After all the anticipation, The Rant Shack is up and I’m ready to rant. Let me give you the history behind The Rant Shack and its conception.
A few months back I got onto my e-mail and saw I had received a message from my sister. The e-mail was about a blog that she had created which she was going to use to post information about her family, more specifically her newborn son. So, being the good brother that I am, I quickly checked out this blog of hers. To my surprise, I found her blog rather spectacular. She had a few pictures of her family, and the blog layout was quite nice. However, I was drawn to an enormous list of names to the left side of the blog entitled “Blogger Buddies.” As I scrolled through what seemed to be an unending list of people, I realized two things. First, it was painfully apparent that my sister had a talent for building web sites -and I am glad that she has put this talent to good use. Second, either she is WWWAAAYYY more popular than me, or, she has been spending a lot of time listing names for her imaginary friends.
About a third of the way down the list, around name 3355, I noticed a few names that were familiar. I figured the names were pretty common and thus, the links could be to anyone’s blog. Boy was I mistaken! Of every name that looked familiar, there were only three I did not know. So, I clicked on a name and immediately I got whizzed off to that person’s blog. I got the same result for several of the familiar names.
Never had any of these people mentioned these blogs to me, and some of them I consider to be close friends, dang near family. I felt betrayed. Bamboozled. Hornswagled even. This was no ordinary hurt. This was hurt like a fat kid feels when he realizes mom used light whip cream on his double fudge brownie split. You know that deep rooted, industrial grade, just got told you were ugly type of hurt.
Well, needless to say I needed an outlet to vent this betrayal borne frustration. Oh sure, I could have turned to the usual vices: a dozen chocolate roses, a gallon tub of cookie dough ice cream, or years of fruitless yet expensive therapy. However, despite all the fantastic options I had, I chose to go outside, sit on the covered swing in my back yard and cry it out. It was then that I had, what I feel, was a stroke of genius. I thought to myself, “what the heck, if they can have a blog than why can’t I?” So I started planning The Rant Shack.
Often words spoken in the heat of the moment are sharp, ill placed, un-thought out and thus almost always “taken back.” For this reason I feel that what I have to say and/or rant about, just might accomplish a few things for me as the author and you as the reader. First, I will be able to have a place that I can vent out my frustrations about any topic I choose. Second, we all experience the same things, just the people and locations change. I hope The Rant Shack becomes a place that you can turn for some type of solace, advice or just a good laugh. To realize this goal I will post weekly blogs of some sort whether they are aimed at reliving my stress (the rants), giving some kind of advice I found helpful with some topic or situation (the informant), or just a generally funny story (the anecdotes).
I will also open the topic pool up to you. You can email me and request a rant, an informant or an anecdote on any topic you would like. I will more than likely have a few blogs cookin’ on any given week, so just have patience with me and I will absolutely get to what you have requested.
One last thing. I realize that we live in an exciting technological world full of crazy gadgets and things that help us be better than we could be on our own. To put it bluntly, I CAN’T SPELL!!!!! Nor have I ever, or will I ever say I can. So if there are words that the spell checker does not pick up… blame my wife for not catching them. Other than that I don’t think there will be many postings quite this long but I wanted to give you the genesis of The Rant Shack. Thanks for reading, please come back and as always… enjoy your life, you only get one.
