{"id":23118,"date":"2016-06-12T16:45:07","date_gmt":"2016-06-12T20:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=23118"},"modified":"2016-06-27T20:05:31","modified_gmt":"2016-06-28T00:05:31","slug":"the-end-is-near","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-end-is-near\/","title":{"rendered":"The End Is Near"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/r377iPPbvVA\" width=\"420\" height=\"236\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\nI don&#8217;t have a graceful way of stating this: at some point, in the coming months, Rock Town Hall is likely to cease its active life and be preserved as an archive site of often\u00a0dazzling\u00a0rock insights and articulation. I can&#8217;t imagine what more we can do with this current vehicle. I don&#8217;t want to repeat myself. As much as I may joke about it, I actually feel too old and too wise to keep blasting away at the same ducks that refuse to leave the barrel. We&#8217;ve been in our public blog form since January 2007; we existed as a private Yahoo Group listserv for a few years prior to that. In the shortened lifespan of the digital age, does that mean we&#8217;ve managed to keep this place in business on the back of\u00a0an 8-track format?<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s been a long time, long enough that I actually feel like a significantly different, evolved person. One of the prices of evolution is that the things that meant so much to us even 5 years ago don&#8217;t\u2014I won&#8217;t say &#8220;mean as much,&#8221; because that&#8217;s not the case\u2014resonate the same way. Like Frank&#8217;s voice (so they say)&#8230;it remained his voice alone, but what he lost in pitch had to be addressed by gains in tone. Or some crap rationale that we say about the aging ones we can&#8217;t help but love.<\/p>\n<p>Do you still love Rock Town Hall? I hope so. I hope you always will. I hope you&#8217;ve found a way to rationalize the gains in tone that only those of us who&#8217;ve loved and lost can turn to their advantage. We&#8217;ve done the Lord&#8217;s work here, at least some rock-loving Lord&#8217;s work. I&#8217;ve executed\u00a0a handful of great ideas in my life, concepts that successfully bring group thought and input to life. This place, with the help of you, you, you, and <em>you<\/em>, is one of them. <em>We coulda been a contendah<\/em>, I&#8217;ve been known to mutter in my characteristically pissy moods. We were in a league of our own.\u00a0I&#8217;ll do my best to resist getting too high on what we did, but trust me, I could.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-22807\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/rockbook.jpg\" alt=\"rockbook\" width=\"400\" height=\"107\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/rockbook.jpg 400w, https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/rockbook-300x80.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Fucking Facebook did us in as much as anyone&#8217;s personal evolution. I like Facebook. I have fun on it. But it&#8217;s so faux-egalitarian. I try to come off as a Man of the People, but that&#8217;s bullshit. I&#8217;m more of an instigator of engagement. Rock Town Hall was a place to collect the best and brightest rock nerds and see who could come out as Top Dog. Sure, anyone who spent too much time here is a mutt, but mutts make the best pets. They&#8217;re typically lower maintenance, more flexible, more agreeable. We&#8217;ve duked it out here for years, and rarely has anyone left the playing field with a black eye or a busted jaw. People talked. People listened. People had fun with it. People made friends with each other. For all my quiet grumblings over Facebook opening up the playing field to all qualifiers, making it too easy for people to carve up little discussion groups of their own, it is nice seeing how many people who clearly met here in the Halls of Rock who now keep in touch on Facebook, sometimes even sharing thoughts and best wishes without the conduit of nerdy rock stuff.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve got to finish the book I&#8217;ve been picking away at. Please hold me to that. It&#8217;s the next step in my personal RTH evolution. After that, I hope to keep in touch. I hope to be part of\u00a0another great idea that will pull\u00a0our incredible rock powers into some shared medium. Nothing will change here overnight, so keep the chatter going if you think of some amazing idea of how to put a bow on this place. Thank you.<\/p>\n<nav class=\"page-links\"><strong>Pages:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-end-is-near\/\" class=\"post-page-numbers\"><span class=\"page-num\">1<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-end-is-near\/2\/\" class=\"post-page-numbers\"><span class=\"page-num\">2<\/span><\/a><\/nav>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t have a graceful way of stating this: at some point, in the coming months, Rock Town Hall is likely to cease its active life and be preserved as an archive site of often\u00a0dazzling\u00a0rock insights and articulation. I can&#8217;t imagine what more we can do with this current vehicle. I don&#8217;t want to repeat <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-end-is-near\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23118"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}