Yep, this li’l venture in snarky commenting and pseudo-intellectual aggrandizing has gone on now for one score years plus eight. Slightly over half my life.

The last few months, I know, I’ve been away from the site a lot.

It’s not that there hasn’t been a plethora of potential subject matter, both on the local front (the waterfront tunnel machine’s woes, the rise of jocks-with-laptops aka “brogrammers,” the ugly new buildings going up everywhere) and the national-p0p-culture front (weird crimes, dumb online “meme” obsessions, the ongoing collapse of almost all professionally-made media genres).

It’s just that the site/column’s “persona” isn’t a personality mode I’ve been into lately.

For the past two years, ever since my mother’s death, I’ve been forced to scramble and hustle just to keep a roof over my head.

Some acquaintances and friends have understood this.

Others have just told me, why don’t I just write full time? They offer “cool” book ideas, imagining that that’s a viable substitute for the real job I tell them I really need. They tell me to just “do what you love” and “don’t worry about the money.”

But I do have to worry about the money. (Despite the occasional rumors over the years, I’m not, and have never been, independently wealthy.)

And I’m working on that, on several fronts.

Among them are two new projects in the “writing” line, neither of which I’m ready to announce right now.

Watch this space for further details.