Well, all right, I’ll put up one more entry before I slink out the back door. I just wanted to say “thank you” to everyone who’s stuck by me as a reader over the years, and I especially wanted to say thanks for the kind comments you guys left after the last entry. I was really touched by them. Thank you all, very much.

As for what’s to become of the deadpan.net world… After thinking about it for a couple of days, I don’t know if I’m going to take it all down after all or not. I’m still leaning that way, but procrastination is a powerful tool and I want to archive it all offline first as html and I’m having issues configuring the software to work with my server and, well, procrastination. So, yeah.

In the meantime, how about one last anecdote so I can go out with some twisted kind of style?

I woke up this morning in the oddest way ever. I was dreaming — and you know how dreams are. In the dream, I had walked up to some friends who were standing on an apartment balcony and I started talking to them, and I was sort of hanging off the outside of the balcony as I talked. Hanging there like that reminded me of a joke, so I started telling it to them. In the dream, this joke was so funny that I was laughing as I told it, so in my sleep I started smiling and laughing. And that’s how I woke myself up: smiling and chuckling.

Now, in my dream I felt that this joke was a little edgy for a straight-laced crowd, so you wouldn’t tell it to just anyone, but it was totally the kind of joke you’d tell your “cool” friends. And when I woke up the joke still seemed socially acceptable because the dream attitude was bleeding over into the waking world. You know how dreams are.

Well. A few minutes later I told Beth about waking myself up and started telling her the joke, and it wasn’t until I started actually speaking the words that I realized how horrifically inappropriate it was for ANY setting. I almost even offended myself, a little. It was a HORRIBLE joke, hugely offensive, and it was shocking to me how it had seemed perfectly fine until I actually started telling it.

Don’t worry, of course I’m going to tell it here. Because, what, you thought maybe I wouldn’t? Please.

So this priest is up on the pulpit, giving his Sunday sermon to a crowded church, when an aborted fetus crawls up the side of the lectern. It climbs up and over the edge and surprises him face to face. The priest flies into a rage and punches the fetus in the face as hard as he can, knocking it off the lectern. It flies through the air and off the altar and lands in the church aisle. He chases after it and kicks it down the aisle toward the back of the church, kicking it repeatedly with huge, wild field goal style kicks, cursing it as he goes and yelling “Damn you to hell! Damn you to Satan! Go back to hell, evil spawn!” Stuff like that. And as he winds up to give the aborted fetus one last giant kick that will send it flying out the rear doors of the church, the baby says–

And that’s when I woke up.

Wow. Just… wow. I can’t believe my subconscious came up with that joke. Or that it thought it was a joke. Or that it thought the “joke” was only just a little bit edgy. Or that that attitude seeped over into my conscious, waking mind. Or that any part of me thought it was funny. It’s mind-boggling.

And the worst part? I blew the punchline.

Thank you, and goodnight.

Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

Regular readers of this blog and the journal that preceded it know that I am, if nothing else, an irregular poster. I put up entries in fits and starts — I’ll be “good” for a week, two weeks, maybe even a month, putting up entries every day or two, then weeks or months will go by before there’s a new one. Something that’s always bothered me about such irregularity has been my own guilt over it — I always feel like I’m being “bad” when I don’t post, as if I owe it to my readers to put up new content. And on one level maybe I do … but since all my sites have always been free for the taking and very, very few of you know me personally, on another level maybe I don’t owe you a thing. And maybe I’m taking myself a little too seriously when I feel guilty for not providing. Maybe no one even notices.

Jim over at Meat of the Matter said something recently that really got its hooks into me. He said that the way the Internet has evolved, personal blogs have become “a non-event.” That struck a chord with me; it felt like truth, and it sort of surprised me. Always slow on the update, I suddenly realized that “blogging,” even the way I do it with the personal stories, has become a cliche. When did that happen?

I’m sort of an Internet old timer. I was part of, if not the First Wave, then certainly the First-point-Five wave of people publishing personal content on the World Wide Web. There were just a handful of “journals” online back in ’97 when I stumbled across the phenomenon and dove in with chuck’stake. We formed our own little communities and fed off each other and I like to think we helped the Internet become what it is now. We fed it content, made it an interesting place to go, showed people that everyone can have their own soapbox on the net. Now, everybody’s doing it. Even dogs have blogs.

And since reading what Jim said, and looking at my traffic stats, and reading the comments my blogs draw and the people making them… I feel like I just woke up and now see things for what they are. All of a sudden my blogging, the pictures I put up, the stories I tell — it all feels like I’m talking to myself. I feel exactly as if I were the crazy homeless guy you see down the alley having a conversation with the wall. He thinks he’s having a real, genuine, important conversation, but the wall couldn’t care less. Can’t care less. It’s a wall. I suddenly realize that I’m just one person among millions having a personal conversation with a void that couldn’t care less. It’s kind of embarrassing, actually.

And I think back to what I said when I started all this back on August 13, 1997: “I’m hoping that writing this journal will help train me to put my ass in the chair and words on the screen on a daily basis.” Well, guess what? It failed. Not only have I failed to write here on a “daily basis,” I’ve also failed to write anything of any real importance offline either since I started this. In fact, I sort of feel that the online “writing” may have been at the expense of the “real” writing, since it’s been the bulk of my output for the last ten years. As the kids would say: EPIC FAIL.

So… I think I’m done. In the next week or so I’ll be shutting down the Lunchroom here, and my motorcycle blog over there, and I think I’ll be taking all of it offline, chuck’stake too. If I won’t be putting my life online anymore because it’s just noise, then what’s the point of leaving the archives up to be noise too? Shut it down, shut it all down.

I suddenly feel the need to go dark. I like the sound of that.

My life has been a mostly open book online for the last ten years. Now I’m checking the book out. Permanently.

The Lunchroom is closed.

Wah. Wah, wah, wah. Wah. I know it’s unseemly to gloat, but: Wah. We won. You lost. Wah.

At long last, after eight years of shame, I feel a sense of hope. Our long national nightmare is over. We’ve finally driven the rats from the White House, and we own Congress too. Now we can get some work done, some change done. Now we can start repairing the damage done over the last eight years.

We can start being America again.