One of the nice things about having a blog that's been around a while is that you have a record of what you were doing in years past. In my case, it's a record that spans ten years, which is pretty good.

Except not always. I was a sporadic blogger in the beginning and sometimes weeks passed between entries. So, in the beginning at least, there are stretches which are entirely unknown. Later years are better, however...

1. 2012 • Taking a look a religious lunacy and cartoons.
2. 2011 • Waiting for Judgement Day and contemplating the end of the world.
3. 2010 • Getting some terrible news from a friend.
4. 2009 • Returning from TequilaCon 5 in Albuquerque... The Spice must flow.
5. 2008 • Attending TequilaCon 4 in Philadelphia.
6. 2007 • Looking for socks before a trip to Greece.
7. 2006 • Hanging our with Bad Monkey.
8. 2005 • Reading a bunch of critically acclaimed blogs... all of which are either dead or long since abandoned.
9. 2004 • Watching two chick flicks... 13 Going on 30 and Mean Girls.
10. 2003 • Unknown. See, I told you.

Of course, that's just the stuff I decided I could write about. Who knows what was going on between the lines.

Probably stuff I'm better off forgetting anyway.

This morning when I woke up I had an awesome idea for a blog post, but have since forgotten what it was. I can only guess I was going to talk about the perils of not writing things down after you turn 40, but who can say for sure?

Fortunately it's Earth Day today, so there's that to talk about.

Uhhhh... yeah... be kind to the earth... or whatever.

Well that didn't go very far now did it?

Except... Earth Day is also the anniversary of my becoming a vegetarian. I gave up meat on this date back in 1988. Which means it's been 25 years since I've had a hamburger.

A quarter-century since I've had a chicken nugget.

And 9131 days since I've eaten bacon.

   
No. I don't know how I've survived this long either.

Lately I've been having moments where I find myself not breathing and I have to remind myself to take a breath. It's very annoying. And has me wondering what in the heck is preoccupying the part of my brain that's supposed to handle the breathing. I suppose it's better than suddenly finding out your heart isn't beating, but still.

So far as Mondays go, this one was pretty heinous. Despite working my guts out from dusk 'til dawn I didn't get nearly as much done as I had hoped. I suppose that was to be expected, because, well, Monday. What was not expected was finding out that my automated backup utility was, in fact, not backing up anything at all. This was discovered right after I had congratulated myself because a missing file could just be downloaded from my backup. Except it couldn't, because I didn't have a backup, which made me very cross indeed.

Nothing like spending two hours re-doing work you had already finished.

As if that weren't enough, I am still having problems with my blog. For reasons I can't figure out, the back-end that manages everything has suddenly decided to randomly fail while I'm updating stuff. This has resulted in my map page having no map, and my archive page being a disorganized mess.

I'd fix all that, but I have bigger fish to fry.

Like making sure I keep breathing.

Looking strictly at the numbers, this blog is either a raging success or a dismal failure.

83,214 visitor "sessions" were reported at Blogography for the month of February (which is 9,795 less than January... maybe because it was a short month?). According to the documentation, "A session is initiated when a visitor arrives at your site, and it ends when their browser window is closed or there is a period of inactivity." On daily average, 624 people are accessing my webfeed, so I'm guessing around 17,500 of those monthly "sessions" are from regular readers, though not everybody uses a feedreader, so that number is probably a bit higher.

And the bulk of my remaining traffic? Search results. The majority of which are visitors from Google hoping to find something here. That's what happens when you've been blogging daily about random crap for nearly a decade.

So, from a numbers standpoint, I don't know if "83,214 sessions" last month is good or bad. Probably good for a relatively unknown blogger like me. But a terrible failure if you're a popular blogger like The Pioneer Woman (who undoubtedly gets millions of visits each month).

But I don't sell ads or make any money off Blogography, so the numbers don't really matter. I write here so my friends & family can know what I'm up to... and to keep track of what's going on in my life (five years ago today I was flying back from a TequilaCon Planning meeting in Portland!). From that perspective, Blogography is incredibly successful.

All the great people I've met and the wonderful friends I've made from blogging is just the icing on the cake.

Which is a fact I clung to this morning as I discovered yet another one of the blogs I read has closed up shop. This comes right on the heels of another blog folding earlier in the week (didn't see that coming).

