Back in the Blogging Game (for good this time, honest)

Sincerity Victory for the Day (or “Reason Why Life Is Better than You Give It Credit For”): You can play fantasy football with the Puppy Bowl this year! The only thing better than watching puppies run around for hours is being able to gamble on puppies running around for hours. I’m going to go with Mandy for my first pick. I think she is going to be a fine girl and what a good puppy she would be if it wasn’t for the fact that my life, my love and my lady was a large body of salt water that covers the majority of the earth’s surface.

http://deadspin.com/you-can-draft-a-fantasy-puppy-bowl-team-1493337187

Sincerity Failure #2: While sitting at the dentist’s office watching The Today Show…

Willard Scott: “Birthday wishes go out to Dolores Smith as she turns 100 years old today. Dolores’ longevity secret?”

Me: “Pure, unadulterated anger.”

Like I said, getting rid of the snark is going to be hard.

So for people who might be new to this I have started blogging again. Consider it part of my New Year’s Resolutions of which there are others that I will discuss over the coming days. Basically I have stopped writing for three years or so after being a five day a week writer for seven years and a novel a year writer for thirteen (novel a year in that I wrote enough words in my journal to equal a novel. Not a novel in the sense that my life either a) had a plot or b) was something worth reading about). The fact is after a lot of reflection I have found that I am happier and just a better person in general when I write regularly. There is just something about having an avenue of expression that I am comfortable with that makes life easier.

The challenge though is that I have roughly twenty eight hours of things I would like to do every day and about thirty hours of things that I have to do every day so finding the twenty or thirty minutes to write these entries has become a lot more challenging than it was when I started this blog. Back then I was just sitting alone in my apartment in Kansas City using a dial up modem still to just vent about my life. Now I am married with responsibilities and a travel schedule that has made me one of Southwest’s favorite customers and it is just that much more challenging to sit down and put some thoughts together. But I’ve decided that this year I need to make time for this even if it means completely changing my schedule around.

What I write about will basically be just whatever is on my mind that day. I don’t write about my job and I try not to write about relationships. I’ve learned over the years that it is really difficult for me to write about those things without making everything worse. It does not help that I will admit that everything I write, fiction, memoir or non-fiction, is all about 75% true, 15% truish, and 10% stuff I thought was funny at the time. It’s the Irish in me. I was raised to never let the truth get in the way of a good story. However that makes writing about real people who know me and actually read this kind of awkward because they can be very public about how much I am lying.

Otherwise everything is pretty straightforward. I’ll write what is on my mind, try to track my progress in the Sincerity Project regularly and anyone reading this is free to comment on any posts as long as they can prove that they are not a robot. There are hundreds of old entries archived and one day, if I can ever find a twenty ninth hour in the day and an editor, I hope to collect the best entries and make it available as a Kindle download. On Sunday nights I’ll post the Best of 120 Minutes video of the week (alternative nation at its finest) and I will continue the Wednesday Night Music Club (video of whomever has caught my attention that week.) I’ll try to keep to my old Sunday to Thursday schedule because I hope you have better things to do on the weekend than to read my blog and I certainly would like to have something better to do than write it.

As always, thanks to everyone who has ever read or commented here over the years. I am sincerely going to try to get back in the habit of writing and just knowing that someone will occasionally come across these words and leave a comment makes it extremely worthwhile.

Let's Get Ready to (Re)Launch!

3 -2 -1 Contact!

(It’s the secret… It’s the moment…)
At some point one has to put things into perspective. I started this blog back in November 2004 when I was a mere lad of 31. Ashlee Simpson sold 3.5 million copies of her album “Autobiography” that year. “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Troy” were two of the top movies of the year. “Friends” ended and “Joey” began in 2004. Since that day I have made 1,516 blog posts and if you just assume 500 words a post that means that I have given the internet 758,000 words of wisdom. I started after Friendster but before MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Hell, I had a blog before Barney had a blog on How I Met Your Mother and Barney never even mentions his blog anymore.
Over this time I have lived in three states, worked for two companies and at one point found myself being paid to not show up in the office anymore. I have gone from being the guy at the end of the bar pining for a girl he had met a year earlier, to the guy who signed up for a dating service, to the guy at the end of the bar who was really upset at the amount of money he had spent on dating services, to, and I will never in all my years understand how this happened, being married to the woman I was pining for in the first place. All of this is to say that I am not the same person that I was when I started writing here. Heck, if you buy that legend that your cells regenerate every seven years than I am not even the same person molecularly speaking.

