Where Did Everyone Go?

I began blogging in earnest in 2007, inspired, largely, by my cousin, Barry, over at Enrevanche. Blogging was, in some ways my most important intellectual outlet.  Through 2008 and the first half of 2009, it was also the place where I hung out with friends.

Then, in 2009, marriage, a new job, a new city, and the blogging didn't so much taper off as simply stop, precipitously.  It dwindled to a short post every couple of months, if that.  Not writing, I was also not reading.  But that watershed year is behind us now.  A custody suit is over (in our favor), a SACS accreditation visit to the new campus I've spent a year getting off the ground is complete (with an unheard of single recommendation about something no one could have anticipated, and the visiting team's single word summation of the inspection was, "Wow!").

In many ways, I've begun to live again.  I no longer work every weekend.  Late days at the school still occur, but they are no longer the rule.

Eventually, I might even begin to write again.  And more importantly, read.  But whom shall I read?  There was a small group of us, who followed one another's words and lives with regularity.  For over a year, I've shared little and read little, and the ether world that I knew has changed.  It's like returning to your hometown after a year or more deployed.  People will have moved on, gotten married, taken up new hobbies.  So it is here.  Barry, my original inspiration, hasn't posted to Enrevanche since July.  Jay, over at The Extended Table, whose beautiful family I met in Colorado, and whose fine gift of spirits I enjoyed some remainder of with my new father-in-law/old friend last night, not since June.  Phil, whose perspective I always enjoyed at The Archer Pelican, hasn't been heard from since April.  And Lex, of Neptunus Lex, I'm sure is still blogging somewhere, but not at the address I used to visit.  Only Buck, whom I'm convinced is a reincarnation of Addison or Steele, seems to have kept the torch burning over at Exile in Portales.

The world can change a lot in a year.  The real world or the digital one.  I hope my friends are out there still, and well.  It won't be the first time I've come back to a place and had to spend time searching for the friends I left behind.