Take

John Gruber wrote about Om Malik, who recently passed away after battling heart issues.

Om is one of those people who has always been well known but in the periphery to me. I've seen many dozen things of his, read a dozen things, and he's been one of hundreds of people who has seemed like a sharp tack, who has seen the right things at the right time. I have nothing of depth to add; rather he be eulogized more appropriately by those who more keenly understand his writing and were impacted by his person – from what people are saying, I wish I had been.

What strikes me in reading this is the chasm that appears. I've been an acquaintance of many dozens of people and a friend of a dozen, over the years. But because of geographical boundaries and because of my own nature, there are no photos of me sitting grinning even with those I would call friends.

When I started writing, around the time Om started writing (and John, for that matter), this writing was a bigger part of my life than it is now. It used to mean a lot more. It used to bring some form of contact with people. But, as so happens, to my detriment, on the personal level I started to grate on people, and on the global level people started to migrate to centralized social media – something I've never been interested in. And this was always a sideline, just writing for fun, exercising the mind, wanting to think, too, like the other people. If this sounds petulant and puerile, it may be because I was a teen at the time, a condition that thankfully fully subsided (in contrast with being petulant and puerile). But this young ambition also started developing a muscle I didn't have, and I don't regret that.

I regret that I've never met some of the people I've run into over the years. But it's also not a coincidence that such situations haven't fallen into my lap – I think I'm as unlikely as I'll ever be to ever actually go to the US, where most of the flock exists. I see a lot of people longing these days, often without nuance or qualification, for the state of things roughly 2005-2008 or so. It was not the peak of my own life, but some things were undoubtedly easier and less complicated.

What I'm left with is this as a loose strand, kept vaguely alive, a witness of a past life. Occasional panning for truths and insights in emerging events, with the rough accuracy as those who panned for gold a century earlier. All the while most of my energy, most of my problem solving and most of my identity lies elsewhere.

You carry your old selves within you as you grow and progress through life. I know that I am good at some things, but I try to always remember my failures. Some of what I've been, I've had to slough off because of embarrassment, or to leave room for the growth of something healthy instead. Some of it seems, depending on the day, to have defined a lot, or to have gone absolutely nowhere. Unlike so many others who see an audience, journalistic duty, a part of a public brand or persona... there is nothing that keeps me writing here. Nothing aside from the value and virtue of continuity. A grounded reminder, a small prayer in observance of something else, that the person who exists now and the person who started out more than two decades ago, though different in circumstance in many ways, still sprouts from the same seed. To the people who have followed this and me since – I wish you have plenty of friends to grin next to, and to those I really would call friend, I'm sorry circumstance didn't work out for us, and I hope I wasn't too annoying.