What this is about is why I haven’t been writing and how that is going to change. I really have let the blog fade away but it was mainly due to the fact that I couldn’t figure out just what to write about. When I started the idea really was to just have a place for me to vent and tell stories about going to bars and going to concerts and ripping on pop culture and talking about my misadventures trying to date in Kansas City. But things are so different for me now that I can’t write in that manner anymore. I now stay home with my wife and watch television and realize that I can see 40 in front of me and realizing that middle age is no longer just a theory but is now a mathematical fact.

But I really have been getting the urge to write again and I have decided that I really need to carve out the time on a daily basis to just sit down and put words to paper (or electrons to screen depending on how literal a metaphor one wants to use). The thoughts and posts have been buzzing around my head and since I have a little corner of the internet all to myself I decided to hang the shingle one more time and try my hand at internet punditry. Heck, I might even get a twitter account since that is what all of the cool kids seem to be doing today even though one of the biggest things that I have realized over the past year is that I am no longer a cool kid. If I ever was one in the first place.

So this is going to be a blog about the way my life is now. I am not sure where that will lead me other than there will be less posts at two in the morning discussing encounters with random strangers in bars. And probably more posts about jointly filing taxes. Essentially it is going to be about how a Gen X kid tries to rapidly turn himself into a middle aged adult without losing his essence or his mind in the process. Along the way I’ll still delve into the world of pop culture, where Snooki’s pregnancy can have more airtime than the Italian debt crisis and where Justin Bieber is still a thing, apparently. If you are interested stop in and stay awhile. Otherwise, just consider me one of the infinite number of silent voices online struggling to be heard. Oh, and if you came to this blog by means of the most popular web search on google for it, the answer to who is Strawberry Shortcake’s archenemy is the Purple Pieman. (Trust me, search “Strawberry Shortcake enemy” in Google and this blog is the second link. I am not sure if I should be proud of that or not.)

A return of sorts...

On the plane tonight I finished Julian Barnes’ “The Sense of an Ending.” In and of itself that probably is not reason enough to restart the blog. If what I read is the inspiration for posting again then my devouring “I Want my MTV”, the oral history of the first decade of MTV, would be the top choice. But the book has put some thoughts in my mind that tie into what I’ve been thinking about recently and why I wanted to start writing again.

The novel, which is a very good read, focuses upon perception and memory and how we interpret our own past. We each consider ourselves to be the hero of our own story and we have created a mythology of our own legend. These memories define who we are but as we get older the question as to whether those memories are real or not become more and more in doubt. As Barnes writes, “History can be viewed as the lies of the winners or the self-delusions of the defeated.”

This made me think about how we document our lives, whether through pictures or videos or words. One of the reasons that I write is that I find it therapeutic to keep a record of my thoughts. Not that I feel that there is any historic value to them. In fact, for years I kept all of my writings to myself. It is not really what I write that is important as the pure act of writing and getting my thoughts out. For some reason I best express myself by looking at a screen and letting words flow from my fingers. I am more thoughtful and eloquent in this form and when I stop writing it effects who I am as a person. And I’ve spent too long of a time not writing and it is really becoming noticeable.

Battling the Current really is a record of who I am, or more accurately who I was. I wrote constantly from November 2004 until March 2011, which would just happen to correspond to when I got married. Now there are a lot of reasons as to why I stopped writing (mainly getting married, moving and switching jobs in the same week made my life so stressful that I can’t really describe it) but one major point is that the story behind the blog had come to an end. I started the blog to document my journey of being on my own, going out and trying to find the woman of my dreams. Once that story was completed I had no idea what the new story would be, which is a fancy way of saying that I was really wondering where my life was headed next.

