Mister 2000

Well. I've got there. Two thousand posts.

Two thousand. Makes my typing fingers tired just to think about it.

But I've been slowing down quite a lot.

As I posted here back in 2012:

The first five hundred posts took more than two years; from 17 JUL 2006 to 19 AUG 2008, or about 763 days.

The next five hundred took three months less; from 19 AUG 2008 to 8 JUN 2010, or about 660 days,

Then I took 737 days to go from 1,000 to 1,500. That was a total of 2,160 days for 1,500 posts. About a post every 1.4 days.

It took me more than 3,000 days to get here from the beginning: 3,117, to be exact, which means I'm down to 0.6 posts per day or a post about every one-and-a-half days. Which makes sense when you look at the interval for the past 500 posts: 958 days, the longest interval for 500 posts since I started blogging.

I won't pretend I haven't thought about hangin' 'em up and that that is one reason things have slowed down around this joint so badly.

U.S. politics today - and politics in this country is what I wrote and write about a hell of a lot (something like 400 to 500 of my posts are labelled "politics", "U.S. politics", or "war") - sickens me when it doesn't just disgust and irk me. The liberal and relatively-sane lack confidence whilst the reactionary and teatard are free of doubt, and I don't see any point in writing more about that; it just pisses me off and scares the horses. We also seem bound and determined to ram our collective dick back into the Gilded Age meatgrinder and I've said everything I need to say about that.

But the narcissitic delight in the sound of my own voice seems to drive me back here from time to time, albeit a sparser and less productive time than when it seemed that I had something of value to add to our "public discourse".

The truth is that what I say here will be neither much noted nor long remembered and that's not especially bitter. Were I a better writer I'd be writing in a grander place, and I'm largely here to entertain myself and those of you who are foolishly fond enough to be entertained, so this little shebeen is appropriate for me.

And let me say that I do enjoy our sort of epistolary friendship and hope that we will continue to meet here for as long as Calliope, Muse of epic poetry, gives me the words to write and Thalia, Muse of Comedy, give me leave to continue this peculiar, ridiculous jest of mine.

POETRY

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

~ Pablo Neruda