The Stonegauge happens to be my personal web log. That’s it. Nothing fancy… Really.

OK, let me try to give you some backstory: I’ve had a web site at one place or another since late summer 1998 entitled “The Stonegauge”. I never much planned for the site to be anything more than something where I could do my personal stuff online. First it was at FreeYellow, then Tripod, then…

In July 2002 – after a little altercation with a small, rinky dink entertainment group — I had to jettison a domain name I once owned and put my site on a different domain. Stonegauge.com was born on July 20th, 2002. Since that time it’s been a mix of personal rants, poetry and photos. There isn’t much method to the madness. I use this site as I see fit and reap all the rewards for it (WHAT rewards?!).

But just what is a Stonegauge?! Don’t you mean Stone Gauge?!

Stonegauge is a play on words. The actual name was inspired by wanderings through Palm Harbor, Florida. One night, sometime during high school, walking near SR 95 and US 19 in Palm Harbor, I came across Stonegate Apartments. I don’t know how or why I changed the name to Stonegauge (perhaps anatomical, perhaps I just misread the apartment name), but I thought it would be a cool band’s name. I can find references to the name in a poetry notebook I wrote in during the 1996-97 school year.

Whatever the case, it stuck. 10 years later, Stonegauge lives on.

disclaimer: This is a blog, there are many like it, but this one is mine.

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Valentines Day is over commercialized.

It’s odd that t hsi very cynicism set myself up for a downfall yesterday. No, not that I forgot the holiday for a certain someone — it’s that I set myself up for the letdown by playing cynic with the cynic I had tagged as Valenine.

Me “Happy Valentines Day”
Them: “Happy Fake Holiday”
Me: “Happy bitter singles day”

The conversation went on to discuss how Spain has a special holiday for single/recently broken up with people ont eh day after valentines, but through all this I took it as a cue she hadn’t gotten my gift and thus was set up for a surprise.

Well, if she checked her PO Box.

Yeah, by compounding the cynicism I only built up the idea that I hadn’t gotten anything — that or the holiday has just become an excuse to put high ticket items on sale. Heaven forbid someone actually writes,/creates something personal in order to touch someone’s heart on what is supposed to be the most romantic day of the year.

Romance isn’t dead… Realism and cynicism are holding it hostage though and the retailers are paying for the hostage-takers risk.

Since my sophomore year in High School back in 1994 I’ve done my share of writing rhyming verse and what one may or may not call poetry. Some of the following prose was written between 1994 and the present and will be marked accordingly after. Some are romance, some are broken hearts, some are stories, some observations, some anger and some despair. It’s subjective if any of them are good or not…

Right now the sub pages (which are the poems themselves) are unorganized. I’d like to alphabetize them in the future but right now it’s just what I post, when I post them that the order will be shown in. That doesn’t give any semblance to when or where these poems were written, how I feel about them or personal priority… They are just words.

I haven’t written much about my health the last few years on der Stonegauge… Mostly because Stonegauge is syndicated on the ever-so-excellent Tampa Blab where some of my blog colleagues (who know me better from my endeavor at Boltsmag or my participation at Sticks of Fire) can get wind of this stuff and start fussing and worrying about me. So can my critics as well with anything personal I write about on here. I’ve had private stuff published on this domain before and had it come back to hurt me. But that’s what happens when you blog, ain’t it?

I’m getting away from the fact that I said I haven’t talked about my health much at all on here lately. For the uninitiated, I suffer from a rare genetic disease commonly referred to as NF2. It’s a nasty little gem of a disease that doesn’t get much attention (besides an odd mention on House M.D. every-so-often). It causes benign tumors to grow mostly on nerves in the body. One of said tumors were the reason I began to lose my hearing as a teen and was rendered deaf 10 years ago last December.

It also gives me the supernatural abilities like super-intelligence, telekenisis and empathy along with…

Wait a minute, that was a John Travolta movie. Never mind.

Seriously… The last time I really brought up (bitched, moaned, vented, etc) my health was the summer and fall of 2003 when I hit a couple of hard patches and was frustrated, scared and just flat out torn up (to put it lightly). Blogging things publicly helped me get my frustrations and worries out in the open… or at least out of my head for the moment until the next panic hit.

