After Shuteye Town 199 and Shuteye Nation there was an exploratory blog (new form for me) that subsequently became a slim book called Gloves Off. I gave up the site because I had something more ambitious in mind, a customized format that would be called Instapunk.com. It went live initially in 2004, then became a demanding regular part of my life requiring posts on most days of the week.
Instapunk covered the waterfront, everything from politics to cars to movies to sports to science to education to TV to theology to literature and writers to personal memoirs to esoterica to mathematical analysis of popular hoaxes. In the course of 10 years it generated four books currently available at Amazon and I felt the need for something new. I tried to pass it in to a younger man, but he soon developed a distaste for blogging and for me. So I left it where it was and moved on.
Now it resides at the Wayback Machine, where a large,portion of its content remains relevant and/or valuable as a chronological record of our history in the making (and unmaking). Click on the graphic to visit a 10-year list of links to each week’s posts in those years.
The chronology can be daunting to look at, but think of it in terms of dates. Specific dates when important things happened in the world (elections, sporting events, scandals, controversies) or times (months/years/birthdays) of your own life which it would be entertaining to look at from a different perspective. Go hunting or pick at random. There is no necessary order of encounters.
There are some representative collections of Instapunk posts. These are identified by post titles or topics to help you find pieces that might interest you. Two of these are located at Instapunk Returns:
The Best of Instapunk (2004-2014)
Books compiled from the original Instapunk include “Indictment: An Obama Diary,” “[P]articles of Instapunk,” “The XOFF News Channel,” and “25 American Movies About America.” (See the Amazon Page.)