This is the five thousandth post on this blog. I used to make a bigger deal about post numbers until I discovered that I was counting them incorrectly. Also, the blogger site counts them anyway, & I hadn't noticed that. Anyway, it was a dumb way to fill space & terribly uninteresting so I stopped doing it. But post number five thousand seemed too much of a milestone to pass up.
It was way back in September - the 12th actually - of 2006 when I decided to start this blog. Self Help Radio had been on the air for almost four years. The radio station on which it aired, KOOP in Austin, had managed to stabilize after some unhappinesses, & I felt like I'd be doing the show there for some time to come.
When I started the show, I had a girlfriend in grad school. Right after the show left the Austin airwaves, I got married to a newly minted doctor of philosophy who would be taking a job - & me, & the show - to West Virginia. I kept doing the blog because why not?
Blogger gives me stats about the blog so I know it's never had a large readership. I am lucky if I get to the high two digits in terms of "views." Some time ago (I can't say when) I bemoaned the fact that I was forgetting the blog so I determined to write in it at least five times a week. By far the most "popular" (if you want to call it that) posts have been the eulogies I have written for my pets. But that's more because I also post them on social media & my friends come to read them - not because those readers are listeners of my shows.
In fact, I have
no idea who listens to my shows & why. I get very little feedback from anyone - very few calls, texts, or blog comments - which may have bothered me at one time but surely doesn't now. Why should it? I am doing something I truly love & would do it if I were the last person in the world. Well, maybe not then. Maybe if I were among the last seventeen people on Earth. Just to have sometime to do in between fighting the mutants & the mole people. In any event, radio is the most fun I have ever had & at some point I knew I'd do it even if no one were listening. Which might be the case
According to the "date calculator" at
Time&DateDotCom, there have been 7,245 days between the beginning of this blog & today. Almost twenty years, as can easily be figured out (2006 to 2026). But also:
625,968,000 seconds
10,432,800 minutes
173,880 hours
7245 days
1035 weeks
My ability to do math in my head is shitty but I see the number 5,000 & the total of weeks (1035) & I assume that means I average around five posts a week. Which is how I have been & will continue to do it. Except this week. I added an extra day because - five thousand posts!
Finally - you might ask - are any of those old posts worth reading? Probably not. A lot of them are me being nonsensical. A handful are me trying to be creative. Way too many are me trying to be funny & instead being extremely unfunny. The ones about the animals I lost I do revisit & they make me cry. But I am glad I wrote them because I loved those creatures so & love them still. I wish I wrote better so I could've given them a grander send-off, but they thought I talked too much as it was.
One thing is certain, I don't think I'll still be doing Self Help Radio in twenty years. I can't be sure I'll even be around in twenty years. So we will mostly probably (at my current rate of blog entries) never see a ten thousandth blog post. But according to
Just Delete Me, it is "impossible" to delete one's Blogger account. So this dumb blog will survive me. For better or worse.
Happy random mostly unearned achievement day to Self Help Radio's blog!
