It was ten years ago this week that a fresh-faced 19 year-old college sophomore named Joe Bush first published on the site bearing his name.

My immediate instinct is to state that it’s hard to believe it’s been ten years already. “Where did all the time go?” I find myself tempted to write. In truth, though, that day feels like it was about ten years ago. I feel about ten years separated from it. 

I don’t remember the moment in particular. I assume that I was in my dorm room in Gertrude Sellards Pearson Hall at KU and that I typed it out on the old Dell laptop that I’d used since high school. The bulk of my memories of Fall 2014 happened in that cramped, lonely, adolescent space, and the bulk of my memories of Fall 2014 featured the subject of that first post: video games. 

I had started the blog at the recommendation of a professor from one of my journalism classes: If you were to take your writing seriously, she said, you needed to start a blog, publish on it at least twice weekly, and have it registered under an actual domain name. By the end of the semester, I’d left journalism school (the weed-out class successfully weeded me out), but the site remained in place and has stood there for ten full years now.

Though I’m working through many different mindsets about the site’s direction (which I will get to in a moment), I must admit that I’m proud of the archive I’ve built over the past decade. I’m fortunate that I have a living catalog like this to illustrate how I’ve grown and changed since that sophomore year at GSP. When I look back at old pieces that I created for the site, I feel gratitude for those prior versions of me who took the time to write those posts and had the courage to publish them. Though there are moments in which I read from between my fingers in retroactive embarrassment, I find myself as often pleased by the ideas that worked and the jokes that landed. 

I consider pride to be an acknowledgement that my efforts have improved something. The past decade of writing on this site has enriched my life. Through the site, I developed a creative voice, I grew to understand my sense of humor better, and I started to take this craft of writing seriously. Without this forum, I don’t know that I would have developed the robust love for the discipline of writing that pushed me into my career in teaching. That, in and of itself, has made the entire endeavor valuable. 

To you, the reader: I hope that my work here in the past decade has helped you out. If I’ve provided insight, provoked a laugh, or enlightened you in some way, then I feel that I’ve done my job. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the feedback I’ve received over the years, be it through comments on WordPress or some social media site, through emails I’ve received, or even references in conversation by friends. I am absolutely flattered by the impact my work on this site has made. 

I find it very funny, in retrospect, that I started the site with the purpose of kick-starting a journalistic career and completely abandoned that purpose within two months. When I started this site, I was in the middle of my first real disillusionment with writing. I thought that, if I enjoyed writing, then I needed to pursue journalism school – But I hated journalism school. I hated that class. I found that instructor unnecessarily cruel (I remember she reduced a student to tears laughing at a pitch once) and I worried that the interviews I did for homework were at best distracting to my subject and at worst ruining their day. If I had to rank every class that I took in college from favorite to least-favorite, it would be at the end of the list with little competition. There would be no jockeying for position from Biology for Non-Majors or Introduction to Psychology or French Linguistics.

Despite all of that, it’s among the most important classes that I ever took. It convinced me to change my career path, it highlighted the importance of teaching with empathy, and it catalyzed this site! It also catalyzed the trombone maintenance video that still gets comments on my YouTube channel a decade later. Biology for Non-Majors did nothing of the sort!

What’s funny about all that, and I think this reflects why the site’s origin so accurately feels like it’s a decade-old, is that the site’s operated without a stated purpose since the outset. I’ve done this for a decade now, and I’ve never really been able to say why. I just have fun with it. As the tagline (which was taken from a Facebook message I sent to a classmate from a French class who I later lost touch with, then reconnected with, and now live with) states: It’s all mostly jokes! 

It’s obvious, if you look at the dates on the right-hand side over there, that I don’t publish here as much as I once did. That’s partially a casualty of the lack of purpose inherent to the site. It’s (and this will sound whiny) moreso a casualty of WordPress adopting the awful Gutenberg editor back in 2019, which I’ve never liked, never learned to like despite honest effort over the years, and don’t foresee myself ever truly liking. It turns the act of publishing anything into a miserable chore unless I’m directly copy-pasting blocks of text I wrote into a Google Doc. The “Read More” tag doesn’t seem to even work anymore! 

If I didn’t know that it’d mess up years of archived links and posts, I’d have moved everything over to Substack years ago – but alas, for the sake of what I’ve built here, we are stuck here on WordPress and on WordPress we will continue in some form.

I actually just had the thought to keep this the site for longer text-heavy works and use the Substack, which has felt sort of pointless ever since I deleted Twitter and realized that most of my readers just get the WordPress updates via e-mail anyway, as the place for any lighter, more serendipitous fare, given that I like using the Substack editor. But don’t quote me on that.

I know not what the second decade of JoeBush.net holds. I enter it much less ambitious, with much less riding upon it, but ultimately much happier and far less confused than I entered the first. Regardless, I’m grateful for what the last ten years have brought me.