I watched the horror/comedy anthology Creepshow 2 (1987) last week. While in Portland I picked up a deluxe Arrow release with UHD and 4K discs and all sorts of extras—commentaries, ephemera, and even a comic with the missing episode “Pinfall” (there are only three segments in the film itself).
One of the things that really struck me while watching the first story, “Old Chief Wood’nhead,” this time around was the relationship between the elderly shopkeepers Ray and Dorothy Spruce (played by George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour). Their back-and-forth about keeping the store open in what is essentially a ghost town hit harder than I expected. Dorothy gently suggests that maybe it’s time to retire—that the town is gone. Ray responds with something that feels like it was lifted from another century:
Martha, this store made it possible for us to get married.
This store sent the girls off to school.
This store has given us the savings to give to our grandchildren.
It’s a touching little moment, and honestly it feels nostalgic even for 1987. The subplot involving the local Native American community—equally down on its luck—initially looks like it might turn into a predictable conflict, but instead becomes a bridge of shared hardship, dignity, and communal pride.* It’s earnest, corny even, but genuinely warm.
And then the 1980s crash through the door, literally. A mixed-race, mixed-class trio of vain, TV-poisoned punks barges into this 1950s general-store fantasy and drags everyone back into the reality of Reagan-era precarity. The tonal shift is brutal: pillaging, assault, murder. The fantasy collapses.
But of course this is Creepshow, so a different fantasy steps in: the wooden war chief who comes to life to exact revenge on the MTV de-generation.
Still from Creepshow 2 featuring the moment when the 1950s meets the 1980s
But what I keep returning to is Ray and Martha and their sense of self-worth tied to a place that is falling apart. Two people at the end of their working lives trying to understand whether the thing they built still matters.
I can’t help thinking about this as I close in on the 4,000-post mark on this blog. Those posts sit atop roughly 16,500 comments, a record of a community that showed up for me again and again. Much like Ray’s store, this blog made so many things possible. I’m not exaggerating when I say: without the bava, there would be no EDUPUNK, no ds106, and in terms of communal storefronts, probably no Reclaim Hosting.
I kept hearing Ray’s speech while I was writing this:
… this blog made it possible for us to get married.†
This blog sent the girls off to school.
This blog has given us the savings to give to our grandchildren.
I know people come and go here, that’s how the web works. But I’m genuinely proud that I’ve always written whatever I wanted. I’ve tried not to be too much of a jackass (not always successfully, especially early on), but over time I came to understand the responsibility of running one’s own little corner of the web.
This blog has always been where I reflect on my life—personal and professional. It indirectly gave me my own business, allowed me to move to Italy, and kept me close to my family. And I never had to sell the farm to make any of that happen.
My blogging changed because I changed, not because I wanted to turn this into a marketing funnel. During the chaotic Reclaim startup years I was equal parts thrilled and terrified, and that’s all here—on the record.
But perhaps the single most fortunate part of this whole journey is that I never had to turn blogging into money directly. I spend more time on this blog than on almost anything else I do professionally. Technically that’s a mountain of unpaid labor, but at the same time the blog has become my work, and it has—indirectly—paid every bill. I don’t know quite how to explain this except to say: blogging became a way of life, and doing it honestly, consistently, and openly has given me a good life, one I’m deeply grateful for.
*It erases the settler-colonial and capitalist realities beneath those shared hardships, but that’s a post for another day.
†Not literally—I was married before the blog—but you get the idea.
The Bava is almost becoming Buddha with these enlightening deep posts, along with creepy images. But you framed it so well and I am saving this quote
“ blogging became a way of life, and doing it honestly, consistently, and openly has given me a good life, one I’m deeply grateful for.”
And the thing is you could never convince me of this at the start or even 1000 or 2000 posts in. My own likely easily refuted theory was much of the web soured when it became a vehicle to generate cash. It’s those podcasts that open with and are crammed with ads and self promos. I always saw the blogging as something we do alongside and part of paid work outside of it. It reeks when it’s a vehicle to “make money” (and seems less fun).
I was unbelievably fortunate when I did freelance 2012 to 2022 that I never had to use the blog to hustle for gigs or sell myself. The networks and track record of a large body of not just outputs but ideas in the blog did the talking. In that time I only had one thing worrisome stretch, all the work came to me or just happened when I just asked.
So I can say absolutely blogging directly made all the opportunities over the long haul but absolutely was a key part of the fabric of both work and life.
I gave up trying to really convince folks but I know like Chico Escuela almost said, “Blogging has been very very very very good. To me”
You, Tom, and D’arcy are the ones often think of as I wake up and start thinking about the next post each and every day. There is something to the long-distance runner nature of it all that I really enjoy.
Beyond that, I have to give Bryan Alexander some serious love because he is a blogging fool and he walks and talks his work both personally and professionally about as authentically as I’ve seen. Hi presence on the blog versus reinforces his futurist and consulting work, but never subsumes it. It’s a hard balance and manages it beautifully.
Making money directly through the blog seems a pretty steep challenge and I don’t envy it. But who knows—I’m not retired yet—so I might still have to walk a finer line than I’ve ever had to up and until now, so it’s no time to get righteous or cocky. But if that were to happen I think the legacy of what this blog was would mean more than the possibility of what I could gain from monetizing it. I guess I still have that weak 1990s “sellout” nonsense rattling around my skull—I have to get over that shit or I could end up poor.
But the thing about you, Dog, is not only do you put in the blog work, but your comment game is ridiculous. You’re a blogging saint, few do more to keep it alive in 2025.