Shut Up And Listen 256

Shut Up And Listen 260 will mark five years of doing this column and it will also be my last. I quit.

This decision has been a long time coming. For the past year or two, writing this every week has been a chore, not something I enjoy. Oh sure, there's the odd column that fires me up and I love writing, but, for the most part, each week is a struggle to string together six hundred words and fill the space. I don't like doing it and I'm not going to anymore.

The column has been a big part of my life for the past five years. Week in, week out, I've been doing it since I was eighteen. I remember when I began in and it stemmed from the fact that I was an opinionated little know-it-all and . . . well, not much has changed. I'm still an opinionated little know-it-all, but I've also grown more apathetic and tired.

Fuck, I'm just not in the mood to write the fucking thing anymore.

This year, I've had school, work study and working as an A&E editor at the school paper, which takes up a good four days a week (including my precious Sundays). Writing a column on Saturday night just isn't what I want to do. Usually, I want to just lie in bed and watch TV or a DVD.

This must have become obvious over the past while as columns have been posted on Sunday or Mondays and, in one case, just not at all. I made that column up at the end of the year, but still. That had never happened before. I've had cases where I couldn't post the column on Saturday, but those were rare cases where I literally couldn't post it. In these cases, most of the time, I just didn't want to do it.

That means that after this column, there are only four more left. I would promise that they are going to be four very special columns that rock the fucking house, but probably not. They'll most likely be typical bullshit from me. If something interesting happens, I'll probably do something good, but otherwise, prepare for the usual.

And therein lies the whole reason why I'm quitting: it's just the usual same old, same old and who needs that? A lot of people do online columns and ninety-nine percent of them suck ass. Do we really need another? And I'm sure this column has sucked ass for a while now, so it's about time I got my ass offline.

No idea what I plan to do with my site beyond keeping it as an archive for these columns. I'm sure I'll figure out something. Most likely, I'll leave it alone and not do much. I'm lazy like that.

So, enjoy these final columns, because once they're gone, so am I.

Later.