Has the world changed or have I changed?
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So after pushing the limits here at SBN for over ten years, the company and I have agreed to go our separate ways.
The plan is for Jim Gardner aka WiHaloFan to take over here and I would hope he has the community's support as he has my wholehearted endorsement. This site is about the community, and it is a great, rowdy, intelligent community
SBN/Vox.com is a big company now and what they call standards I guess I call strictures and, well they want people living up to their standards and I don't want to live a restricted life. It wasn't one thing nor one article, it was just time. I stand behind everything I published here. They stand behind almost everything I published here. I've worked professionally as a writer and journalist since 1988 and this company is as solid and responsible a place to contribute to as exists. Tyler Blezinski has been given many headaches over the years by what I published here and he has always stood behind my right to publish what I did. I thank him for the opportunity and the support against much backlash.
Consider that the company would still let me post to the site after parting ways and imagine the insane shit one could do and you will get the level of professionalism and trust that SBN/Vox carries with it.
It is a much different world since I started in 1988. Today, I'm a fifty-year-old guy with a pacemaker but I still want to rage against any dying of any light. But look around. The world everywhere is a little cleaner around the edges these days. That is by design. In my day job as an art critic I have raged against privileging design over impulse. This was once a commonly held viewpoint. Maybe it is just the purview of my generation now. A national publication calls me a sociopath over something I write - that is a badge of honor. Well, there are other people who do not see it that way and don't see the world as I see it. I've always accepted that and I accept it now. I never manifested the bravery that Charlie Hebdo did but I see a world shunning that bravery... and the rage just comes out of me naturally - and it is really just to rile you, the reader for whom I have had the privilege of hopefully informing, entertaining and inspiring. But I would never force my rage on anyone, especially a company paying me for the privilege of writing about my favorite team.
Last year I got to meet Mike Trout when he was promoting his Nike shoe. I got to do this because I represented SBN and I went to the press event and represented SBN quite professionally and promoted the product and again, I got to meet Mike Frickin' Trout, so what a blast, right? Right. Except, well, I knew. I knew right then... eh... I've just never been interested in "legitimacy" - the people craving it were always caricatures of the worst in humanity, oozing out things to be ridiculed - and on that day, having reached the peak of a mountain I never set out to climb, I just knew that what I aspired to and what SBN aspired to - and had achieved - were two different things.
But still, I wanted to be here to steward the community. THIS community. YOUR community. We're Angels fans. We are never going to get our due in the sports world and so here we are making sure we give each other the admiration, respect and camaraderie we all deserve. This is the biggest Angels blog on earth. We are Goliath and there is no David. We never became a bootlicking booster club and we are not going to start now. I'm proud of having helped build that, but again, the community built it and Vox/SBN built it. I was just pressing buttons and smacktalking the opposing fans a lot of the time - you all were making it happen.
Halos Heaven will still be having the annual July Vegas Trip this year and I will be there with Mrs. Halofan and you can bet I will be around a lot, commenting here - perhaps on posts that you author. I wholeheartedly support the vision of SBN/Vox and want YOU to be part of it. Let's be clear about something: you will get noticed and read if you author something here. Everyone who cares about the Angels reads this site and I've been humbled more than a few times when I saw the influence of ideas born here bloom. Try it, you'll like it.
The other day my wife and I were out and when we got home I immediately got online and updated my jersey number project to add 2015 as a year that Grant Green wore that jersey. This is infinitesimally small shit you realize. She realizes it too. So thanks to my wife for putting up with a baseball nerd. There are too many other people who have helped out over the years to mention so I will just say thanks to you all, I may have led the parade but I marched to your beat. And Angels fans are a very different drummer.
And to all those I have riled and upset here since 2005, understand that it was on purpose and I am comforted every day by the words of the Irish bard Brendan Behan "Fuck The Begrudgers" and that your hatred, loathing and disgust were badges of honor I will wear in the Los Angeles Afterlife of Anaheim as I wear them with pride on this mortal coil.
When I went in for heart surgery two years ago I had to sign a form that said I understood I might die. I didn't and am not now dying here but I will say what I said then. As the anesthesiologist was about to put the gas on my face I lifted up my head, looked at the surgeons and nurses, smiled and said:
Go Angels.