[First published June 20, 2021]

I launched ebogjonson.com on November 8, 2003. Back then it was called "Big Black Brain," and its first post was the first graph of a novel I'd written and never tried to publish:

A screenshot of the first paragraph of the first post on my old blog, published in November, 2003. It read: I'm not a member of your sect and don't share your particular beliefs and ways, but I'm old enough to have learned the value of courtesy. It's a lesson to which you'd do well to attend. You come to my home unannounced, interrupt my day and demand I tell you what I know of the black ships. You ask me to tell my story, but we both know you're not interested in me, only in what I had the chance to witness. I'm tempted to turn you away, but you'd come back or not leave and I'll not be accused of standing between you and the story your faith holds high above all others. To teach you what true courtesy means, I'll even begin my telling the way you and yours begin any tale that touches upon or concerns your belief: In the name of the Most High, in the Unknowable Names of the Black Ships, in the name of Him Who Rode a Black Ship into the Sky, into the Promised Next, and into the Beyond.

The larger blog was an attempt to write my way out of a life problem, which was that I missed writing. Before 1999, my life had been wholly organized around writing, and after 1999 it became organized around web product and project management. In so much I worked with words after 1999, it was usually to edit them rather than write them, to plot how they might be best distributed digitally. Thinking I might blog my way out of this pickle, I launched an anonymous Movable Type-powered site where I warehoused bits of unpublished fiction, political musings, a dream log. The name I chose was the username I've been using since the mid-1990s. So much for anonymity. Like every liar, I secretly wanted to be caught.

And after a while, I was. The blog stopped being anonymous and became unexpectedly generative for me, connecting me to a community that saw me through deaths, professional changes, political upheavals, another move. Posting waxed and waned depending on what I was doing for work, which to say: depending on how much time I had to feel the ache of my life problem. I worked for myself when I moved to CA in 2005, and the years immediately after were particularly prolific. I blogged a ton here, writing a few posts that were small-blog-sized hits, and, off here, I did some of the best work of my writing career. Even when I went back to work full time, I made sure to keep my domain up to date and migrated ebogjonson.com from MT to Drupal to more Drupal to Kirby, depending on my mood and what I was using to build sites for clients and employers. My personal sandbox.

Now I have some other life problems, which is that I'm sick to death of social media. At some point--I don't know when--the energy that I used to put into updating my own site went into compulsively sharing and commenting on someone else's, and I think I am very much the worse for it. I recently undertook a Cal Newport-style program of digital minimalism, and as a part of that, I'm reclaiming my time from Facebook to put some of it to better use here. I am not exactly sure what form that reclaimation will take, but dream logging and sharing rants and fictions will likely be a part of it.

Anyway, that's that. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line. Either way, and even if you've never been here before: welcome back! - Gary/ebog