2852

Blogger informs me that this is the twenty eight hundred and fifty first post I have written for this blog, not counting the hundred or so I have expunged for one reason or another. A fair amount of writing, I'd say. Try it yourself sometime.

It is a real conceit to clinically analyze one's creative output in public so I will try to keep this brief. I write for a multitude of reasons, to share, to inform, to educate, to show off my fancy photographs, there are a million reasons to labor over a keyboard. Helps me to decompress. And the big reason, I just enjoy writing.

But lets get something straight. I write for me. I was talking to a long time reader last night and he decided to clue me in; the blog, in his opinion, is really adrift and lacks focus.  According to this correspondent I have been merely taking other people's ideas and embellishing them of late. Not delivering the big home run so much any more. He says that the blast is getting, shrink, tired. And enough with the expensive dinners.

The guy is a very good friend of mine and has been there for me every step of the way. He could be right. He has certainly earned his right to his opinion. Another friend says that I need to lighten up, a third suggests a need for more balance. I try.

My first inclination was to agree with him and shut the thing down for a recharge of indeterminate length. But then I got to thinking. I have had a person I do not know stop me on the street this week to tell me how much she enjoys my writing, R, one of my oldest lurkers, popped by to tell me that he never misses one and he, a rather hard guy, was gushing with enthusiasm over the blog. Vlad called last night praising certain things I had written lately. What I mostly hear from people and not to sound too awfully conceited, is that people who don't read blogs or any other blogs, take the time to read mine. That means a lot to me. The four to six hundred people who faithfully pop in every day.

Several people have noted that people's  comments have dwindled to nothing, except of course for the grumpy show, which I have to occasionally edit. Two people feel that the problem is that I have just written so much that people can't really keep up. They may have a point.

In ice hockey there is a term for a goalie who has stopped a lot of shots. It's called standing on your head. "He really stood on his head out there today." I think that I have stood on my head. I will continue to write about a wide and diverse group of topics that I find interesting. I'm not a trained seal. It won't all be great. But then again, I'm not paid to perform. I don't feel the need to perform any more, just to deliver an occasionally interesting and mostly defensible blogpost. Will try to deliver.