{"id":29466,"date":"2026-04-20T12:13:05","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T16:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=29466"},"modified":"2026-04-20T12:13:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T16:13:17","slug":"ramh18-a-door-whispers-all-but-closed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/ramh18-a-door-whispers-all-but-closed\/","title":{"rendered":"RAMH@18: A Door Whispers All But Closed&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"683\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Photo-by-Compagnons-on-unsplash.com_med.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-29469\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Photo-by-Compagnons-on-unsplash.com_med.jpg?w=1024&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Photo-by-Compagnons-on-unsplash.com_med.jpg?resize=300%2C200&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Photo-by-Compagnons-on-unsplash.com_med.jpg?resize=768%2C512&amp;ssl=1 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"smalltext\"><em data-afsc-id=\"5933\">[Image by photographer &#8220;Compagnon,&#8221; found <a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/photos\/a-close-up-of-a-glass-emmYD0q5-5c\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">on Unsplash<\/a>. This harkens back to the first &#8212; much smaller &#8212; image which appeared on <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/how-it-was\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em data-afsc-id=\"5933\">the very first post here at <\/em>RAMH<\/a><em>.]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">When I first started <em>Running After My Hat<\/em> (the blog, not the habit &#8212; <em>that<\/em>, I&#8217;d been up to for pretty much my whole life), I thought it was aimed at a specific goal: laying the groundwork for a book project. The book in question, a memoir, would come to be called something like <em>How It Was: The Boy&#8217;s Seasons<\/em>. I never did nail down the title, nor of course the book itself &#8212; not completely to my satisfaction, although I&#8217;d &#8220;finished&#8221; it, sorta-kinda, over a decade earlier&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"highlight\">(Aside: I did eventually, though, create a 23-page e-book of the final section, regarding Christmas season; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/How-Was-Christmas-Boys-Seasons-ebook\/dp\/B00H0IMJX6\/\">it&#8217;s still available on Amazon<\/a> for 99 cents&#8230; free, if you&#8217;re on the Kindle Unlimited plan.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/running-after-my-hat-the-two-year-30-second-version\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">By two years later<\/a>, I&#8217;d obviously gotten, well, distracted: fresh winds, y&#8217;know, and different hats. Oh, I continued to post <em>about<\/em> the <em>How It Was<\/em> project &#8212; something like two dozen times, often just by excerpting from one section or another. But considering the total number of posts (counting this one), which is now 1,910&#8230; well, my focus on <em>How It Was<\/em> turned out to be a very, very small hat, indeed. For that two-year anniversary post, I pulled out links to a selection of five representative (?) posts in addition to the first one; in retrospect, on a re-reading, I&#8217;d obviously already chosen to pursue hats while mounted on a pogo stick:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>July 2008:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/good-will-slumming\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Good Will, Slumming<\/a>&nbsp;(a previously untold story of Shakespeare\u2019s writer\u2019s workshop, from the horse\u2019s mouth)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>October 2008:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/salvaging-the-honey-at-heavens-edge\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Salvaging the Honey at Heaven\u2019s Edge<\/a>&nbsp;(a&nbsp;<em>whiskey river Fridays<\/em>&nbsp;post)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>January 2009:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/a-cats-departure\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">A Cat\u2019s Departure<\/a>&nbsp;(death of a household pet)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>April 2009:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/drafting-a-beer\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Drafting a Beer<\/a>&nbsp;(inventing the properties of a fictional&nbsp;<s>beer<\/s>&nbsp;ale, from scratch)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>October 2009:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/perfect-moments-birds-of-an-earnest-young-feather\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Perfect Moments: Birds of an Earnest Young Feather<\/a>&nbsp;(my childhood friend, Ron)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>See what I mean? <em>Boing&#8230; boing&#8230; boing&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The pattern continued, such as it was &#8212; sometimes while obsessing for days or weeks about a topic (some series&#8217; posts spanned months, even years) &#8212; for the rest of my time here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But really, <em>RAMH<\/em> has been sputtering for a long time. If not for <a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/category\/03_runningaftermyhat\/whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the weekly <em>whiskey river Fridays<\/em> series<\/a>, I think there <em>may<\/em> have been <em>maybe <\/em>a dozen posts at johnesimpson.com in, what, the last five years or so?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Time to put things more or less in mothballs, methinks. There&#8217;s a chance I&#8217;ll pop up here occasionally, just for old times&#8217; sake &#8212; maybe the annual &#8220;Potpourri&#8221; post every June 18, maybe an update to the Christmas-music playlist&#8230; who knows? But such posts will be rare. And I&#8217;m thinking of just turning off all future comments, if there&#8217;s a way to do that, just so I no longer have to review new ones for spam\/phishing attempts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yes, you may still hear sounds from this corner occasionally. But mostly, it&#8217;ll be the chirping of crickets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Now, I suppose it must be said that I and my <em>Running After My Hat<\/em> identity are not really &#8220;going away.&#8221; At some point, I carried the branding (haha, such as it is) over to the Tumblr platform, where it&#8217;s called &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.tumblr.com\/johnesimpson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Running After My (Tumbling) Hat<\/a>.