For the last five years, more or less, I've blogged almost every day. It takes time, at least a couple of hours a day, to do what I've done here.
I started blogging when blogging was relatively new because I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. I thought blogging was something that I -- a professional communicator -- should know about, and it was. I learned a lot doing this, and I kept at it longer than I expected because I enjoyed it. Functional/Ambivalent was the first time in my life I had a public forum without an editor or boss of some kind telling me what to do. (I understand the value of editors a lot more now.) I wrote about whatever interested me at the time, no matter how inappropriate it might seem, and if you look back through the work I've posted here you'll see both creative and ideological evolution over time.
A key aspect of that evolution has been my interaction with my audience. There are some smart, funny people out there who've taken the time to comment on this blog, sometimes agreeing but mostly disagreeing with what I have to say. My main success metric on this blog was not traffic but comments, and believe me when I say that every single comment brought me some small measure of joy. I enjoyed the challenges you offered and, for most of the life of this blog, the differing opinions.
I'm going to end Functional/Ambivalent today for several reasons, the most important of which is that I have moved on to other creative projects and the time this blog demands is simply not time I can afford to spend. I've been working, for the last five months, on a book proposal. The proposal is one part of a year-long attempt to change my life, to leverage what I've done the last few years -- including this blog -- to return to my roots as a professional writer (though I remain involved in a couple of entrepreneurial ventures). In support of that, I've started and need to establish another blog on another subject. That blog is past the experimental stage and needs my full attention, but I'm spending too much of my time over here on F/A, which I love but which is no more useful to my grand plan than is playing golf or reading comic books. I've known for months that F/A was going to have to go; today is as good a day as any to pull the plug.
I want to thank you all for your time and attention and to tell each and everyone one of you how much you've improved me. I'm going to leave F/A up for a while, but I'm turning off comments because the spammers have already set in. Please don't imagine that means I want to cut myself off from the friends I've made here. You can reach me at [email protected], if you like. I'll tell you about my other project, which is dissimilar to F/A in the extreme and still finding its voice. (Perhaps you'll come help me with that.) I'll even pierce my veil of anonymity and invite you to be my Facebook friend, beause I'd really like to stay in touch.
Aside from that, I don't know what to say. Except, again, thanks.