In the middle of doing work — actual work for my real-life job — the urge to write overwhelmed me. Such an urge doesn’t often poke and prod at my consciousness the way it once did, so I figured I’d better act on the impulse.

Every few months I sit down and reevaluate where I’m at with my writing. And every time I do this, it seems my life has changed a bit more drastically than the last time I did this reflection thing.

So where are we at right now? At this precise moment, it’s 10:45 p.m. on a beautiful Saturday evening and I’m sitting on my deck listening to what more or less amounts to the entire Britney Spears discography. There’s an explanation here. You see, my girlfriend (@danceral on Twitter; follow her) was teaching a dance class last week and needed a Britney Spears mix. So I downloaded the songs onto my laptop and… you know what, never mind. Excuses are for the weak. Just know that this is really happening. I’m very comfortable with my place in this world. Even right this second, as I bump Anticipating through the headphones. I imagine this is not what Andre Young had in mind when he got his Ph.D in rapology and dropped his Beats on the universe. Sorry, Dre.

I’ve been working a lot lately. My job has consumed my everyday. It happens. You get sucked into that thing that pays your bills and let it dictate your existence every now and then. We’ve all been there. I guess it’s fairly obvious, if I’m sitting here on a Saturday night doing work. Or at least I was. Until this started happening.

Work is neither bad or good. It just is. When I’m fortunate enough to meet the people who read my stuff, they’re often surprised to find I have a job that isn’t media-related, but alas, ’tis true. SSN is my hobby, nothing more. Like any hobby, I fit it in where I can. Which is why for the better part of the past year, I haven’t written nearly as much as I once did. Work has kept me busy during the day, while my free time has been devoted to spending moments with the people who bring me the most joy. I realize there’s a certain selfishness to the direction my life has taken.

I mention this often, but from Day One — November 12, 2008; I’ll never forget the date — the mission behind my website was to bring people together. I really can’t tell you why I saw that as my mission. But at the time, I had this feeling that sports fans in Seattle needed some sort of unifying thing to rally around. That year, 2008, was epically horrible. The Mariners lost 100-plus games, the Husky and Cougar football teams were a combined 2-23, the Seahawks finished 4-12 and had their streak of four consecutive NFC West championships snapped, and we watched helplessly as our Sonics were stolen from us. It was bad.

On the flip side, what did I really know? I was a 24-year-old kid who had never written professionally. I just had this desire to talk to people about sports. And I needed a new hobby in my life. I was bored. Boredom, it turns out, is an exceptional motivator.

We’re going on four years of this now. Every week, I wonder if this is the week I’ll give it all up. But then I look at the people who have found value, however minimal, in what I’ve done here. I can’t give it up. I like doing this for them, for us. Nothing — no amount of money, no job, absolutely nothing — could replace the satisfaction of achieving the mission I set out for myself.

I’m a completely different person than when I started this website. It seems so foolishly stupid. My life has been entirely altered by a domain name. Think about that. Twenty years ago, this wouldn’t even be possible. That boggles my mind. Without one single act of buying a URL and filling its end result with words, I’m not anywhere near the same person. Crazy.

I played in a softball game earlier today. At one point in that game, I realized every single person I was there with I had only met because of my website. I have another softball team I play on, too. I don’t play ball with those guys if I don’t start this site, either.

Rec softball is just an example. Some of my best friends in the whole freakin’ world are people I would never have had the chance to get to know without this site existing. Opportunities I’ve been granted come as a result of these pages. The people who hired me at my job — my career, my recent temporal burden — once told me the thing that gave me the edge over all the other applicants was the initiative I had taken to run a site of my own creation.

I had no confidence before I started writing on these pages. People should know that. I was reserved and had no idea who I was. My self-worth was non-existent. And perhaps that’s different than confidence. Because one can always exude confidence, even if it’s false bravado. We always like to think we have shit figured out. But at the end of the day, when the world has shut itself off around you and you’re left with only your thoughts, you know your true value. I had none that I could see. No value. I wanted that. I went in search of value through writing. I’ve found some things, but mostly I’ve come to the realization that a) we never actually figure shit out, and b) our self-worth can’t be determined by any audience, only by oneself.

