Well, MindSay, it's been almost two years since I've been around.

That's quite a spell, if I do say so myself.

I hope you'll be glad to hear that, though I've left you for so long, the spark is back.

I'm blogging once more.

I'm going to be honest: this community contributed a great deal to the early development of Ben Mosher, and for that, you have my most sincere thanks. From my start back in 2003 stalking nikkilavoie as her secret santa at my school (thus the userid), to tossing comments back and forth with my good buddy snowboarder (Chevis), to being chased by various MindSay ladies (not the least of which, hobbit5) because of my notorious ability to take sexy profile pictures (anyone looks good in 20x100px), to building this ridiculous color scheme that is now user-selectable in the global MindSay theme library (I was quite honored they added it), and as I recall, has secret love-messages hidden in the stylesheet code written to a girl who I couldn't have designed it without.

A lot of stupid teen-angst and ridiculous, stupid humor peppers these pages. A lot of things I just should've said at the right time to the right person, as well, but I took the coward's way out and just posted it in my own little corner of the Internet.

It was middle- and high-school, though. I think these things go without saying.

I'm glad it all got out of me somehow. I just might have popped otherwise.

Through all the anger and the joy, I tried to keep one rule for blogging: never delete an entry; only explain or apologize.

I might have been understood wrong, or I may have been just-plain-wrong, but at some point, everything here is something I thought, meant, or felt. I think, for that alone, it deserves a record.

I may have switched some entries to just-me mode, as perhaps they weren't appropriate for publication, but I still keep them.

Anyway, I do hope it gets more readable as it goes, particularly past the point when I discovered and subsequently pillaged the comedic and line-spacing styles of (as I remember him) one of the MindSay titans, Smurfy.

Without this blog, I might not have nearly the still-not-great-but-better-than-I'd-be-doing-otherwise grasp I have on English grammar and spelling.

Which very well might mean I couldn't sit down and write a two-page paper in an hour.

For that alone, MindSay, I owe you much.

So, I suppose this is officially the end. It is indeed, as Bilbo would say, a very fond farewell.

I will link this blog from my new one--another separate chronicle of my thoughts from a wholly different era of my life. If you've just come from there, feel free to poke around, some of this stuff might be alright.

I really don't recall.

But because this is all here, logged away,

I don't need to.

That's the magic of the blogosphere.

Sincerely, and with the best of wishes,

Ben Mosher

http://blog.benmosher.com/

Heck, here's a chorus that I wrote for my new pop punk/hardcore project, Fred Alert.

Just trying to get it down on e-paper so I don't forget it.

Go ahead, see what you think.

I'm torn to shreds

I'm ripped to pieces

Like those tiny Reeses

I'm in a hundred multicolored bits

I'm rent in three

Like a Blockbuster trilogy

And all I ask is someday

I'll bounce back from this

(remember, think pop punk; it's a little lighter than it sounds)