New Day, New Year

New day, new year, new— Not exactly a new website, but a revised and revived one. I have Pete Pollack to thank for this. I stopped blogging a long time ago, but now I am retired from my fulltime job as a medical editor, and I guess I am ready to try it again, not with formal essays but with talk. Whatever is on my mind (within reason). And Pete has helped me immeasurably with this, getting me back online. So I thank him.

This website was originally created by the late Mike Johnson, a friend of ours from our days at the AAOS. Mike died too young, damn it, and we lost him in 2020, right in the middle of the goddamn worst year in memory. He leaves behind his wife and daughter, was loved by many and missed by all of us. He and I used to have fun talking about fanboy stuff, and he knew the mysteries of programming and software in ways I will never master. Years ago, he took VHS stuff I filmed, digitized it, and put it online for me. And had fun doing it.

So Pete, our friend, has stepped up to help me out with this revived website, meaning that he is doing all the work behind the scenes, leaving me to blabber on this blog.

Which I intend to do. My goal is to put out a bit of monologue every day or every other day. I seem to be able to go on and on and on when I type emails to friends, so we’ll see if I can do it on this blog.

Outside the window, the day is gray, overcast, with black naked skeletal tree branches set against the gray. Quiet and empty out there. I’m here listening to Radio Dismuke, my online go-to comfort zone. It plays music from the late 1920s and early 1930s exclusively. I find this very relaxing.

Goes back, I am sure, to my interest in silent movies and the popular culture of the 1920s and all the 78 rpm records I found at country auctions and in thrift stories back in the 1970s and played on the deluxe antique Victrola I have lugged around with me wherever I have moved and lived. I listen to Bix Beiderbecke and Scrappy Lambert and Annette Hanshaw and Ben Pollack and am content.

Today, though, as it does on holidays, Radio Dismuke has notable record collectors and historians talking about the old records, so not much is playing. I’ll cue up my own old stuff.

I know my audience is small, and that’s okay with me. Preferable, in fact. For folks who know about my writing, I intend to talk about that, about my books and books I’ve read and any other ideas that come to me. Four hundred, five hundred words at a time. That’s sufficient.

New day, new year, and new blogs to come.