Ten Years and Counting!!!

Today marks a pretty amazing anniversary in my life and one I didn’t even realize until a few weeks ago. It was ten years ago today that I made my first post to Battling the Current and started my blog before blogging was really a thing. In this time blogging has gone from being cutting edge to being mainstream to being old school with people looking at my blogspot account in much the same way as they view someone with an AOL account.

Ok, I also have an AOL account but that one is nineteen years old and I have pledged to keep my AOL email until it can legally buy itself a beer and in two years time I’m pretty confident that my email will become sentient if only to stop the influx of spam email it receives daily.

Anyway, it dawned on me that I should try to do something big for this milestone. You have to understand that this blog was the highlight for a significant portion of my life. If you ask me to reminisce about my years in Kansas City I will talk about trivia contests, going to concerts, drinking way too much Boulevard Wheat at Harry’s Bar and Tables and writing about all of my adventures in my blog five nights a week. I kept that schedule for years and it only stopped when I moved to Delaware and started to date Kim at which point work, travel, relationships and getting older ate into my free time and I could no longer find the thirty minutes a night to spend looking at a laptop trying to think of something funny to say about Lindsay Lohan for the fortieth time.

Which is a bit of a bummer because it was a lot of fun to just have time scheduled to sit down and write. To be honest looking back it amazes me that I was able to sit down and churn out material year after year. For ages I always wanted to be a writer and I still consider that to be my dream job but those core blogging years were the closest that I ever came to reaching that goal. I am in no way complaining that I stopped and it was a case of trying to prioritize my time after accomplishing what the overall goal of the blog was: document the quest to meet the women of my dreams. I did and to my eternal amazement it was someone who knew about the blog from the beginning.

So, I have spent the past few weeks going through old posts and thinking about what to do. After consulting with long time commenter Super Dave, who pretty much kept me going at times by commenting at two in the morning on the most random pop culture points imaginable, I have decided to do the following.

1)      I am restarting the blog but on new terms. I know that I don’t have the time to write five nights a week anymore and if I try all that will lead to is a number of poorly written posts and me quitting after a few weeks like my past few efforts. So this time I am just going to aim for one or two posts a week that I will actually spend time crafting. That will hopefully save me from burn out, improve the quality and make this a fun endeavor. I need to get back into writing mode, as it has always been one of my biggest stress reliefs, and I want to see if I can find that stride I had ten years ago.

2)      I am going to do something silly that I have been thinking about for the past several years but have really been wanting to do which is to edit the old posts, fix the atrocious spelling and grammar, add in the comments and publish it on the Kindle for anyone to purchase for the low, low price of $0.99. I’d charge less but I think I am required to charge something. My plan right now is to take the posts from 2004 and 2005, which total somewhere around 200,000 words, and edit those over the next few months. I’ll also try to add in some comments, explanations, overviews of stories that are much different now and just generally make it something that upwards of ten people might be interested in purchasing. At the very least it is an amazing time capsule into a period of my life and a sliver of pop culture where Brittney Spears is pre-rehab, Lindsay Lohan is not a joke, and How I Met Your Mother is just about to debut. It’s like time a time machine and as we always say here at Battling the Current…

“What do we want?”

“Time travel!”

“When do we want it?”

“That’s irrelevant!”

Ten years. Pretty f’ing amazing.