I’ve been up and down over the past forty-two months. You can look back at anything I’ve ever written and sense the emotion from that point in time. I’m incredibly reactive. Compared to most sports fans, I’m probably a little more even-keel. But my heart is on my sleeve. If I’m feeling something, you’ll see it in the writing. I’ve never been blessed with the ability to disguise my passion.

I guess no matter what has happened to me since November 12, 2008, I’ve always had this website to keep my life in perspective. It is the one constant that has guided me. And it’s not just the website, really. It’s the people who’ve made the website possible, the readers. I’ve found value in the people as they’ve found value in my words. It’s kind of hard to explain, but the reality of that relationship gives me a ton of energy. I brought people together, just like I wanted to. And at the same time, all those people have brought me a great deal of satisfaction.

A few months ago, readers of my website started trying to hook me up with this girl. She was all about sports and whatnot. She had a job in sports, she was a Seattle sports fan, a fellow UW grad, all things that would undoubtedly appeal to me. She had a Twitter account. We happened to “follow” each other. Every now and then, she’d mention me in a tweet (tweet…even as I’ve embraced Twitter, I still hate that word in its modern-day form) and I’d get a little excited since she was pretty and seemed to agree with my otherwise outlandish opinions of society. But we didn’t really interact much. We just happened to acknowledge one another’s presence in the spectrum of the internet.

I went to the Alamo Bowl in December to watch the Huskies play football. We all know what happened there. No need to go into much detail. It’s not that important. But the setting is important. Because on the early morning of New Year’s Eve, my friends and I were camped out in the middle of the Houston airport, having spent the entire night awake in the most uncomfortable of venues. We slept on a hard floor. Except we didn’t really sleep. Two of us were sick, another one puked from the overconsumption of adult beverages. Our misery was a testament to sports fanaticism, I guess you could argue. But mostly, we were just being idiots. When you’re single and in your late-twenties, you can do that sort of thing and get away with it. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts, right?

Anyway, there we were when I took to my Twitter account and began chronicling the events taking place before me. This was at about 3:00 a.m. Seattle time, bear in mind. I expected no one to read my posts. I just wanted a record of the memorable evening occurring in my midst. But then this girl, Andrea, the one people had mentioned to me in passing, responded. And then she kept responding. And we started conversing back and forth in 140-character bursts. And pretty soon she hinted at a date. I told my friends who were with me on the trip about this turn of events. They just laughed at me, and ultimately my conversation with this girl ended when I boarded a plane bound for home.

A couple days later I told her I wanted to take her up on the date offer, if it still stood. She caught me off-guard when she invited me to an event that wouldn’t be taking place for a month — a month!!! I didn’t really know what to think, so I just said yes. We agreed to go on a date on February 2nd. This was in the first week of January.

Over the next thirty days or so, we would communicate from time to time. We texted and tweeted (the past tense of “tweet” is just as bad as the present tense) and little else. I liked her, but I tried to ignore her. There’s nothing worse than going on a first date and having nothing to talk about because you’ve already exhausted your conversation. I didn’t get my hopes up. I had incredibly high standards for dating. My friends would make fun of me for those standards. But I never wavered. When you know what you want, there’s no reason to settle for less than that.

February 2nd finally came. I wasn’t nervous. I’m always nervous for this sort of thing, but I was oddly calm on this particular evening. We met at the Seahawks’ practice facility. Sports. My life always comes back to sports. The event was for the Sea Gals. She was a Sea Gal. We were going to watch a dance dress rehearsal together. I didn’t even know what to expect.

She was beautiful. There are times when someone in your presence can make you question everything about yourself because of who they are or what they look like. At that instant I first saw her, I questioned everything from my choice of attire to my haircut to the deodorant I had put on to whatever cool, funny thing I was planning on rattling off. Everything. I questioned everything.

