Annual Drop In

Every now and then I'll login to blogger just to see if it still works. Kind of like the old Hotmail account. I had my hotmail account from the spring of 1994 until sometime last year when I gave up and just let the hackers have it.

Originally it was just an email account I had set up in the hopes I could track down an old child hood friend. His name was Ludwig Mims. So I took "LudwigMims@hotmail.com" figuring, maybe one day, he'd want an email account. (back then there was no such thing as Google, or Gmail, or Yahoo, or any of that kind of thing. Hotmail was the Gmail of its day) - Anyway, I figured Ludwig would go looking to set up an email account one day, and discover that someone already had the name LudwigMims@hotmail.com, and then write to that person saying something like, "Hey. My Name is Ludwig Mims too. What are the odds?!"

And I'd write back, "There you are you old so and so! It's me, dan!" and so on, and we'd swap war stories and stay in touch ever after.

I don't know what I was thinking. It was a stupid plan. Obviously, I never heard from Ludwig Mims. Even with the advent of Facebook, and Google both, he's never turned up. I went on road trips dubbed "The Hunt for Ludwig Mims" and though I followed every lead, I never actually found him.

In recent years, folks have told me all kinds of stories about what ever became of him, but none of them have ever been verified. None the least of which is a story about how he was murdered in jail somewhere. It's amazing when you try to find out if any of it is true, how many additional stories present themselves, but no matter what you discover, you (I) found myself only further from the truth.

Friends I've made as an adult always thought of Ludwig Mims as some sort of fictitious character I made up simply to relay wild stories of my youth in a "Big Fish" kind of way, sort of deflecting the blame for my antics, yet still allowing me to have my finger directly on the pulse of some absolute chaos from the perspective of a 3rd person. Most of my stories were received with a polite but noncommittal nod or occasional disbelieving laugh.

The fact is, Ludwig Mims remains one of the unsung heroes of my childhood. That damned kid put up with more grief than just about anyone I knew growing up, and it would really be something to see what that kid grew into. He's got to be 40 by now, and I suppose I haven't seen him since he was about 17.

So many things have happened in the world between the summer of 1988 and now.

Well anyway. That's what I logged in to Blogger for. Just to see if it was still there, and I guess it is.

My hope was that it would inspire me to do something with my site. Update it or something.

We'll see what happens.

dTown 6:27pm

the present

There's almost no way to really explain it. I mean, there was a time when I would sit and type, and say something every day. I'd take pictures and post them every day. Then there came a time when I took the pictures, but I didn't post them, and I wouldn't say anything about them either. Eventually, I didn't do anything at all.

One day, I started taking pictures again, and posting them, but to the tumblr. Something easier, something I could do on the fly, and that didn't seem so bad. I didn't find myself wanting to punch a hole through the screen of my ever aging G5 every time I opened a photograph. It had become so easy, there was really no need for words. But there was always this moth-balled old site still just sitting here, and it came with the expectation that there would be some words here and there on this little blog attached to the splash page.

Meh, I got a new camera, I got a new computer, I got a new printer, I got new lenses, new software, anything else I could possibly need, and -

-the thing is, I'm just in a period of non-blogging. Thich Nat Hahn would call it a period of non-work, but really, what's the difference? 1 post in July, 1 post in August, another in October, and now this. That's not really blogging, that's more like an apartment that I had once, where I would just stop by once a month to pay the rent.

Hell, come to think of it, that's happened a few times in this ol' life. So it's kind of like that. Maybe one day I'll come back here and move in, dust off the ol' book shelves and have something to say about the adventures, but for now, I'm just doing the adventures.

Check back any ol' time. There'll always be a light on, and hell... the archives are at least as good as the void. Enjoy -

Good times,

dTown - listening to Duke Ellington - it's 50˚ and a little cloudy.