this clock has been stuck on nine for some time; I'm moving on to ten

Today marks the ninth anniversary of this blog. It began when, finding myself totally frustrated with the idiocy and brutishness of my country's response to the events of September 11 and feeling almost totally isolated in my disgust, I started sending a series of emails to people I knew well, sharing my thoughts and my anger. A few months later I started jameswagner.com, intending it to be a more structured and more widely broadcast form for the kinds of unelicited rants which were testing the patience of my friends. It was also intended to include ruminations on subjects in which I thought others might share my interest.

Almost from the start there were entries on politics, the arts, queerdom, history, New York and the world, and within a year they began to be accompanied by images and photographs. Many of the latter have been my own.

April 27 marks another anniversary for me, one infinitely more important than the launch of this modest little blog: I met Barry, my perfect partner in everything, and Wunderkind webmaster, exactly twenty years ago today.

[the image is that of a beautiful clock mounted high on the outside of the handsome bank located across the street from our apartment, the modernist West 23rd St. building constructed for The Broadway Savings Bank in 1948; the architect was Harold R. Sleeper]