I think I have it now. I still have a lot of growing to do and striving to become the man that I want to be. For years that was about creating that image as I sat at the end of a bar and looked at my reflection in the mirror. Now it is about more being than image and to stop paying lip service. The stories of our own histories that we tell ourselves are not always true. Sometimes you have to face some harsh lights. But that is how we grow. And that journey is what the next phase of my writing is going to be about.

So yes, I am back to writing every day. And yes, it will be the usual mix of pop culture and discussions of a bizarre world and the occasional derogatory reference to the state of Kansas. Some things never change. But the story has changed directions.

Starting over

Testing…testing…one two three….

Ok, and we’re back.

So yeah, this blog has been out of commission for several months. In fact, I don’t think I’ve posted anything for nearly five months, which is pretty amazing since I kept up a five night a week posting habit for over six years. After a period of spending most of my free time categorizing the whims of pop culture and the meandering path that is my life I just took some time off. I mean it’s not like I’ve done anything over the past few months…

Nope, I just got married, moved (to two different places) and started a new job. All in basically the same week. No challenges there at all.

Essentially the past several months of my life have been the most stressful that I have ever experienced. Basically every aspect of my daily routine was flipped upside down at once and it is only now that I am beginning to feel as though I’ve found my feet again. There were good times and bad times during that stretch and I was so busy addressing those issues that I just did not have the time or inclination to sit down and write every night. At some point in your life you realize that writing about Lindsay Lohan is not precisely the best way to spend your free time.

(That said, the fact that I timed my wedding with her being confined to house arrest may not be as coincidental as it may seem.)

But throughout all of this I have been intending to restart the blog. I haven’t had time to write and there were so many other priorities that it was placed in the back of my mind but it was always there. Writing is just a part of who I am. The sheer act of sitting down every night and writing for fifteen or twenty minutes just helps me relax. I’ve never even focused on how many people read this (or if it is written in proper English). I just like having an outlet to unload whatever is on my mind at the moment. Now that I finally feel like I have a schedule I really feel the need to start writing again.

Over the past few months, going back even before I stopped writing, I had been struggling with just what this blog is supposed to be about. When I started it in 2004 the goal was pretty simple: I was going to write about my efforts to build a social life in Kansas City while riffing on pop culture and music. And that was a blast, writing bar stories and talking about my horrible dating techniques. But then Kim came back into my life and we got engaged and are now, and I still can’t quite believe this, actually married. That part of my life, the guy sitting alone at the end of the bar sarcastically commenting on everything that crosses his path, is no longer there. And that put the blog in a strange place because I wasn’t sure what I was writing about anymore. Or to be honest, who was this EC character that was the focal point of the blog.

I’ve figured it out recently. After getting married I now really feel like an adult. It is probably sad that I am saying this at 37 but it really is true. My thinking has changed, my focus has changed and all of the little bull shit that I used to do and say now really bothers me. Not that I still don’t do it, I can still be the cynical asshole, but I’ve realized that is not who I want to be anymore. I want to be a good husband and a good guy and just be that person I’ve always wanted to be. I’m married to the woman of my dreams, someone who makes me smile just by being in the same room as her, and I want to be the man she deserves.

So that is what this blog is now going to be about. How I make that next step in my transformation: from that delayed adolescence that seems to plague Gen X males to being a full fledged adult. There will still be discussions about pop culture (such as a discussion of the 30 years of MTV tomorrow) and all of my usual tangents but that is going to be my new focus. It’s going to be a long journey and I’m still not quite sure how I will get there but I will comment on it all the same. I’ve got a co-pilot with me now, that makes all the difference in the world.

Returning to Blogging Duty

So it has been a few weeks since I last wrote. Three if my math is right, which would make this by far the longest break I’ve taken from blogging and writing in general in five years. First off, thanks to those who got in touch with me to check that everything is ok. I know that for some people my blog has been the best way to keep up with what I am doing and it has become so routine that not writing has been a signal that something has gone wrong. That wasn’t the case this time.