It’s 4 years later and I’ve got problems again. Problems in my head this time that get the doctors attention. Now, from the smart-ass perspective, you’d quickly quip “Yeah, anyone who (inserts a thought, political idea, interest, etc) would be classified as having problems in the head!” but it’s a little more serious than that. About 5 centimeters worth of serious. Between-my-ears, behind-my-eyes serious.

I’ve been operated on twice up there before. Both times I had the operations in question out west with one of the top doctors in the world. This time around, I’m sticking in Tampa Bay and trusting a doctor who’s been heralded to me as one of the best in the world. He’s got books and awards and all that jazz. He’ll have some of my old friends along with him to make sure my ABI doesn’t get fudged up and what not.

Still, there are risks and even if they aren’t substantial — what they are is a worst case scenarios. So I worry about that, even though it’s almost like thinking about worst-case stuff when you go out and do day to day things.
“The worst case scenario while driving to the Supermarket to pick up milk is that an out of control mack truck with a drunk at the wheel, plows into my car and explodes…. Oh, and I don’t die instantly on impact!”

Rosy, cheery stuff like that.

So part of my mind (ha — the cause of all my problems) keeps wanting me to be responsible and at least report this upcoming operation, make arrangements for the “just in case”, “worst case scenario” type things. Every other part of me wants the status quo to remain — though that status quo is a deteriorating personal conditions where the changes in my health are more or less subtle until I get to a tipping point and things really get messed up and my life hangs in the balance.

Rosy, cheery stuff like that.

I don’t want to face the idea of things — out of my control — go bad and yet with responsibilities to friends and loved ones, how can I not?

I’ve waited longer than I should to have Madeline spay. She’s a frisky 21 months old now and as sweet as ever… So now that I have some things in better order in my life, I figured I better go and get this done for her. After all, I am contractually obligated to her breeder to have this done.

And I find myself nervous about it.

I mean, things are scheduled — got the clinic, got the date (February 26th), got the time, got the pre-surgery instructions… I’ve personally dealt with this (well, not having my sex organs removed — but I mean surgery) before so I know the deal. I’m just worried.

Worried about what happens immediately after, how to deal with things, what coudl go wrong, etc… Likely things will be fine but… Hey, I’m a worrier. Once I get this out of my system, I’ll be fine. Maybe.

You know, I get my thoughts out pretty well on here. It might be snipping about personal matters, it might be poetry, it might be just re-listing song lyrics (which seem to be popular with the Search Engines) or quoting movies. Whatever the case, I blog here not-so-much but I do blog here from time to time.

I also blog elsewhere… And tonight I figured I would blog on DFA-link int he Pinellas County DFA group about my fondness for Al Gore and how I am holding out for him to enter the 2008 Presidential primaries.

The only thing I didn’t expect when I blogged this was the fact the post was going to get wider exposure than what I was aiming for. Much wider. Hugely wider.

Blog for America front-paged wider.

More than three years ago, I never would have dreamed in my wildest imagination that I would be featured on the front page of Blog for America — the then-It blog of the Howard Dean for President campaign. Dean failed in his attempts, but he founded Democracy for America in an effort to organize Democratic support better. Blog for America lived on and is still highly thought of on the liberal/progressive blogosphere.

And at 11:45 PM ET, on February 12th 2007 — yours truly has made it to the front page. Whodathunkit?

Many of you don’t know this but about 19 months ago or so I contact a guy who was using blogspot to post his items for his Tampa based blog, about me hosting his blog and upgrading things for him.

It’s been a long, strange trip but in the 14 months I’ve been officially hostingSticks of Fire, it’s gone from blogspot hotspot to dot-com phenom. I knew at the time I approached Tommy about upgrading things that he had something great going on… Little did I know how much it would grow.

Tommy Duncan is probably the Bay area’s most unheralded media star. He gets invites to speak in various capacities (round table discussions, conferences, TV spots) and pretty much has Tampa covered with himself and his cast of supporting writers.

And now, Tommy has taken the next step by getting into a business alliance with Tampa Gold. When that officially kicks off, Tommy will be departing from my server space at Dreamhost and going to the land of far-far-away… Or on shared hosting package with Tampa Gold, take your pick.

I haven’t seen profit from hosting Tommy’s site and I haven’t requested payment for doing so. I never stuck in some personal reference (“Hosted by Dreamhost” etc) or anything like that… It made me feel good to be doing this.