We're dropping like flies.

I'm coming up on my ten-year blogiversary this April. I have no plans on stopping.

Which makes me either a raging success or a dismal failure.

It's getting harder and harder to tell.

Totally drawing a blank tonight.

Having a blog about nothing in particular means that sometimes nothing in particular shows up.

They say that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but in my case it's just not true.

The batteries in my Mickey Mouse wall-clock at work died at 7:28 while I was in Chicago. And since I arrive both after 7:28am and before 7:28pm I don't see the clock being correct even once. And since I don't even know if my office exists when I am not there, I'm not going to make assumptions about what happens when I'm gone. Logic would dictate that the clock does indeed read correct at 7:28am and 7:28pm, but I'm not going to drive to work to find out.

Because I have more important questions on my mind...

• What time is it in Bahrain since there's a Hard Rock Cafe I'd like to visit there one day? Google says it's 8:08am tomorrow in Manama, Bahrain.
• Manama? Mahnahmahna!
• I miss the Muppets. I wish Pixar would do something with Muppets, like a Pigs in Space movie. I love Pixar. I wonder when the Monsters Inc. prequel is coming? Ugh. Not until June 21st of next year. I think Monsters Inc. is my favorite Pixar film. But I loved The Incredibles too. Why don't they make a sequel to that film?
• Ooh! What was the name of the woman who played the sexy voice of Mirage in Pixar's The Incredibles? IMDB says it was Elizabeth Peña of I Married Dora fame. A show that ended with the lead character flying off to Bahrain.
• Why in the heck am I so obsessed with Bahrain now? Probably because I haven't been there.
• But isn't it odd how I'm thinking of Bahrain and a totally unrelated question leads me back to Bahrain? Everything is connected, I guess. Or all roads lead to Bahrain.
• And wasn't it Bahrain where Chandler was moving so he could get away from Janice on Friends? No... that was Yemen. Another place I haven't been. I haven't been to a lot of places because I keep going back to the same places.
• Well, not all places. How many years has it been since the fortune teller I visited in Hong Kong told me that I'd be back to Hong Kong in a year? It was 2005. And since I haven't been back yet, he's off by seven years. so far.
• I guess predicting the future is a crapshoot. They never get it right in the movies. Have any movies got it right? Not really. Not even Strange Days from 1995... and they were only predicting four years into the future for 1999.
• Argh. Who was the actress in Strange Days that I don't like? Not Angela Bassett, she's awesome, but the other one? Ah. It was Juliette Lewis that played the toxic waste bitch that Ralph Fiennes was obsessed with.
• How in the heck did Juliette Lewis become a thing? Holy crap! She was in I Married Dora, which means all roads really do lead to Bahrain!
• Ah Dora. It seems like only yesterday that show was on. What was I doing yesterday? I was flying back home from Chicago with a First Class upgrade in the Mickey Mouse plane.
• What was I doing one week ago? I was mourning the loss of Michael Clarke Duncan and waxing poetic about American Cheese.
• What was I doing one fortnight ago? I was worrying about a cat that's been wandering around my parking lot. I've named her Spanky.
• What was I doing one month ago? I was flying to Portland for friends, free hummus, really good ice cream, Batman, and a zine show for Thrice Fiction.
• What was I doing one year ago? I was preparing for my trip to Australia and admiring Kate Winslet.
• What was I doing one decade ago? Blogography didn't exist. My previous blog that I was writing back then is gone. So I don't know what I was doing. It was a Tuesday. It was also the day before the one-year anniversary of 9/11. At some point I'm certain that I was deciding which of the five photos I've taken of the World Trade Center I was going to post to my old blog in the morning.

Which means nothing has changed, because that's what I'm going to be doing right now.

Well, that... and planning a trip to Bahrain.

The story burning up the internets today is about a letter written by Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe in support of Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo (who is vocal advocate of marriage equality).

Making a long story short, Maryland Democratic politician Emmett C. Burns asked the Baltimore Ravens football organization to make Ayanbadejo shut up about marriage. Kluwe (also a supporter of marriage equality) thought this was bullshit, and decided to write an open letter to Burns to tell him how he felt.

The letter is sheer genius. Go read it immediately.

I'm guessing this image of Kluwe is a team photo, courtesy of the Minnesota Vikings?