It’s weird to say that my life has gotten busy but in a way that is the best way to put it. I just have more on my plate now between time with Kim and taking care of things for work and all of the other aspects of life. I’ve also been traveling a ton and it has just taken a toll on me. The last few weeks all I wanted to do when I got home was maybe do a little reading, a little work on the jigsaw puzzle and sleep. I’m sorry for the lack of posts but my body and mind needed some time away from writing about Lindsay Lohan hitting a baby with her car.

(I think we’ve reached the point where we can use the term “Menace to Society” with regards to her.)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this idea for the past few days and figured that it would be a good first topic back. Kim makes fun of me for the amount of time that I spend on Facebook and I have to admit that it is a rather strange obsession of mine. Now to be honest I don’t really do much on Facebook and I do significantly less than I did a year or two ago. I don’t update my status unless I can think of a really good pun, I haven’t uploaded pictures in years and I accept friend requests whenever I am bored enough to deal with it. Really all I do is login and look at everyone else’s status updates.

When you think of it that is a really odd, voyeuristic thing to do. Like most people, my Facebook friends are not my friends at all. Or at least a significant portion of them are not. Sure, they may have been friends at one point in my life but in some cases that was decades ago. In some cases I can’t even say that we ever were friends; we just happen to have some shared experiences based mainly on geography. Yet every day I check to see what they are doing. I know their jobs, the names of their children, and where they went on vacation. I know all of this despite the fact that for all intensive purposes these people are complete strangers to me.

What is more unusual and disconcerting is this is the same for all of us. Essentially everyone is on Facebook now and your life is on display for the world to see. We have reached a point where there is almost no such thing as private information anymore. We’ve listed everything in our profile and by detailing the minutiae of our life in status updates and Twitter posts and Flickr feeds people who don’t know us know everything about us. It’s a rather frightening thought. We have all become infinitely more social without actually talking to anyone.

This is probably strange coming from someone who in two months will be celebrating the six year anniversary of this blog. I can’t say that it wasn’t a factor in taking a little break from writing. Putting yourself out there every day for the world to see is a rather daunting thought. What does it really mean to know that in the last year someone from Iran has read my blog or that I have a relatively large number of visitors from Norway? Is it a loss of privacy or a way, as minor as it may be, to put my voice out there in the world?

I have a feeling that will be one of the subjects I will be grappling with over the next year. I’m going to keep writing because I feel better when I write and if I write I might as well blog. But I’m not sure what direction this is going to take. The days of writing about bar stories are behind me. Now I just have to figure out what is in front of me.

The five random CDs for the week (which had also been on a bit of a vacation):
1) Aimee Mann “I’m With Stupid”
2) R.E.M. “Murmur:
3) The Iguanas “Plastic Silver Nine Volt Heart”
4) Alejandro Escovedo “Thirteen Years”
5) Jay Bennett “Bigger than Blue”

Fast Food Nation-State

Editor’s note: As some of the more observant of you may have noticed there is a new box under my profile in which you can join my blog network. This is for the members of Facebook nation (though click on it even if you aren’t because I’m not sure what happens) as you can become part of the Battling the Current network and receive a blog feed through Facebook. There is also theoretically a way that if you have a Blogger account that you can become my Follower. In either case all I can say is “Follow me! Follow me to freedom!” Or just consider this your official membership in my personality cult.

So I have spent the past several days analyzing the fast food options on my 35 minute commute to the office. The findings are rather astounding. Here they are, organized by chain.

McDonald’s: None. Ok, that is not technically true. On the way home I noticed that if I drove the wrong way down a one way street for several blocks I would reach one. And while the draw of a Filet-o-Fish is very strong that is probably too much of a challenge to reach on a regular basis. However, I would like to give ample warning to the people on the sidewalk that during Shamrock Shake season they better watch out.

Burger King: A half a King. There is one but it is connected to a gas station. For some reason I always feel very wary about any fast food joint that is directly tied to a gas station. I always assume that these sites have much lower quality than the standard restaurant. That seems completely ludicrous given the fact that the place is going to clog my arteries either way.

