My dad didn’t die.

Well, he did, back in ’92.

I’ve been inundated with all these condolence e-mails, and I appreciate the sentiment, but it reconfirms what I don’t want to believe, people rarely get past the first sentence, the first impression, the initial feeling.

Now if you read the entire piece, you’d see that I made it clear that this was a twenty year old story, even put in the date. But a plethora of people never made it that far.

So I have to ask myself, am I a writer or a dispenser of information?

You know those dispensers of information, like the Huffington Post. It’s about the headline and rarely more. Are you appealing to the grazers or the fans?

We’ve got an entire music business dedicated to the grazers. They tell you to get to the hook immediately, to be obvious.

And they’re right. If you want to reach everybody, the masses, right away, set yourself on fire, use the beats, make it obvious.

But that’s all it is, surface, there’s no depth.

Now I’m lucky, I’ve been doing this for a quarter of a century. I’ve got an audience. But if you’re just starting out, remember, if you want to be honest and innovative, and deep and meaningful, it’s gonna be damn slow. Because just like the TV news, people have been trained for immediate and irrelevant.

The Web allows for both.

You’ve just got to decide who you want to be.