I’ve had this domain for nearly twelve years, which is more than a third of my life. Mental math tells me that I won’t have had this domain for half of my life until it turns twenty, at which point I will be 39, for which I am grateful. You may have recognized that I’ve not posted very much here as of recent, which is to say that I haven’t posted anything new in over a year. Whenever I thought about long breaks in publishing in the past, I’d hedge and say that I still write a lot, but it’s just not coming out on the blog. That was, briefly, true, for instance back in 2023 when I was burning myself out on Score Secondary, but it’s not really true anymore. I still write in personal journals, and I do a ton of writing for my job, but that’s really it. It’s not like I’m sitting on a cache of essays, short stories, or punchy blog posts that I haven’t deemed perfect enough to show anyone and that’s why it’s all been radio silence from me. 

I’m also keenly aware that “blogger posts apology about not posting enough” is a genre that readers infamously aren’t interested in at best and are actively annoyed by at worst, so I’ll get to the two points I want to make here:

1 – I am on a new medication for ADD. I don’t talk about mental illness here very often. I will sometimes look back at my archives on this site and feel this strange dissonance, where some of my most depressive times have produced my most goofiest work – The Applebee’s Secret Menu shortly after my first breakup, the fake quotes about wasps nests and intentional pants-shitting in Allen Fieldhouse days after I was clinically diagnosed with depression for the first time, Chicken McNougats as I sort of listlessly navigated post-COVID, and measuring penalty kick misses with a pilot pen and a notecard during my Canadian exile, which happened five years ago somehow.

Anyway, I make a point to avoid writing about mental illness, mainly because I don’t feel that I do it well, I worry that it’d come across as fishing for sympathy from my readers, and the one time that I did write about mental illness, it got abnormally successful and I tried to pigeonhole myself into trying to connect every video game I played to my mental illness on YouTube for a year and it ended up just making everything worse. There is a reason it’s not “The Depressed Video Game Nerd”, as it turns out. 

I almost never write about ADD. I doubt I’ve ever mentioned it in any public forum. I don’t bring it up to friends very often. It is a significant problem for me, and while I was medicated for about four years (March 2022 to January 2026), I started having adverse effects from the meds starting in the winter and had to stop taking them. I’ve been unmedicated for most of this year, and the effects of that at the very least confirmed to me that I was not faking my symptoms of ADD. 

I started on a new ADD medication last week, and I’ve been having positive results from it. I am failing to finish thoughts during my work appointments less and I’m completing tasks with more efficiency. There are some side effects (like the headaches upon the comedown are still a bastard and I hope that they subside over time, which I’ve read should be the case). It’s also helped shed light on something regarding the blog — namely that I don’t use it anymore. I had the pleasure on Tuesday of writing two thousand words on the KU Soccer stadium. I posted that to the Substack blog. This brings me to my second point.

2 – I noticed, after writing it, that I wavered between places to publish it, but only between the personal Substack (the name of which I’ll probably have to change if I fully commit to writing on it as a default) and Score Secondary. This was a soccer-related piece, but it was really more of a complaining about modern life piece that used soccer as a frame, rather than a direct soccer piece. 

Regardless, I didn’t think about posting it on joebush.net for a moment. As to why I completely ignored the site, it all basically goes back to my preference for the post editor on Substack to the post editor on WordPress (Thankfully WordPress has re-introduced the classic editor, I found out today as I wrote this post) and the fact that the “Read More” instruction on WordPress doesn’t work on my blog anymore and hasn’t for years, so everything I post gets fully stretched out upon going to the blog’s front page, which makes navigating the site sort of annoying. 

In a perfect world, I would migrate the domain to the Substack blog (or more likely Ghost, as it’s less liable to be fucked up by corporate mismanagement and meddling as WordPress was and as Substack has been with the introduction of the Notes timeline), but this would mess up years of back links to old posts. I would like to somehow archive the old site, but I don’t know how to do that. Maybe I’ll do that down the road, I don’t know. 

I think my plan for the moment is to sort of split the difference – I am tired of opening my website to find a post about a VHS blooper tape from last August, so I will instead have the site open up to a designated home page. I’ve just implemented it and can confirm that it functions, which at the moment is good enough for me.