Wendy’s: One. An actual, honest to goodness, stand alone restaurant. However, since I have never been a big Wendy’s fan this isn’t actually that big of a benefit. Sure, the spicy chicken sandwich is an obvious winner but the fries are subpar and who in their right mind would order a baked potato?

Subway: One but it is hidden. They have a sign out (next to an abandoned gas station and in front of a Wal-Mart) but the store itself is way in the back of this strip mall. However, I am more than happy to have one within a close drive of my office. There is nothing better than a five dollar foot long when facing a late night in the office.

KenTacoHut: None, in either the original format or the combined Voltronesque conglomerate. I’m a little saddened that there isn’t one nearby. There is something immensely satisfying in realizing that one can make chicken, pizza or tacos from the same kitchen using the same ingredients and equipment. It’s the fast food equivalent of the Apollo program.

Boston Market: One. Maybe not officially fast food but it is not as though I would sit down there to eat. Amazing that this is there but not any of the other alternatives.

Nathan’s Famous: One. This intrigues me and at some point I will have to stop in. It is a hot dog stand and as a hot dog aficionado I feel that it is my duty to check the place out. But it is a place for New York style hot dogs so I am immediately apprehensive. It’s New York; how would they know how to make a hot dog? My only other hot dog option is this place called Johnnie’s Dog House which, based on the one at the airport, offers all the different regional styles. That is even worse. That just means they do all of them poorly.

Dunkin Donuts: Two. There is hope for this place yet.

Tomorrow night: Vice Presidential debate live blog! Podiums! Moderators! A candidate who uses the word Aboot! Should be interesting to say the least.

Wednesday Night Music Club: If it is fall that can only mean one thing. Hockey season! Here is one of my personal faves, Kathleen Edwards, with the best hockey video ever made.

Relaunch Party!

As many of you know (and as the above picture helps to illustrate) a week ago today I officially completed my move from Kansas City to Wilmington. Or at least that is when my moving truck arrived carrying all of my belongings, which were delivered to me in roughly the same condition as they were when they were placed on the truck. Sadly, they were not magically dusted on the trip causing me to perform more cleaning than I would have preferred though my aversion to cleaning is what caused the whole issue in the first place.

But the point is that as of now I am essentially settled into my new place. Unpacking the CD collection, placing all of them on the ground in alphabetical piles, and then placing the entire collection into the stands in alphabetical order by artist and then chronologically within the artist made me finally feel as though this was a permanent event. It also made me realize that the degree to which my life is ordered has probably gone a few steps beyond being an interesting personality quirk and has reached a point where medication may be required. But I’ll deal with that at a later date.

(Though I have to say, looking at 700 discs scattered around the floor looked really, really cool.)

I was supposed to have the internet in my apartment running last Monday and I momentarily did. Then, thanks to an error that I still have not understood completely my account uninstalled itself and it took me until Thursday to realize to that if I just followed the same procedure the technician did that I could reinstall it myself. Hence, what few blog postings I made over the past two weeks were primarily written at work where I had about five minutes every few days to post just so that everyone would know that I did not fall off the face of the earth or had found myself in yet another medical misadventure.

But with all of that done I can now officially get back to blogging and I would like to take this as a moment to officially relaunch the blog. Nothing is going to change, at least technically. It is still Battling the Current and I’m keeping kcgatsby because I think it is an awesome reference (though props to a friend of mine who suggested DelawareChesterton as my new name). This site has been going for four years and over 1,000 posts and I have no desire to stop now.

What is going to change is the obvious. I’ll keep on writing about my life but my life is now very different than it was a few months ago. Kansas jokes will be replaced with Delaware references that no one will understand. I’ll be writing about what it is like to move to a town where you know no one and starting work at a company that you are familiar with and are a stranger at all at the same time. There will be a little stronger focus on politics mainly due to the time of year. I’ll still write about pop culture but just be aware that I no longer have a job where surfing the Internet is a requirement so I might be a half step behind where I was, which was still six steps ahead of most of the population. Really, I am just going to focus on having the blog meet my initial objective: being something people can read in the morning at work for a five minute reprieve from another day at the office.

