Thank you July 12, 2009
Posted by Mike Matthews in Personal Bidness.16 comments
This post has been a long time coming and I apologize for those of you who expected something sooner. I imagine many of my former readers have already abandoned this site and it may not be viewed by those who no longer make Down with Absolutes! a part of their blog-reading day.
June 30th was my final day of regular posting to this blog. It was the end of the first year of the 145th General Assembly in Dover. If all goes as planned in my personal and professional life, I will not be back to cover the start of the second half come January.
Where to begin? I’ve actually been “rehearsing” this post for the past few months. I’ve scribbled notes and sent myself emails about what I’d like to include in a wrap-up like this. However, as I sit here now, I realize that shooting from the hip is what I did best during five years of blogging and shooting from the hip is what you’ll get from me now.
First, a bit of history. I began this blog on April 23, 2004. I was in my senior year at Temple University and had just come home from hearing Arianna Huffington speak on campus. She energized the audience to “get out there” and ruffle some feathers. She said blogging was one way any ordinary person could get his voice out there. I took her up on this suggestion and I soon registered for a free blog via Angelfire. It was free and the software was a bit shaky, but I had a blog. Over the next eight months, I scored about 1,000 hits. Mostly from friends and family. It was my take on how much I hated George W. Bush and how I would do anything to ensure he wasn’t re-elected in November.
Then, he won.
I realized that blogging wasn’t as much fun and I took a two-month break. In the meantime, I’d met a new friend at work. She’s become a close friend over the past five years and she’s also my very talented “web guru.” Naomi informed me that I should just pay a few bucks and register my own domain. She would, in turn, give me some assistance with WordPress. DownWithAbsolutes.com was born in January 2005. The title is a lyric from one of my favorite Joe Henry songs, Tiny Voices.
There was very little direction with DWA in the beginning. It was mostly my take on national politics with a bit of pop culture thrown in. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2006 when I really began following the shananigans and trainwrecks that local politics had to offer. I was going to school to get my Master’s in Education at the time. So, between substitute teaching and that, I actually had a bit of free time to go out and attend meetings and get to know politicians and their fanboys and girls. I also got involved with some activists, many of whom I consider good friends today.
I began to really get into this blogging thing in the summer of 2006. With an abundant amount of free time on my hands, I decided to put it to some good use. I treated DWA like a full-time job and I was to become head reporter, correspondent, editor, and BS artist. There wasn’t a week that went by where I didn’t have three or four “events” to attend. I would bring my camera, take loads of pictures, see what developed, and then deface them using Microsoft Paint. Many people weren’t happy. I love it and, judging by my site’s visitor statistics, so did the people who stopped by on a daily basis. In 2005, DWA received more than 36,000 hits. In 2006, that number jumped nearly five-fold to 186,000. 2007 saw nearly 250,000 hits and 2008 saw more than 300,000 hits EVEN BEFORE I migrated to the Delaware Talk Radio server in September. Had I stayed on my own server, I imagine DWA could have approached half-a-million hits in 2008 considering I also see frenzied-spikes in readership during election seasons.
2009 saw me in a state of flux. After the gig with Delaware Talk Radio fizzled, I realized I have spent far too much time on this and have reaped far too little financial gain. I decided DWA would take a backseat to my job hunt. And it did take a backseat. Both quantity and quality of my coveraged suffered and this is where I am today. Highly disillusioned and pretty much no longer interested in covering politics. I have to take care of ME right now and that’s what I’m doing.
I thank you all for your readership over the years. I will not say “never” at this point; that would be foolish. But just know that I’m here and I may be back. Special thanks to those who helped contribute over the years, especially those who joined me, including Dominique, Mat Marshall, Delatacit, Justin, Susan, Leo, Intercourse, and Discourse. It was good times, indeed.
This has been good fun. Thanks for such a great time.
Live-Tweeting the final night June 30, 2009
Posted by downwithabsolutes in First State Filth.6 comments
I’m here! Where are you? Follow me!
50% June 30, 2009
Posted by downwithabsolutes in Weigh In.10 comments
It happened. Yesterday I achieved half of my long-term weight loss goal. For those who’ve followed, I’ve set a goal of 200 pounds to achieve in the long-term. My short-term goal is to still reach 225 by the end of August, which likely won’t happen, but it’s been a fun trip.
Anyhow, I started this weight-loss journey at 349 pounds. Twenty weeks later I’ve weighed in at 272.8 pounds, for a total loss of 76.2 pounds. In 20 weeks! Under five months! To say I’m beyond ecstatic would be an understatement. I’m thrilled, overjoyed, and shouting from the mountaintop!
I couldn’t have done this all without the support and encouragement of all my DWA, Facebook, and Twitter friends. As well as my off-line, in-person friends and family. This has been one helluva journey.
But I’m only halfway there. This big boy’s going to continue this journey. I’ve got more than 70 pounds still left to lose. But the effects I’ve felt in those 20 weeks have been immense. I no longer feel the need to sleep half of the day. I can keep up a good jogging pace for more than five minutes. I can fit into clothes that I haven’t work for five years. I can fit into a movie theater seat without having to grease the seat with butter.
In short, I feel great!
Let’s see if I can break 270 next week!
Forgotten Gem June 29, 2009
Posted by downwithabsolutes in Music.add a comment
Outside of Twitter and Facebook, I haven’t commented on the passing of Michael Jackson here at DWA. If I feel like it, I may posit something more deserving of the outstanding (and controversial) life this man led and his impacts on popular music and culture. I would just like to share with you one of my favorite MJ songs.
