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One Thousand Blog Posts

On August 13th, 2004 I wrote my first blog post.

It was called “Pardon My Dust” and it was an apology, because I had no idea what I was doing or why.

It's now one thousand blog posts later, I still don’t.

But 3 years and 2 months later, I’m still here. At the time I started this blog at the end of the summer of 2004, the war in Iraq was just a year old, the election was just a few months off and I had no idea what it was I was going to write about or why.

Of course, now 2004 is history and we all know how it all turned out.

But history is like that. At the time you’re living it, it doesn’t seem like history, its just day to day stuff, it may or may not be important at the time, but it doesn’t occur to you that you will look back on a time like the summer of 2004 and have an appreciation for where that time sat in the big jigsaw puzzle of life. At the time I started the blog, there were significant amounts of people who really truly hated George W. Bush.

3 years and 2 months later, there still are.

At the time I started the blog, there were significant amounts of people who really truly believed that John Kerry was the best candidate to beat George Bush in the upcoming election.

3 years and 2 months later, they still drive around with their Kerry/Edwards bumperstickers oblivious to the march of time or that the election is now over. And that their "Dear Candidate" lost.

At the time I started the blog, there were sleepy seaside villages in the Indian Ocean that catered to foriegn tourists. New Orleans, Biloxi and Pascagoula were all parts of the ‘redneck riviera’ known for their laidback lifestyle and excellent seafood.

3 years and 2 months later, all those places have gone from the world in their own way.

3 years and 2 months ago, Bunker Mulligan, Johnny Ramone, Rob “acidman” Smith, Janet Leigh, Gordon Cooper, Theo van Gogh, Yasser Arafat, Price Bernhard, Artie Shaw, Johnny Carson, Max Schmelling, Johnnie Cochran, Terry Schiavo, John Mills, Frank Gorshin, Anne Bancroft, King Fahd, Peter Jennings, Bob Denver, William Rhenquist, Rosa Parks, Richard Pryor, Stanley “tookie” Williams, Willie McCool, Darren McGavin, Harry Browne, Slobodan Milošević, Buck Owens, Louis Rukeyeser, Alex Toth, Mickey Spillaine, Saddam Hussein, Red Buttons, Glenn Ford, Ann Richards, Freddy Fender, Milton Freidman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Brown, Gerald Ford, Art Buckwald, Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Robin Olds, Calvert Deforest, Johnny Hart, Kurt Vonnegut, Don Ho, Jack Valenti and my father we all enjoying life in the summer of 2004.

3 years and 2 months later, they are all gone.

What a party it would be to have them all over for one more Thanksgiving dinner. Personally, I get dibs on the seat next to my Dad and Anne Bancroft, but only if Darren McGavin sits on the other side of the table.

The world changes a little bit every day and the weird part is unless you take the time to watch it, you don’t notice it all that much. What has 3 years and 2 months and a thousand blog posts given me? An appreciation for the little things, for the passing of time, the note of the seasons, the smell of rain, the sound of thunder and the extreme temporary nature of everything and everyone you see around you. The world around us all seems like its made of concrete, steel and importance and its something permanent, but its all just so much alka-seltzer in a glass.

This is just a blog, but I like to think that years from now my little scribbled notes about what I was thinking was important at the time will help someone who comes after me know what I life was like for me in this little bubble.

Why did I start doing this? I started because I wanted to teach myself the discipline of writing. I wanted to have a place to go where I could put down in words what was going on in my head on any given day. I thought that blogging was easy. but most of all it was because blogging was, and is, fun. If it wasn’t fun, I would have stopped doing it long ago.

Because blogging actually isnt easy, its hard. Writing is hard. It’s damn hard to sit down and write. It’s hard to put down in words ideas that other people can make sense of or use. Blogging, the little tiny bit I’ve done, has made me appreciate the written word for the art that it is. Because in 1000 blog posts and 3 years and 2 months, Ive probably written about 10 things that were worthwhile.

There are things I don’t like about blogging. I don’t care for the death threats when I upset someones delicate sensibilities about their political beliefs, but you take the good with the bad. Yes, people get really upset when you challenge their beliefs.

So whats the good that offsets the "Death Threats"? Well I’ve been given some pretty good opportunities and I’ve met some real nice people in the process of being a blogger. My personal 'global village' is now populated by some first rate folks who have helped me in ways I don’t think they are aware of.

For someone who’s almost as allergic to meeting people as Howard Hughes was, I've even opened myself up and actually gone out and met other bloggers. I drove all the way to San Francisco and spent a wonderful evening with neo-neocon. Im sure I bored her silly, but I had a great time with it anyway. I could have talked to her for a week without stopping. I think she was grateful for the improvised ability to make a speedy get-away at the first opportunity.

I even once got a link from He-to-whom-I-aspire, James Lileks. Of course, I got it about a week after that arty-farty gasbag James Wolcott linked me with a rather bad review, but that’s ok. He’s a corpulent windbag who lives on the remains of his family name, no one outside of the Borough of New York have any idea who he is. But James who-the-hell-writes-like-this-with-what-seems-to-be-no-effort Lileks once said “oh this looks interesting” about one of my blog posts.

That my friends, was cool. (and Wolcott can still kiss my ass).

I’ve gotten more than my fair share of linkage from Glenn Reynolds. I’m sure he wont remember it, but one of my first forays into the blogosphere was acting as his on the scene reporter for how the media was trying to spin the economics around Christmas one year, so I wrote him and told him that everything looked fine on this side of the country, that people were buying everything off the shelves like usual, thankyouverymuch.

He posted it. That was nice. He does that a lot. I don’t know why he does it, but he does. It means a lot to me everytime it happens. I personally dont think Ive ever written anything worth linking, but he has and I thank him for it.

Getting a link from Reynolds is like when a comedian on the Tonight Show got the nod from Johnny Carson to come over to the sofa after they did their routine. You made it to the cool daddy-o! So come sit on the sofa with me and Ed and lets all head over to the Smokehouse after the show for a big steak with all the trimmings.

I even got a chance to work with Roger Simon on the Pajamas Media thing. Of course, that’s how I got in trouble with James Wolcott, but I was in good company, he hates Roger too.

But because of that contact, I got a chance to get into the A380 when it first came to the United States. I still have my badge that says “MEDIA” on it. I loved it. That was a great day indeed.

Ed Driscoll and the Anchoress are still with me. That’s nice. Stephen Green and David St. Lawrence continue to make me think, and they make me think that I’m not doing enough and that I could and should do more.

I don’t watch TV with any level that I once did. That by itself is reason enough to start a blog.

I’ve had days where I thought that I had enough, that I couldn’t get up the stuff to make another blog post. I’ve had other days where I’m frustrated that I cant get to the blog to write up what just popped into my mind.

It’s become an old friend actually. Its there, you pick it up, you spend a couple of hours and off you go. No expectations, no judgement, you just do what you do.

And that’s blogging really. You just sit down and write what comes into your head.

This is blog post one thousand. An hour ago, I had no idea what it was I was going to say about blog post one thousand, but 3 years and 2 months and another 1000 blog posts from now, I will be able to read this and recall what was going on in my life at the time and reflect on it with a greater illumination than I would have had I not bothered to write it down.

I'm sure that far off in the future some poor Archaeology undergrad is going to pour over all these blog posts from all these blogs and try to make sense of it all and go slightly mad over the whole thing.

And that is reason enough to keep going, so I think I shall.

Posted @ October 29, 2007 10:45 PM | Current Affairs

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