The last dispatch

You know, it's been a long time coming.

Friends, old Joe Bones has decided to shutter the Hell's Kitchen Dispatch. Why? Well, for one, I've been living in Sleepy Hollow, NY, for over a year and a half now, and whenever I get the urge to post it just feels plain weird doing so on a blog that's named after an area of New York City I haven't lived in for close to 3 years. It's like returning to the past to talk about something that has excited you in the present. Not a good idea. Just ask Bob Dylan.

Another thing, as some of you may have noticed, is, I'm just not posting with any kind of regularity anymore. The blogosphere is a hugh place. If you spend any time reading what's out there, you soon learn that, as a blogger yourself, the key to retaining an audience is really staying on top of your blog and posting every day as events happen. If you don't, chances are whatever it is you wanted to say will have been posted by someone else by the time you get around to writing it yourself.

Combine the two--a blog name that no longer bears any relation to what you're writing about, and a serious case of writer's constipation--and what you get is a blog that next to no one reads. And what we have here is no audience, which translates to no motivation, which translates to one dead blog. Or, in this case, a blog on life support.

Going through the archives, I see some posts that I'm really quite proud of. So I'm going to leave this blog in cyberspace rather than blasting it to the nether region. If you've stumbled on to this address for the first time and are reading these words, by all means feel free to have a look around. The posts dating to my time in New York City (2004 through early 2006) still hold up pretty well. Back then, I had more time to actually think before I wrote. Nowadays, unfortunately, I just don't have that time anymore.

And so with this, the 103rd dispatch, it's good night, Mrs. Masten, wherever you are.