Long after he reached his commercial peak, Jackson recorded a song for his 1995 double-disc collection HIStory. The first disc was his greatest hits and the second was an album of all new material. It was a rather mish-mosh mix of R&B grooves (“2Bad”), aggressive hip-hop (“This Time Around”), gnashing hard-rock (“D.S.,” a son purportedly about the District Attorney Tom Sneddon who attempted to prosecute him in 1993 for child molestation), epic and grandiose orchestral gospel (“Earth Song”) and syrupy ballads (“Childhood” and “You Are Not Alone”).
My favorite song, though, was much more subdued. The minor-key “Stranger in Moscow” wasn’t considered good enough for release as single in America, where his record company feared it would get lost in the shuffle of a market more interested in alternative and R&B. I only really became interested in the song when Jackson’s record label dumped the video on the market in Summer 1997 (long after HIStory had peaked two years earlier). For those who remember, Comcast used to offer a music video channel called The Box, in which one could pay $.99 to “request” a video of their choice from a selection of mostly new music videos in rotation.
Because Jackson was well past his peak, MTV and VH1 virtually ignored the release of the music video for Stranger in Moscow. One could really only view it on The Box, where it was receiving a moderate amount of requests. As I was studying a bit of film in high school, I was fascinated by the video. At first, the song didn’t mean much to me. I found the slow-motion effects to be very well done. It would be several years later and I was listening to some of my MJ CDs when I, again, stumbled across this lost gem. The melody is a real slow burn. The lyrics, when investigated just a bit, give way to a man who’s clearly quite troubled and alone in the world.
My guess is “Stranger in Moscow” could be described as the most autobiographical of Jackson’s tunes as his life spiraled into a continued state of controversy, endless late-night jokes, and awful innuendo (of which I was often suspect).
“Stranger in Moscow” was not a hit. It peaked at number 91 on the Billboard Hot 100. Shame. How nice it would be to hear this lonely, melodic tune on the airwaves today.
The goddess speaks June 28, 2009
Posted by downwithabsolutes in Awesomeness.10 comments
The Republican Party will never revive itself until its sanctimonious pantheon — Sanford, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Palin, Ensign, Vitter and hypocrites yet to be exposed — stop being two-faced.
As they say: “Read it all.”
“Senator Vacant Seat” June 26, 2009
Posted by downwithabsolutes in First State Filth.4 comments
Wow…the Senate web-peeps didn’t take long at all. They cleared out Sen. Adams space quick, fast, and in a hurry.
Lt. Gov. Matt Denn on SB 121 June 26, 2009
Posted by downwithabsolutes in Awesomeness.1 comment so far
The kid does have a gift for blogging. This doesn’t seem to have appeared on his blog yet, but I got the super-secret, probably-embargoed copy via a Facebook message.Lt. Gov. Denn certainly has a way of making a story quite enjoyable.
Here it is:
Senate Bill 121, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation in a variety of areas such as employment, housing, and insurance, passed the General Assembly on Wednesday and will be signed by the Governor. Its passage took over a decade.
Along with Representative Bill Oberle, no one has spent more time over the last decade on this issue than my friend Drew Fennell. I’ve known Drew for probably fifteen years. She and her partner Lisa Goodman were the first people to tell me that I should marry my now-wife Michele, after I brought her to their house for a dinner party. I believe Drew’s exact statement was “Matt, she is the real deal, please don’t screw this one up.” And not only were Drew and Lisa at our wedding, they will forever have the distinction of bringing us a plate of meatballs just as the caterers were starting to put the food away before we had gotten anything to eat.
Others will write the official history of SB 121’s passage. But I am convinced that a turning point came when Drew testified on the floor of the House of Representatives back in 2001. Very few legislators knew that Drew was a lesbian, and she didn’t fit any of the stereotypes. She had kids, talked about her former husband who was a local minister, and as part of her advocacy for the state’s ACLU chapter, had warm personal relationships with just about every elected official in Dover, including some who had made venal public statements about the gay community. I knew what was coming when Drew took the floor in 2001, so I was watching as she started with her usual calm and erudite explanation of the bill, and then dropped a bombshell by discussing her own life and her own family on the floor of the House.
I could read the expressions on the faces of at least a dozen legislators: “Drew Fennell is gay? How can that be? She seems so…nice.” The bill passed the House that year for the first time, by a single vote. It ended up taking eight more years to get it to the floor of the Senate, and after Drew’s dramatic testimony in 2001, she became the bill’s most visible advocate. A big part of that advocacy job involved participating in scores of meetings with opponents of the bill who, sometimes with the best intentions and in the friendliest tone of voice, looked her in the eye and spoke about the way she lived her life in ways that had to have brought her near tears. But she pressed on, and this week it all paid off.
Drew called me from her car on the way home Wednesday night after the bill had passed. We talked about the hours-long debate in the State Senate, about how the entire tenor of the debate around the bill had changed in the last eight years. The witnesses who opposed the bill had tried to be respectful. I thought at least one opponent of the bill, Senator Colin Bonini, had demonstrated compassion and grace in arguing for a position that was ultimately wrong. There are many things and many people who have contributed to this change in the overall tone, but I think Drew has been a big part of it.
I asked her on the phone what it felt like to finally accomplish something that she would be able to proudly tell her grandchildren about. She said she would think about that after she had a Mojito or two. Drew, you have earned it.
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