Hi!

I know it’s been over two weeks since last I’ve written a blog post that wasn’t just me hyping the latest episode of the podcast, and for that I apologize. I apologize not just to you, fair reader, but to myself because I miss it. I love sitting down and hammering out my thoughts into some sort of meaningful, and well-assembled essay. I’ve done this fairly consistently in some form or fashion for more than 14 years now, and when I don’t write for more than a week or so, my whole world feels off.

But the fact is, behind the mountain of other stuff I’ve had going on, blogging fell down the list of priorities until it basically cascaded clean off the fucking thing. The thing about writing, especially the kind of essay-ish, find the unifying theme among these different ideas type of writing I like most, is that it generally takes a block of uninterrupted and focused attention to get it done. That simply hasn’t come in the last several weeks, and every time I sit down to begin cranking on a new essay (to be clear – the ideas haven’t stopped coming), I’m either interrupted, jolted into panic remembering something pressing I haven’t done, but need to, derailed, or otherwise too exhausted to get the neurons firing in the correct order to turn a blank page into something another person might actually enjoy digesting for a few minutes. Two main reasons for this.

1) The most obvious one. This Monday, October 27, my wife is scheduled to have a c-section as we welcome our first child into the world. As you well know if you have kids, and as you can easily imagine if you don’t, there’s a shitload of preparation that goes into this event, and I’m certainly not going to shortchange this part of my life to offer you my thoughts on the shortcomings (and in my view, the obvious fixes) of the new sitcom “Mulaney” on Fox, which is a real post I was going to write, but shitcanned. This is a well-written take on the subject that echoes some of my own thoughts on the show.

2) I’ve prioritized the podcast over the blog. This is an intentional choice. For as much as I love blogging, it’ll always be there. With the exception of needing a chunk of dedicated time to write, blogging can happen anywhere, anytime, and with nothing more than a blank page and my thoughts. It’s spontaneous, instantaneous, and comparatively low-maintenance.

Hosting an interview-based podcast has forced me to plan ahead, be very strategic in the ways I budget my time, be flexible to a multitude of different schedules of people from extraordinarily different life circumstances, change things on the fly, find even larger blocks of time than it takes to write a standard blog post to assemble episodes and create their associate content, create more lists than I know what to do with (and to be clear – I hate this admin crap in my real life and real job, but somehow don’t mind it for this passion project), and work against my own self-imposed deadlines. I’m not bitching about any of this, by the way – I fucking love this podcast and am invigorated by it in a way I haven’t been since the early days of Cru Jones Society – but it’s to say it’s a lot more labor-intensive than the blog ever was.

If you’re trying to build something, particularly something online as I am with Jon of All Trades, the death knell for it is providing content at an irregular, unpredictable, or inconsistent rate. And since my first priority is, and always will be, supporting my wife and our new daughter, that means my second priority has hijacked the majority of my remaining free time.

That’s not to say there aren’t dividends. There are! I’ve pre-loaded the site with Jon of All Trades episodes up through November 12. I’ve got two more interviews to conduct this week, and four more episodes to assemble, which will take me into the middle of December. It’s not been easy, but goddammit I’m proud of the effort I’ve poured into it, and I’m happy that I get to continue to provide a weekly show for your entertainment. Look for new episode announcements on Monday, and new episodes to debut each Wednesday.

The blog is likely to be on hiatus for the foreseeable future. There’s a chance inspiration will strike as I venture into new fatherhood, but don’t plan on seeing my ramblings on the page any time soon. I guarantee I’ll be back though, because I enjoyed even writing this over my lunch break at work, and this is basically a glorified information dump. This isn’t even good or well-written, but it was fun to write! I like to write, and I probably always will.

Just not for a bit. In the meantime, please enjoy new episodes of the podcast, and if you do, help spread the word. Give us a share on Facebook, a Re-Tweet, a rate or review on iTunes or Stitcher, or send a link via email to your friends or family like it’s 2002 or something.

I’m infinitely grateful to you for making me a part of your day, and appreciate your help in pointing more people to me. I promise to write again soon, and with a new baby girl in the mix, I imagine I’ll have lots to say.

See you then.