We sat next to each other watching a dance team on a stage. I made her laugh a few times. She made me laugh a few times. The rest of the night was a blur, but went amazingly. We didn’t get tired of each other once. We figured we should keep hanging out. It’s been 100 days. We’ve been making each other laugh for 100 days.

She has changed who I am in a positive way. I measure myself by how many times each day I can make her smile. I’m better with her. She makes me better.

And yes, she’s also the reason I am still, nearly two hours later, listening to Britney Spears sing. No one ever accused me of having good taste in music. And I’m easily impressionable. Let’s be honest here.

I would be remiss if I didn’t devote a significant portion of this article to my girlfriend. Over the last hundred days, she has made me happy. There are lots of things in my life that have changed since I started this website, and this is one of those things that’s slightly more important than the rest.

I had that mission to bring people together. I’ve been fulfilling that mission. I’ve benefited from that mission in a number of ways. Perhaps the best example of how I’ve benefited from my own mission can be personified, very simply, in the beautiful girl who makes me happy.

I’m in a good place. We’re in a good place. I’d like to give you, the reader — and if you’re still reading this, good lord, you impress me — my words every single day, but I can’t always do that. In the grand scheme of things, my words are unimportant. We’re fulfilling a mission together. We’re figuring things out together. We depend upon one another in ways neither of us will ever fully comprehend. I owe you so much. And where I’m at now, a lot of that has to do with you. We might not be connected personally, but if you’ve ever read anything here, then you’ve impacted me.

This week won’t be the week I give it all up. Next week likely won’t be either. In fact, I’m guessing that week might not ever arrive. I won’t ever stop all of this. When life gets a little hectic, I like to think I’d be able to sacrifice writing if I had to. But it’s not a realistic thought at all. This is part of figuring life out, yet never having it all figured out. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, exactly, but I know I love doing this one thing. So I’ll keep doing it. And life will keep evolving around it. Because for three-and-a-half years, that’s what life’s done.

We’re here together. I like that.

My heart doesn’t always have the capacity to communicate words in the way I’d like to communicate them. It doesn’t matter what the words are, really. They can be about sports, about life, about culture, about something funny, about an experience, about a moment. The words are there, in my head, and I can sense them, but the desire to convey them, to share them with the world, that doesn’t always align.

It is never easy to do the things that you truly love. And there’s a reason for that. When you truly love something, you give it your all. You don’t cut corners on the things you love. You put your entire being into the things you love. You sacrifice for the things you love. You place the things you love on a pedestal above your own self. The things you love, they are what define you, they are your legacy.

We can only love so many things in our lives. There is only so much time in the day, so much time in our very existence, so much time in any sense that you’d measure it, to give ourselves to these things. So, not everybody has the ability or the opportunity to love something. Those who do are fortunate. I’m fortunate.

I write not because I have to, but because I want to. I write because my heart tells me it needs a release. I didn’t realize when I was younger that this was the case. I just thought it was a hobby, something I liked to do from time to time. I thought writing would come to pass. I thought it might just be a phase, like the phases I had with musical instruments, or video games, or other outlets for my energy. I didn’t realize that it would follow me wherever I went, that it would consume me, that it would be my traveling companion wherever life happened to take me. The thing about writing, it is always available. You don’t need much to write. Just the willingness and a means to transcribe.

I often close my eyes and feel a keyboard beneath my fingertips and channel thoughts and think to myself, amidst it all, that this probably isn’t how everyone else does it. I whisper the things that I write as I write them. Sometimes my voice gets ahead of the prose. Sometimes I’ll go back and look at what I’ve written and realize I’ve left out entire sentences worth of thought, a result of my brain outpacing my motor skills. I just talk. I say the words that come to me and turn them into characters on a screen. I could do this all day if I wanted to I suppose, but again, it’s about desire.

