I knew them, too. But it wasn't a van in France; it was a tent in the woods in the hills over Ljubljana, when there still was a Yugoslavia. Of course they were something more than mortal. It was 1979. June. Still cold in the morning. I tend to remember dates.

He says he never remembers dates. A blessing and a curse, probably. Until recently I would have said I have the opposite problem, but recently my memory has gotten so that (as Dylan Thomas once put it) I can't remember if it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was 6, or six days and six nights when I was 12. The memories are still in there, but the glue on the date stickers has dried out and the tags are starting to fall off the files and collect on the floor. Or maybe I'm just drinking myself into Dylan Thomas.

It got me thinking about what my life would look like if I inventoried it. Bus boy, meter reader for the electric company, assembly-line worker, ran an observatory, taught high school, wrote ice hockey, wrote porn, ate lunch with Reagan in the White House, ... yeah, I'll have to sit down and make a list sometime.

UPDATE: Yikes, I see Alan Stewart Carl also is celebrating a blogiversary.

Blogging has been a bizarre, thrilling, frustrating, emboldening, enraging, enlightening experience. I would have never guessed that so much could come from the little act of hacking out short, often half-formed essays and placing them on the Internet. In the last year I’ve had my words quoted many times by mainstream media sources. I’ve met through correspondence a large number of intelligent, worthwhile people whose words have often enlightened me. And I’ve become actively involved in a netroots Centrist movement that is actually gaining some steam.

That's a lot more than I can boast. All I've managed to do is piss people off, since April 2004. Might have to trademark that slogan. So, good on you, Alan. Of course, he's a Dallas Cowboys fan, so he's got a world of pain coming when T.O. suits up. You'll get one spectacular year out of him. Enjoy it. Because then he destroys your team. Welcome to Philadelphia-with-oil-rigs.