Real Joe

I’m heading to the Mayo Clinic’s St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester later this afternoon. My motorcycle buddy Jim Douglas and I are paying a visit to Jon Harmsen who was severely injured in a cycle accident about a month ago.

Jon is the son of another friend, Larry Harmsen whom I’ve known and gone biking with for many years. (Jim and Larry rode on the very first RJ Tour back in Nov. 200.) Jon joined us on our one-day Real Joe Motorcycle Tour that we held back in August. (No, I never wrote about it. I did take photos, but lost them in a hard drive crash.) A couple weeks later, he and his wife rear-ended a van and they’ve both been in the hospital since. Details and updates on CaringBridge.

I may moblog some photos from the hospital.

No, no that SOS.

I mean “shot of solitude” SOS which I wrote an essay about 4 years ago (blog post is still us but not the essay.)

One of my Wigley and Associates‘ weblog clients is Eden Prairie Police Chief Dan Carlson. Earlier this morning, he blogged a Week in Review post in which he gave a little glimpse of his activities from his personal life. It ended with a paragraph about the importance of quiet time.

This week I was cramming to get our taxes done (yep, I’m a laggard) and catch up on client work. On Wed. morning, I noticed that the background tension/noise in my head was approaching apeshit levels so I took time for a 30 minute SOS walk in the Carleton College Arb just after sunrise. Ahhh. That simple break got me through two-days of tax prep and is still reverberating. I gotta remember to do it more often.

I started this weblog over four years ago, part of a plan to make Real Joe into a media property, on a par with other big web content sites. The dotcom collapse took care of that, as well as my own naivete about what was required to create a sustainable online content business.

I can’t say I’m any smarter about the latter. But after a four-month hiatus, I’ve discovered that I miss blogging for Real Joe. Something about the regular discipline of reflecting about what’s going on in my life and the cultural sea I swim in… and getting some feedback from other guys who are doing likewise.

I just ordered Real Live Preacher’s new book that’s based on his blog, supplemented with some essays. I’d like to do that someday. But in the meantime, I’ll just blog for myself and a small audience of family, friends, colleagues, and a few strangers. How often? I don’t know. My self-employed income is as tenuous as ever, so I can’t devote much time here. I’m aiming for shorter, more frequent posts.

I hope to have a meeting in another week or so with two guys I know who are bloggers. We plan to brainstorm on ways that we might collaborate on a blog.