I’m skeptical on my chances.

Look, I’m not the most interesting guy out there. Just go through the archives here on The Stonegauge (which stretch back to 2002) and you can find plenty of boring, personal, and petty drivel. I’m not flashy, but I have been involved with the sites and people that your independent newspaper has honored again and again — such as helping Tommy Duncan run Sticks of Fire from 2005-2007, or aiding CL columnist Catherine Durkin Robinson with her blog as well as editing one of her books. I’m online buddies with one of Tampa Bay’s most popular Twitter personalities in Clark Brooks (oh, yeah, he also writes for me on Raw Charge).

I’ve been blogging for nearly a decade, I am one of the longest tenured hockey bloggers in the sport (having started on Boltsmag.com in 2004). And I’m the only local net personality who has not only been threatened with litigation from the most popular pop group of the 20th century, but I’ve been in USA Today and quoted between the likes of Tony LaRussa and “Crash” Davis.

My point is, how about throwing a little recognition my way in your upcoming 2011 Best Of The Bay awards? I’m not as trendy and attractive as former Interbay Superstar Rachel Moran, nor am I as social as other personalities who’ve won accolades through their net presence…

But I have been around a while, and I’ve been the guy keeping things running for some of your favorites in the past. A hat tip to the mysterious online producer isn’t much to ask, is it?

Whatever the case, I’ve neglected Stonegauge for a very long time.Honestly, it’s easier for me to re-tweet something on Twitter or to post on my profile at Facebook than post on Stonegauge, which goes to the general masses.

Maybe it’s my audience here?  Or maybe it’s just the fact the world has moved on.  Whatever the case, my posts on this site have been few adn far etween.  Maybe that will change, or maybe it won’t?  We’ll see.

Well, unless of course it’s trash tabloid-ism or an arrest warrant… But I’m not talking just-printed-on-paper but I mean a by-line of one sort or another. I can say that from experience as I’ve gotten that kick — seeing “John Fontana” linked to letters-to-the-editor, or being sourced/interviewed by USA Today, being quoted in The Hockey News, The New York Times Slap Shot blog and la-de-da.

But I can also say that wasn’t where I intended to go with writing when I started out as a kid.  My intention wasn’t to be a face-in-the-crowd (though no matter what you write or publish, you are another face in the crowd of literature) in the newspaper.  Not another source for magazines and what not.  Not a weblogger.  I planned on doing things creatively and having my own book.  Or books — plural.  Take your pick.

But that never happened.  See, when i was a teen I got away from story writing so much and was writing poetry most of the time…  a habit that’s followed me into adulthood.  Lyrical verse more-so than deep observations and perspectives…  Well, yeah they are perspectives but they are my perspectives.   Sometimes just pop, sometimes inspired by events or people or feelings  in my life.

Over the years, I’ve had some of them available to the masses through the web…  Certainly you can find a couple of them on this site and probably elsewhere on the web…  But they’ve never really been published in the sense of print.  Never published in the sense of being out there for any traditional form of mass consumption.  I haven’t bothered to take the time with sending out poems to magazines who have niches all of their own (and aren’t available unless you pay for a subscription or pay for a copy — while you’re not getting paid for your contribution).

I ought to put together a manuscript and do something with it.  But I’m hesistant.

Catherine Durkin Robinson, local blogger and Creative Loafing contributor, has written two book manuscripts.  Her first one is being published, chapter-by-chapter, on a blogspot site.  The other, a more recent work based on her life as a teacher in Hillsborough County, is being sent around to literary agents in hopes someone will pick up the work and mass-market it.  Sadly, that has not been the case and the rejections have been comical at best.

Their loss.  I’ve read the book and it’s not only a good read, it’s provocative and controversial enough to be read widely by those fearing school-district scandals.

I also have another friend, in the Pacific Northwest this time, who went out and self-published her first novel.  The book, Steel Goddesses, is currently available on Amazon.com for purchase.  It takes a lot of courage to go out on a limb like that and self-publish any work…  But it sort of cuts out the middle-man of having to appease literary agents who tell you what a proper market for your writing is-or-isn’t and tells you to change your work to fit that niche.  At least that’s what I’ve seen with rejections served up to Catherine.

