So this is where I’m supposed to tell you who I am and why you should read anything I write. Alright. I’ll give it a shot.
Alfred Brennan. Sixty-three years old. Born and raised just outside Pittsburgh — one of those towns where everybody’s dad worked the same handful of places and Sundays meant the Steelers whether you asked for that or not.
I spent a few decades on a factory floor, coached youth football on the side for a good stretch of years, and somewhere in there started collecting old pocket watches. Don’t ask me how that started. It started with one my father left me and then it just kept going, the way things do when you’re not paying close attention.
I retired a couple of years back. Both my kids are grown and living abroad now, which is a strange thing to type, but there it is. My son’s in Europe doing something with software that I don’t fully understand but sounds impressive when he explains it. My daughter’s further east than that.
What I’ve got at home is two dogs, a shelf of twenty-three watches, and apparently enough time on my hands to start writing things on the internet.
The dogs are Biscuit — a yellow Labrador who has been with me long enough that I can’t really remember what evenings felt like without her — and Rusty, a beagle mix I got a couple years later who has never once done what he’s told and I’ve mostly made my peace with that. Biscuit is steady, reliable, the kind of dog that just parks herself near you and makes everything a little easier. Rusty is chaos in a small body. I’m fond of them both, though I’d never say that to their faces because they’d take it as an invitation to do something that costs me money.
The watches are mostly nothing special. Four of them are worth anything to anybody else. The rest are things I picked up at estate sales and flea markets because something about the case caught my eye, or the movement was interesting, or some guy at work needed twenty bucks and had this old thing he was willing to part with. I’m not a collector in any serious sense of the word. I’m a man with a shelf and a habit. There’s a difference, though I couldn’t always tell you what it is.
The blog — I’m still getting used to calling it that — started because I had things to say and no particular reason not to say them. I write about the Steelers, mostly to work through my feelings about what is shaping up to be an interesting season, and I mean that in ways both good and concerning. I write about Biscuit and Rusty, because they do things that deserve to be written down before I forget them. I write about whatever new app or gadget or TV show or site I’ve tried that week, in the spirit of a retired guy testing things out and reporting back honestly. My son sends me tech stuff to try sometimes. I try it. Sometimes I have opinions. Sometimes I have more questions than when I started. Usually both, in that order.
There’s no real theme here, if yinz are looking for one. It’s whatever’s on my mind when I sit down. I’m not trying to build any kind of audience here or turn this into a career. I just always liked to write — letters, notes to myself, things that didn’t go anywhere in particular. Now I’ve got a place to put them, so here we are.
If any of that sounds like your kind of thing, stick around.
Alright, that’s enough out of me for an introduction.
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