THE END OF AN ERA?

Today, I had a revelation.

It is time to do something completely different with my blog, something potentially revolutionary, or maybe just something really stupid.

After five years--FIVE FREAKIN' YEARS!!--The R Spot will completely change formats starting later this week, or by Tuesday, April 21st at the latest. I've come to the realization that anyone who has stumbled across this site over the years pretty much knows by now on what side of the political spectrum my opinions are going to fall. They will have read any number of movie, television and music reviews and seen pictures of family, friends, celebrities and a few of the events that I've encountered since I first started posting. It has been an online diary that has been open to the world, where I may not have shared all of my most innermost thoughts, but I have SHARED dammit, and there is something to be said for that.

No more.

Beginning within the next week, this site will change it's layout and it's content for good. The R Spot will become...a continually updating lit blog, featuring a rotating, episodically updated roster of short stories and/or novellas written by yours truly.

No, I'm not shitting you.

I will copyright protect each story and each post at the bottom of each page, but of course, nothing is to stop anybody from stealing my ideas, writing them better than I do and then selling them for a fortune. (NOTE: if I see one of my stories in print under another name, I will find you and your ass will be mine. Just so you know.)

Why the change? As I creep ever closer to 40, like a lot of people, I find myself yearning for a way to shake things up and make a change. Since I'm happily married, happy where I live and reasonably happy where I work (as if there are a lot of comparable salaried options in THIS economy), other things have to change. We are all to a certain extent limited in what change we can truly affect, whether we like to admit this limitation to ourselves or not. In my case, since I am unable to put Dick Cheney in jail or give new Broncos head coach Josh McDaniels a brain transplant, I've decided to marry one of my life's passions with my blog and see where it takes me.

The passion I'm referring to by the way is writing.

Ah, writing. I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my dream of becoming a highly paid and infinitely respected Hollywood screenwriter. Once there, I found out that the two greatest detriments to succeeding in that field are professional shyness and an inability to direct your own script. That's not to say that I was ever the greatest screenwriter in the world (far from it--my Facebook friends Elizabeth Kirkscey, Tony Gama-Lobo and Todd Carney, just to name a few, are far more capable movie and TV writers than I will EVER be.) But I know I was much more talented than a lot of the people who have their names in the credits of movies and TV shows we've all seen--ultimately, I didn't have the moxie, the schmoozability, the patience or the salesmanship to break through to even get an agent. That, combined with the too-fast L.A. lifestyle and a wife who would be much happier somewhere else led me back to my hometown and away from the movie life.

However, I still love to write. I have been negligent in doing so lately. Adult life is not kind to the simple pursuit of putting words to the page but that shouldn't be an excuse. After all, I've posted almost 300 little essays right here on The R Spot on topics ranging from my favorite hip-hop albums, to the joy of getting married, to the injustice and incompetence of the Bush administration, to my joy and amazement at the election of Barack Obama, to my choices of favorite TV shows and movies, to jokes I've heard and even celebrities who I've peed with. It has been a terrific outlet for me and a way to write even when I've been blocked on more creative endeavors, but let's be honest. A blog is a blog is a blog. They lead to bad habits, to laziness, to a smugness that is not healthy for one's creative impulses or their self-image.

It is time for me to challenge myself. It is time to be a little more ambitious. It is time to take a risk. Whether these stories invoke O. Henry and Stephen King or get me ridiculed by some snarky office worker stumbling upon my blog in their cubicle, I can't continue to keep doing the same thing, especially when in the blogosphere my opinions and rants have no more or no less value than anyone else's. Besides, the idea of crafting a story, adding to it and putting it online feels like a new frontier to me. It excites me in a way that even I find surprising. It is, to cop a theme from our nation's 44th president, a change I need.

Indeed.

Who knows what will become of it, if it will work or be interesting? Who knows if Blogger.com is even the best site for this kind of thing? All I know is that I have to try it, before I forget how to write or before I run out of anything interesting to say. I hope anyone who has read this post sticks with me and shares their thoughts about the new direction (all six of you). If you don't have the time for such folly, I completely understand.

I want to thank Zubin (Dr. Z), Tuhina, Lyle, Dave Rowe and most of all my wife (who hopefully has made it to Atlanta safely tonight and then on to West Palm Beach tomorrow) for indulging me over the years and offering feedback--some of it kind, some of it not, all of it thoughtful--to the various thoughts on this post. Some of you I know have great blogs of your own that I've read and I hope you keep continuing to do what you want to do the way that you want to do it.

Hopefully, the new direction will curb my tendency to ramble! It didn't help here, but I had a lot to say and I wanted to make clear why I've decided to make this change. Wish me luck, keep on reading and remember one important thing:

No matter what new technologies and media are born in this ever changing, all too unsettling time in which we live, nothing will ever top the power of the written word. It is not just mightier than the sword, but mightier than the splitting of an atom, then all the images ever broadcast on a cathode ray tube, mightier than the gun, the knife or the cynical instruments of torture. Wherever the future takes us, I hope we as human beings always have the desire to put words on a page, to read words on a page, to tell a story. Truly I believe, that is our only hope.

Peace.