I had a dream.

It was the year 2000. The Internet was still on fire. People were getting rich left and right, simply by tattooing “.com” on their foreheads. Girls were showing their magnificent breasts on the Internet. It was magic.

I wanted to write stuff. I wanted to write funny. I wanted to write meaningful. I wanted to write silly and political and deep and — crap, I wanted to write about whatever was affecting me. Truth be told, I wanted to be Mike Royko, the late legendary Chicago newspaper columnist.

So I set up this web site, Rusty Brain. It looked like this. I built the web site from scratch, using Photoshop and FrontPage (yeah, I know FrontPage sucks, you don’t need to e-mail me). And I started writing these long humor columns. That’s how I thought of it, as the web version of a newspaper column. I also did illustrations to go with some of the columns, which was good practice for my meager, undeveloped art skills.

I ended up writing 21 columns over the next 18 months. During that time, some 500 people signed up to be notified when I wrote something, kind of an early version of an RSS feed. Maybe — I’m still not really sure how those RSS feeds work. It was pretty cool, but it was a lot of work.

A couple of people have said, “You were creating a blog before blogs hit the big time!” Yes. No. Maybe. It wasn’t really a blog, per se. I painstakingly wrote and edited the pieces because I intended each piece to be a free standing essay. I illustrated most of the pieces. And I hand coded the thing and archived the old material by hand. It was a royal P.I.T.A. I would spend three to four entire evenings in my basement, ignoring my wife and any sense of a responsible bedtime, just to get one new column published.

The writing was good. Some columns were published in magazines. Some were read on radio shows. I made friends around the globe with people who wanted to tell me about their cats and experiences buying domain names and disgust over the mourning of celebrities.

I loved it, but it got to be too much work. In early 2002, I quit my job to start my own design and advertising company (Idea Shop). I wrote one Rusty Brain column soon thereafter, and haven’t touched the web site since.

So I was way early on the blog scene, kind of, and now, as I renew Rusty Brain as a real blog, I’m way late. Slate Magazine recently proclaimed that the Blog gold rush is over. My chances at fame and fortune are virtually nil. I missed the boat.

What better time to start than now?