While I appreciate the sentiment, I hung up The Powderhorn as a column after a particularly bitter 2006 layoff at a paper where I was the news editor and the opinion editor. My only connection to Texas at the time was choosing to run Molly Ivins when I had the opportunity to shake up the entirety of our syndicated content.

Having decided which letters to the editor run in full, which ones need heavy edits to make any plausible sense, and which were simply useless in their form, I don’t really like the process from the other end. I think the last time I was published in a letters section was about the same time as the layoff … I wasn’t yet willing to give up my voice, and Fareed Zakaria had just written a piece in Newsweek that really rubbed me the wrong way.

I’d told my then-fiancee I’d sent off the letter, and she made sure to pick up a copy the following week, exclaiming “It ran!” My take was a bit more subdued, akin to “Of course it did. You did fall in love with a guy who’s been in journalism for nearly a decade – and started as a fucking columnist.”

But life looks far different 20 years later. Being published yet again is a nothingburger for my ego, and while I still have very strong political beliefs and am not afraid to write about them, I’m content to leave my reach at those I know personally and the very small tranche of parasocial online followers. Also, the pay for a letter to the editor fails to make the juice worth the squeeze.

I’m sure someone with more vigor will make the point better than I could, and unlike anyone in Congress these days, I can sense when my time is over, and it’s the next generation’s turn.