This morning, I awakened realizing that Follow Me Here is a quarter-century old. I misremembered and thought it was actually twenty-five years to the day since my first post, but looking back I actually opened the blog on November 15, 1999. Too bad, it would have been fitting if the anniversary were Thanksgiving Day!  It has been a tumultuous quarter-century and also a third of my life. My career has grown and deepened as has my marriage. We have raised two children, the younger of whom was born just the year before, 1998. (Neither my wife, my son, or my daughter seem to be very interested in this pet project of mine although they certainly do not resent it and FmH has never been an intrusion or an interference in our family life, I would venture to say.) I am still in the same home I lived in when I started FmH, and it is still the same home on the web.

I don’t have the time right now to go back and read through the twenty-five years of posts but you can dive in if you like. Best is by simply going to the URL https://followmehere.com/yyyy/mm/, for any year yyyy and month mm. Or, in the righthand sidebar, navigate back month by month by the calendar, more painstakingly. I started out using the Blogger platform and migrated several years later to WordPress, which I still use. The Blogger posts, with a lot more hardcoded HTML, were imported into the WordPress corpus so I am not sure exactly when the transition occurred. I have played not so much with design tweaks through the years, changing the style of the attribution of each post and varying the page themes. But, in WordPress, whenever I change the theme it applies the change retroactively to the entire body of posts, so you won’t see the actual historical appearance of old pages, if you care. Maybe the Wayback Machine could help, I haven’t looked.

I have played a little more with the succinctness of the posts. Once in awhile but not too often, posts like this one have reflected on the meaning and purpose of blogging in a meta- sort of way. As you can tell by the name of the blog, Follow Me Here has always been mostly a chronicle of my reading on the web. I make no claims that it is anything more than a ‘weblog’, which is the original nomenclature for ‘blog’ if you weren’t aware. For a long time I insisted on using the full term but long ago ceded that battle to popular culture. Sometimes I have simply posted links to interesting content although it has usually been more than a tumblelog or microblog. At other times I have written original reactions or done a brain dump prompted by a link. Most often recently, as I am sure you have noticed, it has been mostly curating blockquotes, perhaps with a pithy comment at the bottom. While some readers over the years have pressed me to do more commentary, I am really more interested in trusting you to have your own reactions to things I point you to.

Especially with my attention to the deterioration in American political life after bearing witness to 9/11, the Bush Jr administration and its risible War on Terror, and  of course the current Orange Menace and Orange Menace Resurgent, I have more than had my fill of self-important punditry and have no intention to add to that cacophony, although I am certainly opinionated and you probably do not read FmH unless your your worldview and mine intersect well. There have been times when posts have been more conflictual and provoked dismissive or hostile comments. I have always delighted in keeping comments turned on for all posts, although reader responses are few and far between these days… but always welcome and encouraged. (It is good that the WordPress commenting system is so functional that the moderator can readily eliminate imbecilic spam, I would add!)

The weblogging phenomenon has had its ebbs and flows, of course, over these years. It hasn’t mattered to me, since I haven’t cared about being faddish and haven’t been overly insecure about an audience’s flagging attention or size. I honestly don’t know what makes the difference about how much attention a blog attracts. It has been the furthest thing from my mind to do any search engine optimization, for example, and I have never had the slightest intention to monetize this site. This is pure and simple a ‘hobby’. As such, I cannot even take tax deductions for the associated expenses.

As weblogging has waxed and waned as a cultural phenomenon, I have been honored to be a peer to other thoughtful blogs over the years, few of which (with the notable exception of Kottke, around about as long but far more widely read) are active anymore. I think it was a site called Wood S Lot, with whom I had a friendly rivalry although he was far more erudite than I have been, that I felt the most kinship. And I felt close to another blogging pioneer, Rebecca Blood, who wrote an early book about the history of blogging and the cadre of ancestral sites that included FmH. I would also like to give a nod to another blogger for the ages, John Gruber and his Daring Fireball. The world of tech blogging that he inhabits (dominates?) rarely casts its shadow on FmH’s content, although, Mac geek in me, I do follow the field in my spare time.

Apart from the wild ride of the last quarter-century’s politics, FmH posts reflect other areas that grab me in my reading and thinking. At times I have tried to examine and explain new developments in my areas of professional interest, psychiatry and neuropsychiatry, although that is sort of a busman’s holiday, since that is what consumes me during my professional activities. I am a clinician, administrator, participate a little in research, but at this stage in my career I increasingly enjoy my teaching — students in mental health fields, younger colleagues, my patients, their families, and the lay public who (I am sure you will not disagree) need to understand human psychology and mental health problems better so we can remove impediments to addressing human suffering as best we can on an interpersonal and societal level. Over the FmH years, largely coinciding with the arc of my career, I have been so pained to see the decreasing dominance of dedicating oneself to service and the alleviation of suffering in my field. As Allen Ginsburg said, “And what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.” I have always believed in living a value-driven life as my way of addressing the problem of being, and like to bring others along for the ride. One of the most cherished compliments bestowed on my work at FmH was the late writer (and later friend) Steve Silberman‘s comment that he found me to be the “Oliver Sacks of blogging”, which I accepted with gratitude although I am too humble to accept that mantle. So, at least every once in awhile, I will probably go off on a fascinating psychological topic. On the other hand, this is anything but a psychiatric blog. I have read a few of these and they seem far to lackluster, narrow and constrained for my taste. And, of course, sometimes self-serving.

Before it became a kitschy term, I also aspired to posting “edgy” topics here, In the sidebar, I have always proclaimed, “You can only tell the shapes of things by looking at their edges…” In 20th and 21st century hubris, we have tended to think we know what’s what, no matter the topic, which strikes me as limited and pitiful at times. Some of my posts simply point to the mysterious events or phenomena in the world that we do not understand. It is as if I am simply saying, “Anomalous events happen. Get used to it. Don’t filter them out.” This is also in the service of a mindful approach to life, without simply trying to impose too much meaning. Even though I have always thought of myself as intellectually curious. On the other hand, another type of blog this emphatically is not, as you know by reading it, is one of the credulous sites that explore paranormal, supernatural, or cryptozoological topics exclusively. That’s just the spicing here.

As far as cultural criticism goes, I am an inveterate cultural consumer, although I am stuck way in the past, as befitting my age. The blog may at times reflect my love of the Beat poets, outsider art, and musical trends hearkening back to the counterculture of the ’60’s and ’70’s, as well as jazz and classical music. Apart from the reading I do in my professional field, I go for lowbrow and contemporary fiction. Some of that creeps into the things I log on FmH, I think. Cultural experiences for me are a nuanced balance between challenge and reverence for the past, so sometimes if I take note of a new, more disruptive, cultural trend, you can feel me rolling my eyes or shaking my head between the lines. Old fuddy duddy, maybe? But proud of it, and, yes, decrying the decline of western civilization. Also, when I am politically dispirited and particularly now as the authoritarian threat looms, I am more attracted to expressing resistance and rebellion in broader cultural terms.

Certainly, the frequency and intensity of my posting has fallen off. So, probably, has my readership, although I do not follow the statistics with any regularity. I think I am getting at most dozens, rarely hundreds, of visitors per day. But you few can count on continuing to find my awed, cynical, irreverent, enraged, wondering tone here, and I am immensely grateful you are following me here. To the next twenty-five years?

A special nod to my lifelong friend abby, who has enthusiastically supported my effort and dedicatedly read Follow Me Here since day one, as well as pointing me toward numerous pertinent items to post. (Hmmm, especially now that he is retired from his career, should I make him a co-author of Follow me Here?)