I've been writing online at a relatively enthusiastic (if occasionally uneven) clip for nine years now. A lot of things have changed in all those days, and renewing my effort means taking a trip down memory lane to remember why, exactly, I started all this in the first place.

So, in addition to tuning a few things up under the hood and getting my blog posts going back to ye olde Facebook, I decided to bust out some Variation on the Theme in light of the solstice.

I've been noodling on a real redesign with one of my mother's students for a while now, but it's not the sort of thing I've had a ton of time to invest serious energy into, and ergo things have kind of stalled.

But I want to write more, and have been sort of hating on my old rust-colored sexyface theme. Maybe this is part of what's blocking, I think, and I went ahead and cropped myself out a new photo, generated a little background to match, and set some new colors. New coat of paint on this lonely old town; inspiration, I'm ready for ya!

The bigger changes I want to make are about content organization and whatnot, but I think the sad fact is that until I start generating said content, energy invested in organization would be questionably allocated. There's always more time for fancy-pants layouts and whatnot. The more pressing question is what, pray tell, would fill the boxes, and how might it get written?

Scouring The Sources Of My Windless Sails

After yesterday's post, which looked at how my working life was sucking my will to live, I started thinking a bit bigger. Work is top of mind at the moment, so that's the first thing to come out, but getting that out of the way made room for deeper/better reflection.

The existential crisis is of course about more than just my jibity job; it's about who I am as a person, and the world around me.

This is a winner, from the most recent Rolling Stone, which features excerpts from an oral history of Hunter S. Thompson. This by William Kennedy:

bq. I remember talking with [Hunter] about an essay by James Baldwin about the writer's quest for wisdom. Baldwin viewed the generation of American literary giants -- Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Faulkner -- as looking at the world as "a place to be corrected, and in which innocence is inexplicably lost." The key phrase for Hunter was Baldwin's view that "innocence must die, if we are ever to begin that journey toward that greater innocence called wisdom."

Give all my rending of soul over the loss of novelty and innocence over the past four years, I find great solace in that notion. Bring on the wisdom!