Wow. This is dagblog, huh? I don't even recognize the place. Readership is flourishing, the pace of posts is snowballing. Frightening dagger logo be damned, it even looks like an official bloggy thingy now.

It's like I left the neighborhood right before they legalized prostitution or discovered massive amounts of shale oil under dagblog's hallowed grounds. If I was a more insecure man, I might even say there was a causal effect involved here, and that everyone had been lurking on the outskirts of town, waiting for my departure, but I'm quite confident my body odor has been under control since my junior year of high school.

In any case, given all the new people roaming the dagways, let me just quickly re-introduce myself. My name is Deadman, and I am a co-founder of this place. Awww yeah, I am the D in Dagblog. And I once pontificated quite often here, spewing hot air on topics ranging from Tiger Woods to Terrestials (of the extra kind) to Twitter to theology. With my day job as a mutual fund co-manager, I admittedly liked to discuss financial matters and make spectacularly poor (or at least spectacularly early) market predictions most of all.

Over time, however, my urge to spew lessened and my posts sparsened (should be a real word, dammit). Part of the reason for my lack of production was just life getting in the way - getting engaged, married, having a kid and redeveloping a serious online poker habit all in the span of a year-and-a-half will do that to you.

But the main reason for my disappearing act is that I'm one lazy mofo when I don't feel passionate about what I'm doing, and I developed a whopping case of the 'Who Really Gives a Shit Anymore' blues. Shiny new, well-spoken POTUS or no, the system was still irrevocably broken, full of hate and hostility, the only difference being that now we had to deal with the tyranny of the minority.

Of course, I had always envisioned that dagblog would be an eclectic place where all matters of modern society - politics, business, sex, pop culture, art, sports, health, technology - would be discussed and debated (with decorum), and all intelligent opinions welcomed.

Yes, politics would be a part of the content, and given that we launched dagblog right during the heat of the 2008 presidential election, probably the main part. But even when I still believed that Obama would actually deliver the hope and change he was promising, I never wanted dagblog to become an ideological soapbox fixated solely on politics.

Alas, aside from a few scattered posts, that's kind of what this blog has become, especially since the refugees from Talking Points Memo arrived on dagblog shores.

Of course, this isn't really a bad development. It's actually a good thing as I think the original vision for dagblog may have been flawed from the start. The most successful blogs need a passionate, dedicated community to thrive, and focus may just be a necessary component for that to happen.

I get it. I really do. I mean, I never wanted to become the kind of dad who always is showing off pictures of his children, or updating his facebook status with the latest new kid development, or abandoning all other interests and hobbies, but I fear this is where I'm headed. 

In any case, it really does thrill me to see how robust a blog and community this site has become, even if it's not exactly in the way I had initially envisioned. I definitely plan on being a semi-regular reader, and an infrequent contributor (Genghis has asked me to revive my Questions columns, something I'm all too happy to do, and I promise only one of them will be about fatherhood!).

And I truly hope one day I'll once again believe that my opinion matters and that my words might make a difference.