There is a demand. There is an expectation. And unfortunately, I cannot always bend to demands and expectations. I’ll write things from time to time because I feel compelled to. Not because anyone else tells me I have to, but because I know in my own mind that it’s time, that it’s been too long since I’ve last said something. But I guarantee you if you ask anyone who writes for a living if everything they wrote came freely, as a result of their own desire, they’d tell you that wasn’t the case. There is always some demand to write. It just depends on who happens to be issuing those demands. I’m no different than anyone else in that regard. Except that I create my own schedule. That may be the one unique facet of my calendar compared to others’. I don’t acquiesce to the demands of a boss, a readership, a company, money, or anything else. The demands are my own.

I don’t do it the right way. I craft paragraphs all wrong. I end my pieces abruptly. I use whatever word most articulates the message in that moment, even if that word happens to come with a parental advisory. I don’t write about the things people always want to hear about. This, for example, this article, this is selfish, this is about me, this is about my life. I should be writing about the Huskies or the Seahawks or the Mariners or something like that but I can’t, I just can’t, and that’s frustrating. And it’s not that I’m incapable, it’s that I’m incredibly unwilling right now. Because I don’t care. My desire to romanticize the Husky Basketball team, or the signing of Marshawn Lynch, or the fast-approaching baseball season is not there. I wish it was, but it isn’t.

I understand the ramifications of everything I write. I don’t always care for those ramifications or heed them in any way, but I comprehend them. I know there are certain topics I can write about that will bring in ridiculous traffic. I know what it takes to get linked on the most prestigious pages on the internet. I don’t really care for that attention, though. Maybe I’m foolish to act that way, to think that my craft is above that if I want it to be. But when you love something, you don’t always act rationally in the heat of your passion. I love to write. Rationality died when I came to grips with that.

Why am I writing this? Because it’s been two weeks since I’ve written anything of substance and that demand I mentioned kicked in. I need to get back to writing. I’ve taken breaks from writing before, but never have I gone this long without releasing my words. Problem is, I don’t know where to begin. I’ve started and stopped so many articles in the last few days that I just needed to emote for a minute. This is the end result of that. It’s a holdover. It’s a pledge to you that I’ll be back with something that matters, that fits the bill of this website’s name, soon. I will. Because I know that desire will return. It always does. Sometimes it takes longer than other times, but it never fully goes away.

There is a prevalent belief in this world that when you love a craft, you should perform that craft as often as you possibly can to get the most out of it. I think that belief is garbage. When you love something, you cannot force it. Love is natural. It speaks to your soul and causes you to react, not the other way around. So because I love to write, and because I enjoy interacting with all of you who like what I love, I give you this placeholder for now and the promise of a return, hopefully sooner rather than later. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe a week from now, maybe longer. You can’t place a deadline on the heart, as it turns out.

I’m sitting on an outdoor couch in a stunning villa overlooking a bay and the entire city of Acapulco. It’s probably 75 degrees out, 2:30 a.m. local time. In less than 24 hours, I’ll be back in Seattle. For now, however, I’m surrounded by the droning chirp of crickets, a bevy of urban lights in the distance, and the occasional mosquito looking to feast on me. The world, it appears, has gone to bed. I’m the last of my travel mates — all coworkers of mine — awake. And yet for now, I can’t sleep.

It’s an odd picture, I imagine. I shouldn’t be on a laptop in paradise. Wearing jeans, no less. And a blue button-up shirt. These are all things I typically wouldn’t wear in warm weather. Fact about me: I get warm easily. Heat is not my forte. We just got back from a night out and I’ve been too lazy to change. Laziness > body temperature.

Today (well, by now it’s yesterday) is the third anniversary of the day I conceived this website. I don’t really know what to make of it. I never thought I’d last three years with a domain name and my thoughts in print. But that appears to be the case. It’s kind of weird. You never grow up thinking to yourself, Okay, one day when I get older I’ll have a job and in my spare time I’ll be writing everything I think about down for others to read. No one imagines that happening. And upon picturing that scenario, if by some strange chance you do happen to picture that scenario, you never figure that people will actually want to read the things you’ve jotted down. It’s odd, unique, perplexing, all of the above.

