A Year Of Blogging...

...and so just about a year ago today, I started this blog. It's been an interesting, educational and enlightening experience -- to say the least. We've accumulated nearly 22,000 "hits," since I figured out how to put a hit counter on this thing. Over the past year, a number of people joined this blog and added immensely to the humor, satire and community enlightenment that has been our focus. Others e-mailed me good stuff to post. Some just sent me e-mails and thanked us for sticking up for the community and helping to expose what's lurking at the www.ontheborderline.net blog site.

The focus of this blog wasn't to attack the person but to debate the issues. I'm sure there is plenty of evidence in the archives of this blog that will show we swerved off the objective, crossed over the gravel shoulder and hit the ditch more than once. I don't know how many times we pointed out the hypocrisy of what is preached on the site of our evil blog neighbor -- www.ontheborderline.net -- but I know we left our ass exposed to the sting of the hypocrisy paddle many times. Speaking for myself, I'm human and I'm a hypocrite. If you're overly self-righteous about yourself, look up the definition and think about the areas where it applies to you.

Hell, this blog even reunited me with a few old friends I've lost track of. Even the OTBL'ers must have run into a few of my old Hudson acquaintances, as evidenced by the posts using one of my old Hudson nicknames. I felt flattered to see it up in blog lights.

It's interesting see the dedication people have to working on these blogs. There's way too much midnight oil wasted on putting the right cartoon captions tying transvestites and skunks together in the vast OTBL conspiracy. There's too much typing and not enough writing, to steal the words from Truman Capote concerning Jack Kerouac. I don't really think anybody every actually reads an entire post on most of these blogs -- including the authors.

The return of spring has reminded me that there's a much more important stuff to do out my backdoor. My guitar playing callouses need to get built up for the summer jam season. There's fish to catch. Golf balls to shank.

To my friends over at OTBL, I want to thank them for kicking me off their blog and telling me to go start my own. Just think what an unknown deadzone OTBL would be now, if they had tolerated a little opposition and debate. Over the summer, the OTBL'ers will continue to rehash the same stuff. All the additional publicity I got the OTBL blog has only increased their active poster by a couple. They also had people don't off. There's a sick bastard postings on under the name of Jack Bauer who does her best to lower the standards of OTBL. Keep it up Jack!

So with all this in mind, those of us who blog here at this site -- in honor of school teachers across the nation -- have decided to take a summer vacation. We've decided to increase our dosage of vitamin D, spend more time with our family and forget about the idiocracy the slithers through the cut-n-paste ramblings of our evil neighbors at OTBL. Of course, we will leave the blog open to any one whoever cares to use it. You can enjoy the archives, checkout the links -- which I will continue to update -- and join our blog and breath your own brand of creativity into it. If you are interested in joining, send an e-mail to abovetheborderline@yahoo.com. I check that periodically and I will gladly set you up as a member. It's easy.

Likewise, if you find anything on this blog that is offensive to you, use the comment section on the posts to express your feeling or shoot us an e-mail. We will take you thoughts into consideration. Likewise, if you want to be notified when we start backup, use the e-mail option.

With that in mind, we hope you enjoy the summer ahead and we hope to see you online down the road.

Peace!
James P. Nelson
aka dratsum
aka Shamus
and the rest of the cast here on the island.

PS: OTBL, as always, we are keeping our eye on you.

To be continued...