We had a server problem last night and this morning, so moronosphere.com come was down. Let me know if any mail sent to me bounced back to you.

Meanwhile, all looks well now.

If you’re reading this it means you’ve found the new, and not-at-all-improved, version of moronosphere.com.

Lucky you.

If anything seems broken let me know; all we did was swap hardware, so everything should be identical.

I’m working on moving all the domains I host to a new server.

This isn’t helped much by the fact that that company that physically maintains our hardware fucked up the machine and had to wipe and re-do it, after I’d moved half my domains.

But in any case, I’m down to the hard ones, the ones that have database-driven blogs and so forth.

Sometime in the next couple of days, this site and others hosted here may go unreachable for a short duration. The move should (knock wood) be largely invisible to the user, but still, fair warning.

I’ll post a note here when I’m done.

Ok, so I need some help from a template designer who knows movable type 4.

I don’t need a lot, but I do need someone else to suffer the slings and arrows for me. Payment will be in sexual favors and good old yankee dollars.

I don’t intend to port my old template as is, but I want to keep some of it’s elements, so I’ve got a pretty clear idea of a starting point.

I became aware of this because a commenter on my previous entry mentioned it. This tells you how on-the-fucking-ball I am lately, when readers have to mention significant dates to me. I mean come ON, I’m mister significant dates.

Today marks four years of blogging; four years of the pain and pleasure that is The Moronosphere.

But as with the new year, it’s seemed that I don’t have much to say about milestones lately. Maybe, to steal a quote from Iandiana Jones, It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage. Maybe I’ve just had too many milestones and they’re getting smaller with perspective.

Or maybe it’s a symptom of everything else lately, the motivational drain of too much have to and not enough want to. I can’t seem to get worked up much lately unless there’s sex involved, and I can’t seem to get the sexuality lined up with the creativity to turn that into something that lasts longer than few orgasms.

Who th’ fuck knows, y’know?

Four years blogging. I’m not even sure what to say of it. I was surprised to be still at it after one, amazed after two, and still thrilled with what this whole experience has given me in terms of friends made and experiences had, not to mention with the pleasure of simply having an audience for my words. At three, I had les to say, simply observing that it’d been a Long, Strange Trip.

At four I find still less to say on the matter; but maybe that’s because in the last year, my written output has radically decreased from the previous year.

I find myself compelled to graph this:

And yes, I spenty 20 minutes goofing with excel for that, as a way of avoiding writing more words (you know the ratio of worth, pictures to words, after all).

Yet, what I see when I graph this isn’t that my output has dropped near zero, as I expected. It was dropped to near 2004, but that is certainly not zero. This in some way gives me hope; it tells me I’m not done with this. I considered graphing by months, but that I fear would show me an unfavorable curve, and I think I won’t look at that, at least not today.

What I will do, though, is set myself a challenge; I *must* write something fictional before January is gone, even if it’s only a scene or a bit of dialog. I do not need to *finish* it, but I need to publish it here, just to prove to myself I haven’t lost the gift of it, and I guess to say fuck you you fucking fuck to my recalcitrant muse. I’ve tended to use distractions and workload and issues with attention span to justify not writing; I must stop that. I must write, even if it’s only a few words. After all, so the anecdote has it, James Joyce once sat disconsolate in his study when a friend dropped by. “I’ve only written seven words today”, Joyce told him. “But James”, reassured his friend, “Seven words is a good day for you”. “Yes,” wailed Joyce, “But I don’t know which order they go in”.

If seven words were good for James Joyce, I should count it a success if I can make a baker’s dozen.

(thanks to Taro’s Travels for that quote, I couldn’t quote recall it)

This is Moronosphere blog entry number 1000. And I look at that number with a mixture of confusion and pride.

In January of 2004, my friend Jennifer offered to host of a domain I owned. I wasn’t doing anything with it, but I figured, hell, I might as well host it someplace and use it for email and a couple of web pages. Jen’s then-boyfriend had a machine in his office, and was more than happy to donate a bit of space and a bit of bandwidth.

Do you want a blog, while I’m at it? Jen asked me, since she already had Movable Type installed.

I couldn’t really imagine why I’d want one, but I was curious about how the tools worked. I didn’t really get blogging, but I learn better with my hands involved than when it’s just my eyes. So I said, yeah why not.

I didn’t think much about it. I’d been hanging around with a few bloggers like Trance, Circe, Doxy, Jenifer, and a number of others, and I didn’t really see myself doing what they did. On the other hand, I’d been having a successful run writing erotic fiction, which was posted on a now-defunct site called Satin Slippers. So I figured, blogging might help my writing; it might give me a place to get down my own thoughts on writing, and would be a place to keep in practice when the muse wasn’t cooperating.

Plans like that rarely quite play out when it comes to blogs. One may begin writing about sex, to find one’s voice is more focused on personal growth. One may start writing about chickens, and then find one’s blogger’s voice has more to do with family and daily life. Blogging’s like that. Once you stop thinking about what you write, and begin to write, the blog has a personality all it’s own. This sort of writing has no rules.

I started doing this, one thosand entries ago, with no thought to who might ever read it, what it might bring or cost, or what it’s duration. I am, frankly, amazed to find I’m still doing it. I cannot stop, even if I want, though some days it seems a burden, or an herculean labor.

I find the outlet – and the audience – the be an essential part of my life, as much when I can’t do it as when I can.

Still – one thousand. I wish there was a good way to count the words; half a million? a million? More?

There’s a small temptation to summarize the fractional lifetime these 1000 pages represent; but I’ve done that in one sense far too much already. And the years between then and now haven’t lain easily on me, for all that there are high points ranking in the highest of my life. Summaries will be left for another time, some more concrete life milestone.

This project started out just for me, and always, I need to focus on that. It’s not for you people, for all I love the lot of you; it’s for me, and I have to keep writing for myself, and not censor so much as I sometimes have. Whatever I’m feeling, I need to try harder to write it, and let the desire to be good hinder me less. I need to think less about who may or may not think is that about me, and write, to the best of my ability, as if no one was reading.

One thousand entries. A line from a Gin Blossoms song comes to mind:

The lost horizons I could see
are now resigned to memories
I never thought I’d still be here today

I still can’t really say I get blogging, of course, but maybe in another thousand entries, I will.