August 23 is WWdN’s official birthday. It was 24 years ago last week that I finished building a website from scratch (in notepad, using raw html), after about 6 weeks of intensive study, and many late nights of trial and several errors, and turned the lights on here, for the first time. Sadly, the earliest capture I can find at the Internet Archive is from 2002, but this is pretty much what it looked like for most of its first decade:

You’ve come a long way, baby.

Almost a quarter of a century, man. Twenty-four years. And to think that it had only been a few weeks earlier that I used Geocities to make my first website that I called Where’s My Burrito? I started my blog with this:

So the votes are officially in.
Out of the total of 4 votes I got, all of them said it would be cool to have an online journal, so here it is.

Extra special thanks go to loren who directed me to blogger, a website that will hopefully make this whole weblog (the cool kids call it a “blog”) easy and painless.

I’m off now to make dinner for the family. You know what we’re having tonight?

Burritos. No shit.

“The cool kids call it a blog.” Heh.

What a journey, huh? From there to here, in so many ways, even if I did have total access to the part of me that puts words together, I don’t know that I could fully communicate what it has all meant. I guess it’s a quarter century of growing up, becoming who I always wanted to be, and all the joys and sorrows along the way. I mean, I don’t have to tell you; a lot of you reading this today were also reading that, all those years ago.

I’m going to pause a moment to clearly and loudly say thank you to everyone who supported and encouraged me, then and now and in between. It’s been about 8300 days since I cut the ribbon here, and looking through my archives, I saw that I wrote this in on my blog’s birthday in 2019, after about 6500 days:

28 year-old me was struggling so much, in those days. He was trying so hard to be a good husband and stepfather with pretty much no support from his narcissist parents who weren’t thrilled about him marrying a woman with children. He struggled with undiagnosed depression, Anne’s vindictive and destructive ex-husband, and not meeting the extremely high expectations he had for himself. He has some real painful days ahead, but he gets through them with the love and support of his phenomenal wife, who he still can’t believe picked him, out of all the humans on the planet. He doesn’t know it, yet, but writing this blog is going to change his life, save his life, and make it possible for him to find his own dream, instead of trying (and failing) to live someone else’s.

I have grown and healed so much since 2019, in spite of the chaos, trauma, and cruelty we have all been subjected to since 2016, and I’m almost as proud as I am grateful.

I wanted to write something last week to mark this moment, but just couldn’t find the words, so I celebrated the moment quietly, which is how I’ve been doing basically everything for the last couple of years, while I am intensely focused on my own recovery. I don’t think I even mentioned to Anne that the date had passed.

That’s kind of where I’ve been, creatively and energetically, for this entire year. I mentioned in an Instagram reel that I haven’t had access to my creative self all year, I think largely because of the shock and trauma of America’s dumbfucks voting to put a fascist tyrant and his administration of incompetent criminals back into power, after we all saw how incompetent, evil, cruel, destructive, and violent they are.

Really great work, everyone. Especially everyone who was really worried about the cost of living, you know, the milk and eggs crowd? How’s that working out for you? And all the Walk Away people must be sleeping so well these days. Just fantastic fucking work all over the place, you fucking chuds. They are planning to ban the Covid vaccine, so those of us who want to protect ourselves from all the stupid conspiracy theorist dipshits who think bullshit and science are just “opinions” are just fucked, now. You’ve doomed us all to the world you alone deserve. I, for one, will never forget what you did to us, and I will never forgive you. I hope you spend the rest of your miserable lives ostracized, alone, and afraid. May you never know a moment of peace. May you wear your support for this petty little tyrant like a scarlet letter, so everyone knows who you are and what you did.

Anyway, as you can see, I’ve been distracted and preoccupied with all of this endless horror. I’m just exhausted by ten in the morning every day, and try as I might to find other things for my attention and time, I keep getting drawn back to the news, hoping I’ll see The Headline, or some indication that the entire Republican party, its punditry, and its media echo chamber have finally stopped being singularly focused on protecting and covering up for a pedophile rapist and his child sex trafficking pals. And I haven’t even touched on the endless attacks on innocent people who have been declared Enemies of the State because of who they love or the color of their skin. It’s fucking disgusting, deplorable, infuriating, and has ripped the mask off of much of America. It’s been really hard for a lot of us who grew up reciting and believing “liberty and justice for all”.

