Over the course of relearning WordPress to launch what must be the 10th version of dadsbigplan.com, I went on a little side trip to try and recover a set of icons I’d used in one of the earliest iterations that I thought had been lost to history (or more accurately – hard-drive failure). But nothing ever really dies, and (thank’s to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine) the internet, like diamonds, is for forever.
It’s a tedious process to navigate snapshot-by-snapshot looking for artifacts from your digital past, but yesterday’s adventure did reveal a few treasures.
I wanna go back to 2001 and tell myself that the core premise in that piece is never truly defined – the narrator’s general misanthropy and the Dog Lady aren’t ever brought into a sharp enough focus. The original version is seemingly centered on a pretty shaky (and let’s face it – just mean) slur rather than the absurdity of the situation.
Even with the editing pass, it’s pretty slight at best.
Somehow my brain wanted to be a McSweeny’s writer before that site even existed, but still only landed a little north of Dave Barry-lite