&#8221; But that&#8217;s never served as anything other than a tie-in to this place; every one of my Tumblr posts, I&#8217;m confident, was simply cross-posted from here. There are Facebook and Instagram incarnations, too, although they&#8217;ve been steadily withering on the vine (and again, never with fruits of their own). I&#8217;ve also dipped one toe or another into the waters at Mastodon, Bluesky, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But for the last couple of years, I&#8217;ve been actively &#8220;blogging&#8221; (so to speak) only <a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.substack.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">via the Substack platform<\/a>. (Note that my Substack site is also called &#8220;Running After My Hat.&#8221;) Several of my series there have spun off from projects begun here or elsewhere during what we could &#8212; very, very wryly &#8212; call &#8220;the <em>RAMH<\/em> years&#8221;:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>The Propagational Library<\/em> is the near-final draft of the novella of that name which I first wrote and &#8220;published&#8221; in real time at <em>RAMH<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/the-propagational-library\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">back in 2012<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>23kpc<\/em> &#8212; also nearing completion offline &#8212; is a novel which I&#8217;ve mentioned a few times here, <a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2015\/11\/paying-attention-to-the-story-that-was\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">starting in 2015<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>#jesstorypix<\/em> is a series of &#8220;microfictions&#8221; (up to a few hundred words apiece, most shorter) which I first began on Instagram in oh, maybe 2018 or so &#8212; stories inspired by photographs I&#8217;d taken.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Most recently, I&#8217;ve taken up with exploring the use of AI as a fiction-writing partner; this series, called &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.substack.com\/s\/imagination-machines\/archive?sort=new\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Imagination Machines<\/a>,&#8221; started in early March and has continued, roughly weekly, since then. The goal is not major, for now: I expect it to continue just towards build a complete short story &#8212; or possibly a novel&#8217;s first chapter &#8212; step by excruciating step, while &#8220;showing my (and the AI&#8217;s) work&#8221; along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyhow, if you&#8217;ve gotten used to &#8212; and liked! &#8212; the kinds of things I&#8217;ve written about here, you might also be interested in what continues to happen with me over at Substack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"highlight\">(But sadly, I think I&#8217;ve run out of gas for my <span style=\"font-style: normal;\">whiskey river Fridays<\/span> streak! I&#8217;ll never say &#8220;never again&#8221; for that series; it&#8217;s really served as a weekly psychological anchor for me. But if it returns &#8212; probably at Substack &#8212; it will probably have a different name, and not necessarily appear like clockwork.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Finally, I must tip my hat &#8212; <em>all<\/em> of them, in fact &#8212; to numerous people I&#8217;ve &#8220;met&#8221; here (often via their own blogs) in the last 18 years. Blogging as it used to be feels like operating a sputtering, battered used car &#8212; a 30-year-old Honda Civic, say; few of those folks&#8217; blogs are anything like still active. But even though I&#8217;ve met almost none of them in real life, I&#8217;ve continued to stay in touch with them by other means: Facebook, Instagram, Substack, simple email messages. And they have all come to occupy exclusive, durable niches of my soul. (Which sounds ridiculously flowery, but damn it, it&#8217;s true.) I&#8217;m so <em>very <\/em>happy to have crossed paths with each of you. In alphabetical order, by the names\/handles I best remember you by:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Ashleigh Burrows<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>DarcKnyt<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Eisha<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;fg&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Froog<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Jayne<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Jules<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Kate<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Marta<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Misssy<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Moon Rat (and other names)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Nance<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Querulous Squirrel<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Rowena<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Tessa<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Thank you so much, folks. You&#8217;ve meant &#8212; continue to mean &#8212; much, much more to me than I&#8217;d ever have imagined complete strangers would mean when I first set up this blog; if I&#8217;d never met any of you, I doubt I&#8217;d still be &#8220;blogging&#8221; (or Substacking, etc.) in that gray, unhappy alternate universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-vivid-cyan-blue-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-28690a2d3e2c3f4e4e14b54b9b8d9086\"><em>*poof*<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Image by photographer &#8220;Compagnon,&#8221; found on Unsplash. This harkens back to the first &#8212; much smaller &#8212; image which appeared on the very first post here at RAMH.] When I first started Running After My Hat (the blog, not the habit &#8212; that, I&#8217;d been up to for pretty much my whole life), I thought [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29469,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Winding down an 18-year-old project...","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,3286,247,12,37],"tags":[229,1256,6300,6301,6302],"class_list":{"0":"post-29466","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-backwards","8":"category-obsessions","9":"category-ruminations","10":"category-03_runningaftermyhat","11":"category-onlineworld","12":"tag-blogging","13":"tag-anniversaries","14":"tag-winding-down","15":"tag-the-world-moves-on","16":"tag-and-so-it-goes","17":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Photo-by-Compagnons-on-unsplash.com_med.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-7Fg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29466"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29481,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29466\/revisions\/29481"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}