The End

Fifteen years ago, on or about February 1st, 2003, I sat in my cruddy but beloved apartment in Samara, Russia and used a battered Pentium 1 desktop given to me by a student to make the first posts on an Angelfire website, marking the beginning of the English Teacher X website.

And for fifteen years I chronicled my observations of life as I saw it, from the twisted surrealist vantage point of an expat abroad, in a world that changed tremendously during that period of time, from the first optimistic bursts of globalism to its current last wheezing gasps. 

So now it is with some regret that I must announce:

This is the last blog post I will make.  

Why? 

Well, the question is more, "Why not?"

Fifteen years is a long time to do anything, much less write the same blog. I've been running out of steam for a while now, obviously; not just because I'm getting older, but because I've already said everything I wanted to say. 

Not everything I've got to say, perhaps, but everything I wanted to say. 

Anything else I said would likely just be a variation on what has come before. 

I thought for a long time about how I wanted to end it. I could end with a sick joke; a hoax suicide, for example. I thought maybe in the spirit of keeping the blog a comedy, I would end it when I married the Girlfriend. 

 I thought about turning the blog over to somebody else -- Crazy Bob, for example -- or opening it to "guest posts" from anybody.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that English Teacher X just had to vanish into the night and the fog. 

I'm uncomfortable with the internet now. (And perhaps with life in general.) It's a strange humorless place now, where everyone has a strident political agenda; Nazis on one side and on the other a world where everybody eats avocado toast and never say anything offensive. There's little place for lumbering dinosaurs like myself to air my private parts.

So what will become of X? 

Well, look around you. He might be anywhere. 

He might be that drunk angry guy teaching in the next office, stinking and red-faced. He might be that happily married, quiet fellow with the foreign wife and the cute kid. 

Maybe he went out in a blaze of glory, some kind of balls to the wall orgy of drugs and sex and hate. 

Maybe his foreign hosts finally hunted him down and destroyed him. 

Maybe he became the quiet old guy living with his cats, always meek and polite before dying quietly with the kitties licking his face. 

Maybe he's all of those, or none, but one thing is for sure ... English Teacher X abides. English Teacher X will be teaching, here, there and everywhere, and this blog will stay here, an eternal monument to all those moments in time that would otherwise be lost in the rain.  

I won't be answering e-mail at the yahoo address; it became overwhelmed with spam. You can leave messages for me here, I might answer them. 

Goodbye folks. I sincerely thank you for reading.

Be careful out there!