Every year I’ve made it 12 more months, I reflect on my existence since the last anniversary of this site’s birth. November 12th. It’s a date that has an inordinate amount of significance to me. I don’t have kids, so for now this URL and these words are my baby. They are what I take care of every day. I just do. I don’t know why. It’s not really out of obligation so much as it is love. I love to write. And I love to write here. Perhaps that’s the most important thing. I’ve been asked to write elsewhere. I’ve been offered opportunities here and there. I’ve even capitalized on those opportunities on occasion. But I’ve never found the words published anywhere else to be as valuable to me as the ones that appear on this page.

I know to many of you, this is just another website. It’s a place you go when you want to key into my thoughts — why you want to key into my thoughts is beyond me, but I appreciate the endorsement — or read about sports. To me, though, it’s more than that. This is my heart and soul. These aren’t just words. They are my emotions, my true feelings, and they are real. I’ve never wanted to be anything less than real when it comes to the things I write. It’s just not in me to act otherwise. And what I’ve found over the years is that people appreciate authenticity to an unrivaled degree. You can be the best scribe in the entire world, but if there isn’t a pulse to your writing — a genuine pulse — then your words are shit. You cannot fake passion and devotion. You can try, but you won’t succeed. Without passion, we are unhappy individuals. Without devotion, we are committed and accountable to nothing and no one. The value of our lives is found in the honest, passionate, devoted moments we afford ourselves.

I am very fortunate. I know how fortunate I am. I’m surrounded by amazing people. Those who have supported me, mentored me, raised me, encouraged me, shaped me, and allowed me to do this every day. I say it often, but it can’t be said enough. I am nothing without you. As it is, my thoughts are insignificant. They’re just thoughts. What matters to me is the people who read them and reflect upon them. Who are inspired by them and moved by them. Who share them and promote them. It is the people that matter to me. More than the URL, more than the letters on the screen, more than the effort of writing, itself. I do love to write. But I mostly love to write because of who reads the writing. It’s that simple.

When am I going to stop doing this? The other day, I was lucky enough to be interviewed about Dawg Pack Dirt, my one lasting contribution to the University of Washington (sorry I don’t donate more…or at all. One day it’ll happen. But if nothing else, you got thousands and thousands of dollars from me over six gloriously average years of education). The journalist interviewing me asked when I would essentially retire from publishing the gameday info sheet. I paused, then stuttered. I had never given this any thought. Just like I had never given any thought to quitting writing. And frankly, I still don’t know how to address this issue. I’m overly-invested in this website. One day I might have a wife and kids, or a different job that demands all my free time. But for now, I have the luxury of being able to do what I want with my spare hours in the day. And so I’m married to this thing. It’s my outlet. I know I want more. I want much more. But this isn’t a bad companion for the time being.

It’s 3:10 a.m. local time. I should go to bed. I have to be up in four hours to prepare for a flight back home. I miss Seattle. I shouldn’t. It rains there too much. And I’m in a tropical paradise right now. But for better or worse, that’s where my heart has chosen to settle. Damn geography.

Thank you for letting me be selfish enough to write this. Once a year I have to reflect on things. I mean, I do this other times, as well. But on November 12th (13th, in this case), I need a long second to look back and make sure I’m seeing this all correctly. I honestly don’t know how we got here. I feel like I’ve been out partying for three years and all I have right now are the clothes on my back and a content smile on my face. I feel good about this writing thing. I feel good about the people around me. We often entrust our hearts to one person. I’ve entrusted it to thousands. It’s insane. And yet it makes perfect sense. So thank you. You’ve been good to me. I really appreciate it. On to Year Four…

The winning game will receive a write-up and endless amounts of notoriety on the pages of this website. Not only that, but advanced metrics show that winners of polls such as this usually have greater success throughout life and breed better children. It’s science.