The lockout is killing me. And you've probably noticed that it's killing this blog.
I’m not shutting it down. But it's going to change for a while, even if the lockout ends.
When the game went quiet, I needed something else to do. I started a new writing project as a sort of experiment and it’s advanced to the point where I want to spend more and more time on it – enough time that it’s forcing me to make a choice about what Black Aces is going to be going forward.
Basically, it's going to be more casual - no more post-game writeups. No more running to the computer when someone is made a healthy scratch or when I read a column that that pisses me off.
Blogging for free is a young man’s game. In order to keep an audience, you need to post daily, be endlessly obsessive about the minutia of the game, nurse a completely fabricated and inflated sense of importance and have the stamina to do it all without getting paid a dime for any of it.
After 5 years of doing that here, and 3 more in the early part of the decade on the old Black Aces website, I no longer have any need to get into those arguments about contracts, fighting, CBA negotiations, concussions, Twitter, Don Cherry, or anything else. It’s all just noise. The fact that I immersed myself in it for so long and still somehow love the game is mind-blowing to me.
I still plan to keep posting whenever the urge hits me but I made a promise to myself that it’s only going to be about the things I enjoy, and those things are largely the same as when I was a kid. The memorabilia, the personalities, the legends, the tall-tales. To me, that’s the good stuff.
I want to be able to watch a hockey game without having to rush to the computer to tell everyone what I thought about it. There are enough people doing that, some of them very well.
If you’ve been coming here for a while, I really thank you for reading and letting me know what you think. I’ll still be here. But I’ll probably be posting pictures of old hockey programmes instead of pleading with Bryan Murray to re-sign Matt Carkner.
I still say they should have gotten that done. And before that, Anton Volchenkov too.
How do you let that guy walk?
See, it’s hard to stop.