But to just make a long story short, I want to wish my buddy well with his new venture and I hope it takes him where I couldn’t take him — to his rightful place at the to of local pop culture and beyond.

First and foremost to anyone who knows me and actually visits Stonegauge from time to time to see what’s on my mind or what else I am up to… I’ve stayed off here a lot lately because I’ve been bored with it a bit — Boltsmag gives me a topic to focus on while Stonegauge asks me to focus on me and my life is rather boring.

Oh yeah, and the fact I don’t want to bitch about personal things knowing people know this is my personal blog.

But I gotta bitch today because I’m looking for an old family friend… Or friends more like it.

In 1984..? I think that was it… I moved into a house in Blue Point, New York with my family… Nice ranch place with cedar shingles and brick accents. There was a nursery next door and it was a quaint, small town on Long Island… There’s a plethora of details about Blue Point or that house but none are pertinant to this tory besidse what I want to talk about.

One afternoon after moving in, I was inside doing one thing or another and my brothers were out back — giggling and acting really weird by the back fence. I went to investigate what was going on and I found out they were making a fuss about a girl (and her friend) in the next yard. Mike and Andy were acting anti-social in one way or another and I thought “What’s the big deal?” and started up conversation with the girls… This was the begining of a great neighborly friendship between the Fontana family and the Reilly Family.

The girl in question was Shannon. Shannon H. Reilly if I do so recall her middle initial. She was about the same age as my older brother and went to Blue Point elementary school (while me and my older brother were attending Sylvain Avenue Elementary in nearby Bayport)… Shannon was basically the fourth child of my parents while me and my brothers became children of Shannon’s parents. We really were interchangable children and would spend time playing at each others houses all the time (except when I got tugged into some type of disagreement between my older brother and Shannon). I believe her parents names were Mary “Mussy” Reilly and Rich.

Shannon would later have a little brother, Brian, who became the fifth partner in crime. Of course, Brian would be too young for most of the -adventures that we’d undertake but he was none the less part of the equation when we did something.

At any rate, I moved away from New York to the Tampa Bay area in January 1989. The Reilly’s were there to send us off. They’d later take a trip from their home in New York to Florida and make sure to stop to see us along the way.

But time and distance made things fade. We did end up visiting the Reilly’s after they moved to Massachusetts during the 1990’s (not far from Foxboro if I do so recall) … But after that I can’t recall much of anything – news or what not – of the Reilly family. I did not see Shannon at that mid-1990’s get together because she was still in New York, finishing school while staying with relatives. I do remember Brian was playing offensive line in football but… eh.

I wanna know whatever happened to Shannon? I want to knwo what’s up with the Reilly family and I hope everything is ok. It’s a shot in the dark trying to write a blog entry about them — but after I did research on various platforms trying to find them and failed… I thought this was at least worth a shot….

I was taking a Zogby poll the other day and a question surfaced within the poll that actually made me freeze and think long and hard before I cast my vote. It’s soemthing that can come up in idle conversation at any time and you might throw out an immediate answer but I took this question real serious…

What dead rockstar best epitomizes the spirit of rock and roll

Jim Morrison (The Doors)
John Lennon (the Beatles)
Janis Joplin
Jimi Hendrix
Stevie Ray Vaughn
Freddie Mercury (Queen)
Duane Allman (The Alman Brothers)
Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)
Jerry Garcia (The Grateful Dead)
Frank Zappa
Buddy Holly
Ronnie Van Zandt (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
Elvis

It really mad eme stop and think — I’m not sure why. I mean, the first thought i had was Lennon but John — for all the good he gave to the world as a musician just didn’t feel like the guy who represented Rock in life and death. One could say Elvis but he didn’t liv efast and die young…

I thought of Jim Morrison and his glory days that people remember him for and Jimi Hendrix and how he was the genius on guitar that everyoen strives to be. I thought of Kurt Cobain who wrote and sang, lived fast and died young leaving the beautiful corpse — and how his insecurity (a traight with almost all musicians) was a profound attribute to his personality.

Just who best eptomizes Rock?

But of course I expect conservatives / Bush supporters to point at the source and complain:

Newsweek

But before you dance or roll your eyes at the news, take a look at part of the story:

Explaining that he had obtained last-minute “personal consent” from his source, Cooper was able to avoid a jail sentence for contempt of court.

Rove conscented being revealed?