Why act? Why act now? Why do anything? here's why...

[nashville_brook]

(i get one of these emails every so often and they are what keeps me blogging Johnson City Forum in earnest. i thought i would share it because it confirms something real important: what you do matters. do it for the general "out there" and know that even if you never see them, they are there (your stats tell you so). this guy didn't have to send me an email. he didn't ask to join the discussion. he just wanted to say, "hey, cool." isn't that the BEST THING anyone can ever hear?

beyond that, it reveals that i succeeded in my meager mission with the paper: provide the tools for people to affiliate and they will use them accordingly. we're all beginners. there's a connection between "getting out" as seeing music and "getting in" to the stuff that affects your life. it's not rocket science. it was so much more difficult back then...you had to pay lots of money to publish. you had to drive the damn newspapers around so people could find them. there's so much unexplored potential in this internet thingy.
brook :)

Sent : Friday, November 4, 2005 9:45 PM
Subject : yo brook

i came across your blogspot a while back when i was feeling nostalgic
for the days of yore and i googled "brian and the nightmares". i went
to ETSU until 1995 when i graduated and would go out and catch all the
local bands. anyway, i found your blogspot, oh, probably two or three
years ago and read it off and on.

i now live in charlotte, nc by the way. so i was over in bristol a
while back going through some stuff from college and i came across a
bunch of issues i saved of a free weekly that came out in the early
90s called 'the weekly beat'. i had never lived anywhere but bristol
and J.C. so i knew nothing of all the cool free weekly papers in all
the bigger cities. but when that came out i loved it! it was
hilarious and it turned me on to local and national politics which i
had never kept up with and i learned about some cool bands (sex
police, remember them - we actually just recorded our second album
with one of the guy's from that band). a buddy and i couldn't wait
for the next issue so we could sit around in the cafeteria at school
and read the horoscopes.

so i saw your name in there when i was reading an issue and remembered
you ran the J.C. blog so i just wanted to drop you a line and let you
know that i really dug the Weekly Beat and I was sorry that the run
was so short. it was something that J.C. was desperately missing.