Well, when I was thinking up and
writing my last post,
Paul Ford was writing this, on the occasion of 20 years of blogging:
I took it very seriously for many years and it earned me thousands of readers, thousands of emails, and tons of opportunity. It was better at generating opportunity than money. I drifted away for all the regular reasons.
I had many thoughts about how to mark this moment and all of them were self-indulgent and exhausting. What I do is completely relevant and alive, thank you, and what was lost was lost. People keep expecting me to be wistful and nostalgic. But there was no innocence or purity. Not ideologically, politically, textually, technologically, sexually, or personally. Everything powered by ambition comes with compromise and taint, and is made under ridiculous circumstances. Everything good is transmuted from grudge-fueled self-doubt into something that other people love and criticize, knowing they could do better if given the time and resources.
That's a pretty economical encapsulation, looking back from my mid-career perspective. The ending is also quite a kicker.
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