This Blog Is 15 Years Old

On this day in 2003 a 23 year-old kid, having read about this hot new “web logs” trend, signed up for a Blogspot account.

This was in the ancient days of the internet. Back before Facebook or Twitter. Back before YouTube or Netflix. Heck, MySpace was barely a thing.

That kid was me, and I wasn’t taking it very seriously. People often ask me how I came to name this blog “Say Anything,” and the very boring story is that I put “anything” in the field for the blog’s title when signing up because I didn’t think it would matter.

I felt in that moment like I wanted to write, but I didn’t think I’d stick with it. I just wanted to complete the form and get on with writing a few posts.

A decade and a half later it turns out I stuck with it, and along the way I had to turn my off-the-cuff blog title choice which was now embedded in my blog URL into something marginally more meaningful than “anything.”

Thus, “Say Anything.”

I spent years in the beginning sending my posts out into the internet void where few, if anyone, read them. But that was ok. This blog has always been a journey for me, and those first posts were very much the product of a kid trying to figure out what to believe in.

As I’ve found my voice the audience has grown. Today I serve that audience not just with this blog but with a daily radio show and regular columns published in most of the daily print publications in the state thanks to my employment with the Forum Communications Company.

Going to work for them is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. They are a wonderful company, employing a lot of great people, and they give me a free rein to do my thing.

I also have to give credit to Scott Hennen. He and I haven’t always seen eye-to-eye on things over the years, but he was the first person to give me a shot at doing this full-time. It was a nervous thing for me to make that leap, going from writing-as-a-side-gig to writing-as-a-way-to-feed-my-kids, but I’ll forever be thankful to Hennen for giving me the chance.

Back during the 2006 election cycle, after a few years of writing, I started to feel like this blogging thing might actually be something more than a hobby. At the time I was working a full-time day job, and then spending hours of my free time maintaining the blog. I would dream of one day being exactly where I am today.

It’s a gratifying thing, yet an impossible thing without you folks reading this. So thank you for that. Sincerely. I make provocative arguments about fraught social and political topics, and that lends itself at times to an acrimonious atmosphere around my work, but I appreciate each and every one of you. Even those of you who express your disagreement with insults and invective.

Thank you. I’m glad you’re all here.

I meet a lot of you when I’m out and about – getting recognized in public by strangers is still a surreal experience for me – and my favorite thing you folks say to me is that you like my work even if you don’t agree with me all the time.

If people find my work enjoyable, and valuable, even when they disagree then I’m doing it right.