That’s my head, every day. I’m worried for the people I love, I’m sick to my stomach as I watch six unelected, transparently corrupt, Christian Nationalists issue unsigned decrees that overturn the will of the voters as they hand more and more unchecked power to a criminal and his criminal organization.

It is so hard to tell stories, to find the joy and release in creative writing, when I feel like the world outside my window is on fire. Sure, my privilege currently protects me, but Timothy Snyder pointed out that if we have to remind ourselves of all the ways we are currently safe from political lawlessness, we are already living in an autocracy. That’s scary as fuck to me.

For a lot of us who are survivors of abuse, every day with this motherfucker making everything about him and his fragile little ego is jabbing a finger into a deep bruise that can’t ever fully heal. For a lot of us who have worked so hard to leave and overcome our abusers, to live our lives as fully as possible in spite of our experiences, it is an endless struggle of flashbacks and nervous system dysregulation, while we remind our bodies that we aren’t trapped with our abuser anymore. Thank god for EMDR. Thank god I can afford regular mental health care. Thank god he’s going to die and hopefully soon.

I haven’t wanted to write anything in my blog because what I just wrote is all I have been able to write. When I want to tell a fun story about playing Mysterium with my family, taking my son axe throwing for his birthday, celebrating my son earning his Master’s Degree and starting his PhD, or any of the things I couldn’t wait to write Before All This, I stare at an empty document while I write and erase ten words over and over again, hoping these will be the ones that grant me access to my Creative Self. And the harder I try to find them, the more effectively they hide from me.

I have also felt like I shouldn’t write in my blog, while I have been struggling to write and turn in two pieces that I agreed to write last year. One is an introduction to a book, and the other is a short piece of fiction. Last week, I finally broke through on the introduction. After almost a full year of struggling and failing, I found it. It was so much fun to work on, so deeply satisfying to finish, and such a relief to turn in. I have never been this late on anything. I hope I’ll never be this late on anything again. I hope nobody notices that I’m writing in my blog when I haven’t finished the other thing, which I have started and abandoned too many times to count. I have probably written ten thousand words or so, trying to find the approximately 700 or so I committed to assembling into a story. I’ve tried to come at it so many different ways, from big ideas to small ideas, from limited points of view to omniscient points of view, and nothing is sticking. It just feels like I’m writing with someone else’s hands that don’t fit quite right. Maybe writing here today will help me find my own fingers again.

Maybe I needed time away, and that’s why I didn’t write anything in my blog for over a month, not even on the day that was a cause for celebration, the anniversary of the moment I took my first big step into the world that had always been hidden from me, or made inaccessible, by my dysfunctional family and abusive parents.

And I know that it is weird to hear a 53 year-old man talk about his parents and his childhood so much. I see pretty cruel commentary about that online, and while I don’t take it personally, I do compassionately hope that the kids who are saying it only do so because they haven’t experienced what I have, so they can’t understand. I get it; in a lot of ways, I feel like I’ve only been living my own life since I quit drinking in 2016 (hell of a year to start rawdogging reality, wil), and I’ve only been doing the work to recover from and manage CPTSD for a couple of years.

I don’t know how to do any of this, but I’m trying to figure it out. I know that writers get stuck and find their way out of it, and I’ve been doing my best to give myself patience and grace and space to figure it all out … I’m just growing impatient, is the thing.

I have a great story just sitting here, inches away from my fingertips, and I can’t figure out how to grasp it.

So I guess I’ll remind myself that I’ve been putting words together in public for about 8500 days, I’ve written a bunch of books — including a New York Times bestseller! — and that whatever it takes to do it is in me. It’s just doing a very good job of Not Being Seen.

But this feels like something of a start, anyway. I forget that it’s okay to make short, silly, 50 word posts here. I forget that I don’t have to follow up every long absence with something profound and carefully edited.

I’ve been doing this for almost 25 years, and I still forget. But today, I remembered.

Thanks for listening to me.