Wow, looks like it's been kind of quiet around here. Lots going on, and where have I been? Oh, around, here and there, dealing with life and watching as our once-vaunted economy slides into a morass of depression that no amount of Prozac is going to fix. You'd think I'd be chomping at the bit to get my thoughts down.
You'd think that, and you'd be wrong. For whatever reason, I just haven't felt like writing much in the last month or so. Maybe it's post-holiday letdown, or maybe it's just that I feel like it's time to slow down and decompress. We had a hard-fought election campaign, and now that our new President is in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue I feel no small sense of relief. The world isn't any kinder, and our economy isn't any sounder, and maybe I'm just being naïve, but I'm confident in our new President. He's a bright man, and I hope he succeeds. For the sake of all of us, he needs to.
We've seen lots of changes happen in the last few months, as anyone with a 401(k) can tell you. I've survived layoffs at work, a tanking retirement plan, and I'm watching as the unemployment rate begins to skyrocket. There's talk that deflation may be happening, and I'm enough of a history buff that I read the newspapers, magazines and blogs and think hard about the 1930s. I'm grateful that my monthly gasoline bill is down below $300 for the first time in ages, but I'm nervous about what might happen with our monthly income. There are no guarantees, and like everyone else, I'm starting to wonder what the future holds. When I was a kid, I remember what it was like to climb to the top of the slide at Conejo Community Park and look down that long expanse of metal. Now, at 43, I'm looking down a long slide of a different kind, and I can't see the bottom, which is scary. I just hope I don't have to ride it all the way down. Or at all.
But change happens, and all you can do is roll with it. This is a long-winded way of coming around to my main point, which is this: I'm shutting down the blog. More precisely, I'm renaming it, refocusing it, and moving it to new quarters. “The Lazarus File” was an echo of an online re-branding that was perhaps less well thought-out than it should have been, and it's become fairly obvious that it's time for change here as well. I've already moved my homepage and reassumed my old Twitter and Jaiku handles, and this blog was the last thing left on my list. It's time to go.
So come over and take a look at my new blog, which you'll find at <span>http://larand.wordpress.com</span> (see update below!). I'm not yet sure what the title of the blog will be; nothing quite as good as “The Lazarus File” has come to mind. But I'll think of something, and I'm open to ideas if you have any.
And now, The Lazarus File is hereby closed.
Update (2009-02-24): My blog, called The Larry Channel, can now be found at http://blog.larryanderson.org.