On the fence about whether this is a good idea or not, but…
The third anniversary of South 12th, this very thing you’re reading right now, is coming up next week. Three years in Internet time is a fairly long time, and it’s easily certainly the longest-running online presence I’ve ever actively cultivated. Even my Friendster and MySpace profiles, which wouldn’t strictly count, fizzled after two years or so. Better yet, it keeps on going. I don’t post as much as I did a year ago, perhaps, but I certainly have no intention of ceasing publication here anytime soon. Indeed, I hope to be here long after I’ve moved away from S. 12th Avenue and eased into my late 30s, where I will ideally be living on Nicollet Island in a clapboard compound with twelve chickens and a goat named General Betray-Us.
(Odd sidenote: my second longest-running online presence, a blog I operated for two years from 2001-2003 and which I will never, ever, ever link to, never in a million years, also celebrates its 10th anniversary next week. I guess fall is just a good time to start a blog.)
The point is, I’d really like to do something special for the big day, so I need your help. This is absurdly self-aggrandizing, and few around would be shameless enough to do this, but I don’t care: for my third anniversary on October 12, I am putting out a call for fake S. 12th posts.
Basically, write your best fake S. 12th post, and send it to me. You’ve been reading this junk long enough to know what’s involved in a standard post around here. It doesn’t have to be long — just a couple of paragraphs, maybe an image.
(No anonymous submissions, please: if you’re going to send something along the lines of “Hi, my name is Andy and I think I am so great but really I’m a big jerk,” I’d at least like to know who I am angering out there.)
I’ll post all the submissions on October 12, and have some voting mechanism in place where you vote for the best one. Then I’ll send the winner a mail-order bottle of peppermint schnapps or something. And, if you’d like, I’ll also write something absurd for the purposes of your own self-aggrandizement sometime.
You have a week, readers: get crackin’! Think about what it means to see my name show up in your dashboard or bookmarks or Google Reader every few days, and bottle up that lightning in a few paragraphs.
