Don’t Say It: A One-Man Dialogue

Don’t say it.

But you-

Don’t even say it, because I know.

[in unison]
Oh my God, I thought you had quit blogging!	Oh my God, I thought you had quit blogging!

Told you I knew.

Of course you knew, we’re the same person. What, you think you’re cool because you can read your own mind?

Whatever. Never mind, …mind.

You and your blog decided to take the summer off?

Pfft!… It was hardly a decision.

Just another one of your lackadaisical month-long pauses then, huh?

Oh SHUT UP, I’m tired of your judgmental shit! As if you didn’t already know the whole story, too!

Hey, judging you is what I do. It’s judging others that’s uncool — judging yourself is all good.

Since it’s obvious that you’re not going to give the benefit of context, I guess I’ll have to fill it in.

Oh-kay. Commence building your excuse.

“Excuse,” yeah right. You say “potato,” I… say “potato.”

BO-ring…

I had to spend four out of six weeks beginning June 23 up in Northern California, where a family member was seriously ill. I made two round-trips from L.A. in the car, both of them embarked upon at the drop of a hat. Feel bad for saying I was a negligent blogger yet?

A little… well actually, no. I don’t really have feelings, I just cause you to have them.

Fine, then dig this: amidst all that preoccupation and stress I still managed to chip in two posts, one each on July 15 and 16. Suck on that, inner critic!

Impressive. But are you going to leave us all hanging about what happened to the person-

My family member who was sick is OK now. Still a little way to go to be fully recovered, but much, much better.

Good. So we can move on to hearing how you account for the time between August 4th and now.

My “account,” as you condescendingly put it, is the not-terribly-interesting story of technical snafus caused by my current web host, Lunarpages, finally upgrading its baseline package to PHP 5. I’d tried several times previously to do the optional upgrade to PHP 5, and each time it broke the blog. I tried calling Lunarpages Support at least twice; both times consisted of extensive troubleshooting and ended in the support person telling me, “I don’t know why none of these things I’ve tried have worked, so the problem has to be with your .htaccess file. You have to figure it out yourself.” Yesterday, after many hours of mucking about, I finally did get the site unfucked and running with PHP 5. The problem had not been my .htaccess file — the problem was Lunarpages’s php.ini file. Thank you very little, douchebags.

…Hmmwhat? Oh, oops, I started dozing somewhere after the first PHP-whatever upgrade version thing. Are you done?

Yeah- …no wait, actually, I’m not. I’m going to talk about how this opens the blog up for HTML 5 and what the implications are. So do me a favor and go back to sleep.