Bleeding Neon as it appeared in early 2009, back when I wrote about Vegas politics, economics, and culture, you know, like I got paid for? And apparently had a lit agent?

October 18, 2006.

That’s the date I first registered the domain bleedingneon.com, although I’d coined the term a year or so earlier, and was using it as the name of my LiveJournal blog, which was why I bought the domain: to point it at pjperez.livejournal.com (which still exists, but you won’t see any content there; I pulled the curtain on my old posts a decade ago).

“Bleeding Neon” was an identity that pretty much summed up who I was at the time–someone so embedded in the world of Las Vegas that I bled neon. Clever, right? Ironically, in the background, I was plotting to leave Las Vegas not long after that, but the thinking was that I’d always “bleed neon,” no matter where I went. And now, 14 years later, after not living in Sin City for more than three years, I realize I’ll always be a Vegas kid, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to still be operating a blog under this name, especially when the subject matter no longer ties to the theme.

I started writing this post at the beginning of 2020, and as anyone who’s been around for a while knows, I normally do a nice little New Year’s post around that time, typically to assess how I did on the goals laid out the previous year, and then to publicly announce new goals for the next year. In a life where I live and die by to-do lists, it’s just a grander to-do list, really, with some added public accountability.

Well, that didn’t happen for 2019/2020, and here we are, almost 11 months and one pandemic later. Did I know, somewhere in the back of my head, way back in early January, that writing a blog post laying out goals for 2020 would be an exercise in futility? Because, ha ha, obviously, joke was on humanity this year, huh? Especially on those of us who like to make plans. And it was doubly, triply full of cruel jokes for me and my family, for reasons further detailed elsewhere.

So, while we’re cancelling everything else in our lives (if we’re smart–those of you pretending everything is fine just because you want it to be will continue to get distant side-eye from me), now’s as good a time as any to cancel one more thing: Bleeding Neon. I’m keeping the domain (because, I mean, it’s still great–and it might be used for other projects TBA), but this here blog? It’s going dark after this post.

Of course, looking back over the infrequency of posts over the last few years, that’s not a revelation. I think there were only three updates posted in 2019. I have more half-written, unpublished drafts than I do published posts. That’s both reflective of how ridiculous the last few years have been for me and mine, and of the era in which we live. You know the one. Clickbait driven. Hyper unfocused. Likes-and-shares obsessed. Platform-specific. Who even reads blogs anymore? (I do, and I guess you do, but the kids, not so much.) I subscribe to 100+ RSS feeds via Feedly, but only about 10 of them populate with content anymore.

So, if you’re looking to follow the Adventures of Pj going forward, there are still a lot of other options. In descending order of frequency and relevance: Twitter. Instagram. My “official” website. Facebook, sometimes. And my “project” sites, like Parkway of Broken Dreams or Bourbon & Bitters (also more active on social media than the blog itself). There are probably a few other outlets on the interwebs, but if I can’t think of them right now, then I’m not likely to use them much these days.

Before signing off, let’s take a moment to reflect upon the 10 most popular posts here at Bleeding Neon:

10. Spider-Man’s Amazing Company  – A 2016 post about one of my illustrated pop culture mashups that includes the observation “I’m not entirely sure that the very nature of time itself didn’t magically shift at some point,” which seems awfully prescient given how 2020 feels.

9. Homemade Comics – Letting the world know in 2012 about a Tumblr I started in 2011 to post scans of ALL of the comics I made when I was a wee lad (that Tumblr itself has gone fallow in the wake of *everything*)

8. 2018 – The last published edition of the aforementioned annual year-in-review, in which my stated goals for 2019 included finishing Parkway of Broken Dreams (achieved, but not in 2019), starting a production company (done!), producing a scripted TV pilot (nope), increasing self-care (yeah, 2019 was the bomb for that, but 2020 erased all those gains), and de-cluttering our lives (made some progress here, until half my parents’ possessions ended up in my garage).

7. Insomniac: Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas 2013 – A post about my second annual illustrated contributions to the official EDC magazine. You know, I kind of miss getting paid to draw sometimes…

6. Project: Rooftop ‘Spider-Man: Webhead 2.0’ contest – Another illustration-related post from 2011 (I’m starting to sense a common theme among these most-viewed posts), sharing my losing entry into a Spider-Man costume redesign contest.

5. Douchey bedding available at Dillard’s – One of the earliest entries on the blog, when I actually blogged about stuff in Las Vegas. In this case, it was poking fun at Ed Hardy bedding found during a trip to the mall (the post got a lot of organic traffic from people specifically searching for said bedding).

4. This Week: Seduction of the Innocent – A preview of the art exhibit I curated at UNLV’s Barrick Museum, back when I did things like curating gallery exhibits. My life has taken weird turns.

3. The Maze (of Trails) Runner – A reflection of my experience running my first (and only) trail race in November 2015, back when I still ran for medals. I think this one got so much traffic because it was linked to from the official Trails of Glory website.

2. Independence Day – A 2012 post “reprinting” my 2003 CityLife column remembering my friend Lin “Spit” Newborn, who was executed by Nazis in the desert outside Las Vegas along with his friend Dan Shersty back in 1998. I come back to this every year on the Fourth of July. And it’s a topic I’m probably not done with yet.

1. Super Justice Friends – This 2016 post has more views than any other by a large margin, Maybe because it blew up on Reddit or something? I don’t know. But it’s yet another pop culture mashup illustration, and maybe a reminder that I shouldn’t have put down my Intuos pen a few years ago.

And with that, I think it’s time to move on. Thanks to everyone who’s ever taken a few moments out of their busy lives to read, comment, and sometimes even share whatever nonsense I’ve posted here, even when I shifted from writing about stuff happening in Vegas to just whatever was happening inside my head. Bleeding Neon is officially closed.