So the idea I am kicking around is actually putting together a manuscript of poetry I’ve written over the past decade and self-publishing it.   I realize that poetry is not exactly a hot seller and not going to lead me to riches…  It’d cost me more to publish than the commissions I’d get in the long run from doing it…  But it does what I have long sought to do — take the writings jammed in Mead notebooks that I’ve carried around since High School and take some of those verses and show them to the masses.  Will people connect?  I have doubts.  Will strangers read what I’ve  written?  Even more doubts…  But it’s mine, and it’d be out there.  My claim.  My piece of literature.

My book.

It’s a thought, at least.

Sorry I have not posted here on Der Stonegauge for something like… well, a long while. How long? So long, in fact, that it’s an opinion of a falsehood and not the truth. That’s how long.
Part of it’s just lacking motivation to write something not hockey related. Part of it is the inability to collect thoughts. I get an idea for a blog post and by the time I am back at the computer I find myself having to report on something else.

I’ll try to be more involved here, but if life calls — I have to put everyone (both of you) following Stonegauge on hold again. Sorry.

Update: As you can see, this nifty, fantastic, rootin’ tootin’ tag cloud is working.

That’s besides the point…

So I went to my Happy Five years Hosting Me Now webhost and went to their one click install area and…

Well, to put it lightly, I fucked up.

I accidentally deleted Stonegauge from the Interweb.

It was just one simple miscue and yet everything I have ever uploaded to Stonegauge.com (the domain) was sent to a digital grave, to rot along with billions and billions of 1′s and 0′s. Every POST I ever made on WordPress (and a few dozen from my former MT and HTML based sites) were safe in a database but immediately after this deletion had happened, I feared the worst.

And as the afternoon progressed, the worst got worse.

I couldn’t gain access to five years of inane blog posts and personal shit that I have rambled about on thsi Interweb and this site. I mean the information was there but WordPress — the software I use to run Stonegauge — wouldn’t even look at it. It refused to acknowledge it.

I can’t send software to the corner for a timeout, can I?

I could barely figure out MySQL (database language) and contacted the Happy Web Hosting Overworked-and-Underappreciated Tech Support team. I laid out everything that happened in 2 different support tickets and chronicled all of my screw ups attempts to make things work.

But having not hear back from them by 7 in the PM, I decided to try to take things into my own hands — post another blog site just to see if I can rescue the database and then import an upgraded version of that DB to Stonegauge.com.

Well, I was in the middle of all that crazy shit when I get a little letter from a member of Tech Support. Everythign was fixed adn fine and back to normal.

MY BABY’S ALIVE! Try as I may to screw everything up to end all means fof ever restoring the site, it’s live and kicking again. Seems I screwed up a setting or three.

Of course this could effect those who are searching for Andy Kim’s “Rock me Gently”. It would seem that Der Stonegauge has become the place to get the lyrics to this song (dude, look at my latest referrers and tell me that’s not the truth).

Back to the upgrade note, I’ve been putting this off because I’ve been intimidated with the new version and the built in tag support for WordPress 2.3.x. It’s true that I already run the site with tags (and categories) but this is a new wrinkle to have it built in and have to update templates and such.

At worst, I MAY have to switch themes on top of making minor changes to pages to implement tags…. which would suck. But it’s Sunday so I might as well do something now because I ain’t gonna’ want to do it tomorrow.

update: Might need to find more bells and whistles for the site but everything is coming up roses right now after upgrading the site and the plugins. Of course I still have to change some markup on the site but I will live.

Being the busy bee that I am and having other things to do online, I decided instead of keeping the site up and running, I took it down. All while saving the files.

Well, in a limited case I’m putting a definitive writing section back online. You can access it directly and you can also access it from the above menu by clicking WRITING.

Oh, and for the moment you can jump to the poems directly on the sidebar here on der Stonegauge’s main site. Some were never part of my collection on the old writings site and some were.

A loyal, sweet, athletic and extremely bright breed of dog — Whippet Rescue and Placement focuses on finding homes for Whippets that need them. These are usually rescued animals that either had problems in their former homes or just couldn’t be looked after any more.