This Is Zero.
Well! You made it all the way back to the very beginning.
So. What was the beginning like?
It's close to 8:30 PM on a cold Tuesday in mid-February. The snow began late last night and it's finally called it a day after a damn productive outing. 8 to 10 inches isn't exactly one for the record books here in New England. But it's the kind of snow that yearns to be packed into spheres, of suitable scale for either snowman construction or hurling at the wicked. Or just at people in the wrong place at the wrong time wearing fancy tall stovepipe hats.
I'm in my office, but I'm not at my desk. I'm at the little table where I record my podcasts. I recorded Episode 908 of MacBreak Weekly today with my friends Leo, Alex, and Jason. The show wrapped four hours ago but I haven't left my chair since. I'm comfortable, I'm getting things done, and these Sony over-the-ear headphones are keeping my ears warm, so I chose to stay put.
Yikes…yes, I ought to fix dinner.
Soon.
Beginnings can be anticipated, I find, but they can't always be planned. The best ones just sort of Happen, as a perfect afternoon just Happens. Think about a perfect afternoon you've experienced. It's more likely to be a time when you finished your business in the city and headed for the commuter rail station, but then you detoured through the park, and the people and the weather and the critters all conspired at that moment to make you feel deeply, gratefully content.
Compare and contrast this with an over-planned vacation. Right?
I've been planning the relaunch of Ihnatko.com for years. Scratch that: I've been planning the relaunch of Ihnatko.com for (pause) (sigh) (pause) (hesitates to say something) (thinks better of it) (waves off the thought) years. There was never a fixed deadline for the project. Only an increasing sense of embarrassment about how long the site had been down, and a deepening impatience to have a place where I could write whatever the hell I want, whenever I want, and often without even a good reason for writing it.
I'm sure that the route from there to here will be worth writing a post about. Not soon, I think. That feels like the episode of a sitcom spinoff where characters from the old show turn up. When they arrive in Season 2, it's jolly fun. If it happens during Episode Four, one can't ignore the festive party banner hanging across the entire width of the lead character's living room reading "Are We Really This Desperate Already" in bouncy, balloon letters.
The beginning of this iteration of Ihnatko.com just Happened, and it was far from impulsive. Over the past few years, I've been thinking hard about the big stuff and the little stuff, from "What color should the highlighted text be?" to "Is this even still a good idea? The Post Office is hiring."
But during that time, every question faded from something to figure out to an answer that now seemed like a solid fact, even if I hadn't formally acknowledged it.
And that's why, when I carelessly hit YouTube and searched for a video about this tool I'm using right now, I thought "Hell with it. Let's just go."
"About goddamn time," my Muse said, and put down her copy of David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" (which she herself never finished reading…even though she'd been picking at it since this downtime began, before the oceans had learned to walk and the 3/4 musical time signature was still considered unachievable under Earth's atmospheric conditions).
I went through a series of steps that I was already well-prepared for; I made a bunch of creative and decisions that I already knew by heart; I second-guessed one or two things for a moment before swatting those thoughts to the floor, where my Muse squashed them dead with all 1079 pages of the book that moved the critic at The New York Times to speak of shooting either the author or himself, right in the review's opening paragraph.
And then I wrote this. Because a blog without content is just an empty container, and I was eager for this thing to formally move from a thing I plan to do to a thing that is.
Yeah, I'm sure I'm going to change a few things here and there. But I feel great about pushing the "Publish" button. Even if nobody will be reading it for a while.
Push the button, Frank… ⓘ