Even if you don’t have a lot of time, it’s good to take a moment, at least, to note an anniversary. Twenty three years ago today, December 13, I bought the URL for Disquiet.com. It was the winter of 1996. I had recently moved to San Francisco from Sacramento, where for the previous seven years I’d worked at Tower Records on their magazines. Initially that was *Pulse!*, and then *Classical Pulse!*, which I co-founded with my friend Bob Levine, and then in 1994, as the World Wide Web (capitalized thusly) was beginning to happen, a weekly email newsletter I founded called, naturally, [epulse](https://disquiet.com/2010/07/30/floppy-disk-epulse/), which ran more or less weekly for a decade.
I’d moved to Sacramento from Brooklyn in 1989, a little under a year after graduating from college. Moving, years later, to San Francisco was disorienting, and it took a few weeks, maybe even a few months, for me to realize what was disorienting about it: I’d benefited for a long time, at that point, in having a music publication as part of what I might call my identity, my self-identity. Suddenly I didn’t have such a thing, and the only solution I could come up with was to create my own, and that was Disquiet.com.
This all got started about three years before the word “blog” formally entered the vocabulary (2019 marks [the word’s 20th anniversary](https://disquiet.com/2019/06/16/word-blog-20th-anniversary-1999/)). Initially I was just reposting to Disquiet.com things I published elsewhere, like *Pulse!*, which I continued to write for right up until Tower went [bankrupt](https://disquiet.com/2018/03/10/rip-russ-solomon-1925-2018/). In time, though, I started writing things directly for Disquiet.com. At some point along the way my always insightful friend Jorge Colombo suggested I add dates to my posts (again, this was before blogs normalized and codified such things).
From 1996 until 2007, the whole site was hand-coded by me in HTML, even the index pages and the RSS feed. In 2007 I paid someone (Nathan Swartz) to translate it all into a WordPress site, and then a few years after that someone else (my friend Max La Rivière-Hedrick) did a beautiful revision of the WordPress theme so the site would be as readable on mobile phones as it was on a computer screen.
Each year on December 13, if I have the time, I write a brief summary of my memories of founding Disquiet.com. I don’t re-read previous such summaries while doing this writing; I just write it again from scratch. If it’s cut’n’paste, it isn’t a memory.