   
As you might have noticed, the letter is filled with colorful language which has raised some criticism of Kluwe's choice of words.

This really hit home with me, because I struggle with whether or not I should use swear words most every time I write in this blog. When I first started blogging I swore constantly and didn't think anything about dropping f-bombs. But then people started actually reading Blogography, which caused me to not only curtail my swearing... but also go back through old entries and eliminate the curse words I had previously used.

It was a practice that was destined to be short-lived. I use swear-words in real life when I'm fired up. So it's unavoidable that I'm going to use swear-words on my blog when I'm fired up. For a while I tried to disguise it... typing out things like "F#@%!" and "B#LL$H!T!," but comedian Suzy Soro commented that this is kind of stupid. Since absolutely everybody knows what you're trying to say anyway... why not just come out and say it?

She was absolutely right, and I've been cursing in my blog ever since.

Though I admit that most times I do regret it.

Somebody once told me that swearing is a sign that the writer is unintelligent. They don't know how to express themselves properly, so they foolishly have to resort to curse words to make their point. In some respects, I agree with this assessment.

In other respects, I'd argue that there's no word that can adequately take the place of "fuck."

And so I use it. Probably more often than I should... but definitely not as often as I want to. "Fuck" (and dozens of words like it) are forms of expression that I find helpful in communicating exactly what I'm feeling in a way that "shucky darn" doesn't quite reach.

Anyway...

Today I managed to get in my essential visit to America's Dog so I could get my Veggie Chicago Dog...

It was, as always, delicious.

Oh... and speaking of delicious food... I never check a bag when flying into O'Hare so I can grab a veggie burger at Johnny Rocket's before I exit through security. But yesterday as I approached the restaurant, I was horrified to see that IT WASN'T THERE!

WHAT THE FUCK?! Shucky darn!

I hate it when that happens.

Sometimes I regret that I'm a "daily blogger."

The reason I write daily is because I know my blog would die a long, slow death if I started skipping days. First I'd skip once or twice a month... then skip once or twice a week... and then, before I even realize it, I'm struggling to write two entries a month. At which point Blogography is dead. I've seen it happen with other blogs many times before. And so I continue to post something every single day, even if I don't have anything to write about or I'm going through something that can't be blogged.

Like today.

I got nuthin'...

Fortunately, I can totally blog about nuthin'. You're welcome!

Gotta have priorities, yo.

Okay... Okay... Okay... THREE EPISODES of Community tonight?!?

The first of the three was my favorite episode to date, which is really saying something considering the slew of frickin' amazing episodes that came previously. Not only did they faithfully represent the Age of 8-Bit Video Games perfectly, the characterization of each cast member in pixels was flawless...

The fact that the show is only getting a paltry 13 episode order next season is a travesty. But I suppose they have to make room for what ever shitty reality television crap they've bought to stink up the airwaves come Fall. I know that television is a business, and ratings and ad revenue are the only factors that really matter... but come on. Given the quality, critical acclaim, and rabid fan base of the show, NBC owes it to humanity to at least get Community up to 65 episodes so it can be syndicated.

But the network seems intent on killing it off.

And speaking of premature deaths...

This morning I got an email from somebody who stumbled across my blog from a Google search and wanted to thank me for writing about whatever it was they were looking for. It was a really nice note, and it's good to know that this blog has useful content squeezed in-between all the stupid crap I usually write about.

The interesting bit came at the end of the email when they said "I hope you've made arrangements to keep you blog around after you're dead because it would be a shame for it to disappear."

To which I replied "Nope. My guess is that Blogography will die shortly after I do, but thanks for the kind words!"

Then I got to thinking about how I really should be more distraught that nine years of my life will soon evaporate if I get hit by a bus tomorrow. But I'm not. Not really. I've toyed with the idea of deleting my blog a half-dozen times in the past, so why should I care if it happens after I'm dead? I suppose it's a little depressing to think that a domain scalper will undoubtedly come along and grab "blogography.com" so they can use it to link to a bunch of websites selling "generic viagra" or something. But that's life... and death... on the internet for you.

Eventually I'll be gone and forgotten just like 99.9% of everybody else on earth, and that's probably how it should be.

Unless somebody wants to finance that monument to my greatness I so totally deserve...