IT'S...JUST...NOT...FAIR!!!

The great grand-daddy of us all (many of us, anyway), El Possumo, Dr. Possum hisself, is hangin' it up.



Personally, I fail to see why something as meaningless as a job is more important than the way I waste my day when I should be working.



The fact is, Terry blogs in part so I don't have to. Looking around here, you can see I've fallen off the wagon a bit myself over the last few months. But I could always count on Possumblog to check three or four times a day to see something weird, interesting, intelligent, or ever so slightly off color. And that was only in the quotes he put up every week.



I'm only blogging here because of him and Jim Smith - the two of them noodged enough that I started this here steaming pile of crappy electrons. Though truth be told we can lay some blame at Jordana's feet - I only found Boss Possum after seeing a link to her blog from National Review's Corner blog. It seems odd that I should continue when he stops - seems like the chain, broken at the top, should fall apart.



But that, in essence, is the point of blogging - once started, no matter who egged you on, you're on your own. This isn't meant to be a moralistic tale of an aging, balding Jew, raised by his PossumPappy to finally blog on his own two feet. The heading for this post is, in fact, completely mistaken. It is fair. It's entirely fair that the real Terry - not the entertaining raconteur of my bloglife - should continue to grow as a person and live the life he needs to lead for himself and his family.



That it will impact part of my life is noticeable, but in essence irrelevant. Blogging is a pastime for most of us, not a fungible career. And when advancement calls, pastimes have to take second place. I will miss the daily conversations of Possumblog, which is where the real fun was for me. It was a chance to talk to folks I find entertaining, a place to trade one-liners and gently snide insults with a group of people I would never have met otherwise.



Look, nobody died here. Terry remains around, and emails are always available. Heck, I might even start blogging regularly again, in the hopes that I won't lose touch with the crowd I "met" over at PB. It's nice to call you folks that I've never even met in person friends, leaving aside the oddities of a New York Suburban Hebrew palling around with a Southern Rednecked Christian Goober (hmmm - I sense a sitcom plot in there somewhere...)



Life will continue, and there's no "forever" here in the blogosphere. There's no reason Terry won't someday return, even on a semi-regular basis. But in the meantime, the internet has just become a less interesting place to hang out, and that makes me sad.



Shalom, Possumblog.