Spatula Forum

Happy three-year blogiversary to me!

...To quote Keanu Reeves, "whoa." This weekend – Sunday, actually – marks three years since I first fired up the ol' Spatula Forum online. Three years of bloggin' – who would've thought? Dead blogs litter the Internet, but I'm still plugging along, providing whatever the heck it is I provide going into a fourth year.

I didn't quite know what I was doing when I started, but it turns out this was the next chapter of my "creative outlets" that've included small press comic books, newspaper columns and more in the past. The only rule is there are no rules to bloggery, and over the past 737 posts I've done everything under the sun – movie, music, comics and TV reviews, comments on the news, lots of stuff on Peter. When I started this in April 2004 I was a brand-new dad working as an editor in rural Oregon, and now I'm the one staying at home with our 3-year-old little muppet while Mom has returned to work – and, oh yeah, we're living in Auckland, New Zealand now, after several years of talking about it. Lots of craziness has happened, particularly in the past 12 months.

I never really set out to have a goal with Spatula Forum, other than I didn't want it to be me whining every day. I try to provide actual "content" like my favorite other blogs do, as well as a helping of the ol' day-to-day thoughts and observations. I'm a mad pop culture consumer, and this blog reflects my love of everything from The Ramones to Bob Dylan to John Updike to Stan Lee. I've changed focus a bit – I used to write a lot more about comics than I do now, although I still consider myself a tangential comic blogger. On the flip side, I write about music more than ever – music, to be frank, has kinda helped save my life this last six months or so. I thought I'd reprint more of my newspaper columns on here but only did that a couple times (I did self-publish a nice book of them instead). I try to avoid ranting and raving, and generally just let it flow. I've made some great friends through blogging, caught up with old ones, and generally had a pretty fun time doing this.

However, I came quite close to quitting this blog several times in the past few months - since we landed here in New Zealand and I've settled into the wholly unfamiliar routines of stay-at-home dad in a strange land, the going has been weird, to quote the late Hunter Thompson. (Better than Keanu, I think.) I lost my focus a bit, and felt obligated to fill this space, and unsure what I was doing wasting so much time and energy on something that I've probably only got a dozen or so "regular" readers for. So I stepped back a bit and think I'm now a little more relaxed about the whole thing; I'll post when I post, and if a week goes by in silence, so be it, I'm off doing the life thing. (And trying to do some writing I'll actually get paid for, y'know.) But I do like sharing with you folks my various thoughts on pop culture, life in New Zealand, fatherhood and the like. I hope you dig reading it, too. The comments you guys leave are definitely part of the gasoline that keeps this thing running.

So heck, congratulate me on surviving 3 years in the comments if you like, and thanks for reading - I'll try to keep it going for a little while longer!