For my new readers (or people who are rejoining after a long absence) there are a few standard features should be aware of. Sunday night features The Best of 120 Minutes (a video from music’s golden age) and the Random CDs for the week (what I’m listening to in my car that week). Wednesday night has the Wednesday Night Music Club: a video from an artist you don’t know but should. And Friday night will be your 80s Weekend Rewind: a video from the early days of MTV that is much funnier in retrospect than one would imagine. As always, feel free to comment on anything I write. Annonymous comments are fine, I just require that you prove that you are not a robot intent on overthrowing society before you post. It’s tough to offend me so it is an open forum and there is still nothing better than checking my email and seeing that I have comments. Makes this all worthwhile.

I’m still Battling the Current. I still think that I am swimming upstream in a society that does not match what I envision it to be. My present life is not all that I want it to be. This is a story about one man’s journey to find his own destiny. Join me. It could prove to be quite interesting.

Best of 120 Minutes: Back to someone who I have had a crush on for the past fifteen years or so: Liz Phair. The fact that she is only a few years older than me and is a fellow Chicagoan makes me always think that in some parallel world the two of us met up and fell in love. Why I never tried to make this happen in this world is beyond me. Here is “Supernova” with a video that appears to be from a Scooby Doo episode gone horribly wrong.



Five Random CDs for the Week:
1) The Last Town Chorus “Wire Waltz”
2) Aimee Mann “@#%*! Smilers”
3) Aaron Neville “The Grand Tour”
4) Anders Parker “Tell It To the Dust”
5) Jump, Little Children “Magazine”

They better not dare mess with the eviction ceremony

First off, I would like to express my utmost disgust and dismay at my local CBS affiliate for their actions last night. It was bad enough that they shrunk the screen to show election results but they even cut into a broadcast to discuss the primary. Not any broadcast mind you but Big Brother right when the entire house was in a massive argument. What they couldn’t be bothered to wait for a commercial break? Did they really need to tell me what the numbers were with 1% of the polls reporting? It was a freaking August primary. The power of veto competition is way more important than that.

Today was a nice day. Having made my decision has helped to reduce a lot of the stress that I’ve been under for the past few weeks. It’s tough for me to explain but I’ve been waking up every day with a headache that was not alcohol related. I didn’t have an appetite and was probably not drinking enough water given the heat wave that we were under. That is just the way I tend to deal with stress. Lots of people eat when they are nervous; I stop eating. I also tend to lie in bed until the last possible moment. Today I was actually out doing things and laughing and smiling, which is a welcome change.

For those who are already wondering I will be keeping this blog going at the same URL. First off I have to keep blogging because I will have more interesting stories in the next few months than I have had in a long time. Moving to a new part of the country with all of its inherent idiosyncrasies will just be a field day for me. I still won’t write about work (and I’m kind of wondering when I will tell people about the blog) but life should give me a lot of mew topics to explore.

I will be keeping the kcgatsby domain and monitor for a few reasons. First is that after four years I probably have built up a small following who would be upset if I changed the location of the page. But mainly I like the image behind KC Gatsby. I really do try to model myself after Jay Gatsby. Suave and debonair but tied to his past and unable to gain true acceptance in this world. (I’ll ignore the whole part about being shot by a jealous husband. Let’s just say that I avoid swimming pools for that reason.) But being Gatsby in KC doesn’t make sense and neither do I. I’m just a mass of inconsistencies so why not have a name that echoes it. Plus, I have more than my fair share of Daisies in this world.

Wednesday Night Music Club: I’m not sure why but I just really feel like posting some Rufus Wainwright tonight. This is from the Want One album, which is high on the list of incredible discs that you don’t own. There is such an orchestral and dramatic feel to all of his music that I dig. It is musical in the right sense of that term. Plus this song is about the unknown and confusion and it just seems to fit with the way that I’ve been feeling the past few days.