Last night, as I was dealing with the anguish of watching my Minnesota Vikings mail in another game from Lambeau Field in Green Bay, I realized that I'd missed something of a milestone (or a millstone, depending on your perspective, I suppose) last week. Last Wednesday marked seven years of blogging. For most of those seven years, the now-defunct (and likely little-remembered) The People's Republic of Seabrook chronicled my life in Texas and my one-man mission to turn the one of the reddest states in the nation blue (Uh...it failed. Spectacularly.). Now that I'm back here in Portland, I'm doing something a wee bit different here at WWJD. I'm not certain, and I have no real way of verifying this, but I think the change has cost me a ton of traffic. Then again, while my ego would love to have Daily Kos numbers, it's never really been about the numbers. After discovering that there really is no reliable way to accurate calculate traffic, I've decided to stop thinking about it. So, whether there are 10 or 10,000 of you stopping by on a daily basis, I'm proud to still be doing this seven years later. I'm not sure what this says about me...other than I'm desperately in need of a life...but apparently, I still have a lot on my mind.
For more than seven years now, this has been part obsession, part therapy, and part cheap entertainment for me. How long will I keep at it? Who knows? I imagine I'll reach a point where it will make sense to stop and do something else, but for now it keeps me intellectually active, and it gives me a chance to keep doing something I love. I get to continue pretending that my opinions actually carry some weight, and that people actually care about what I have to say. Perhaps someday someone will discover me and throw large sums of money at me to write...but if you were standing in front of me now, you'd notice that I'm not holding my breath. It would be nice to lose my amateur status, but I love the writing, and that keeps me coming back. Do what you love, and the money will follow... I think I saw that on a bumper stick once. Or maybe it was scrawled above a urinal in an airport men's room....
In the future, I'm going to try to focus more on life here in Portland. Local politics (and life in general) can be pretty interesting here (think Berkeley without the kill-or-be-killed Lberalism), and there are a lot of things happening in this part of the world that fascinate me. Writing about national and international politics will continue to be a focus, but that's a niche where I have plenty of company, most of whom, if I were to be honest with myself, probably do it better than I do. I'm also struggling with how to reflect on my own continuing personal journey without forfeiting my privacy or being pathetic. For now, I'm a once-again single man in his late 40s trying to find his way through life...and not always doing such a bang-up job of it. Then again, I've heard it said that life lies in the lessons you learn along the way. Stay tuned....
I'll be here tomorrow, and I hope that you will be as well. Thanks for coming along for the ride!
