This may or may not
be my 100th blog post. Blogger, the host
site, puts my count of previous posts at 99. But when I conducted my own tally
while jotting down brief summaries of each post (to remind myself what the hell
I’ve written about in the three-plus years since I started this thing in July 2010),
I counted 101 entries to date.
Whatever. Let’s just
assume this is number 100, so I can proceed with a retrospective to mark this historic occasion. Never mind that somehow the eyes of world
seem not to be on this milestone, what with such distractions as the ongoing war
in Syria, the aftermath of the mall siege in Nairobi, the kickoff of “Obamacare,”
and the related Republican hissy-fit that has shut down our dysfunctional government.
(What is not a distraction is the Navy
Yard shooting, as it’s already been forgotten, because America won’t allow anything to
sully its all-consuming love affair with guns.)
Come to
think of it, I guess there’s another reason that anticipation of my 100th post
hasn’t gone viral. That would be the fact that this blog’s readership
has stabilized at somewhere in the low single digits over the course of the
past 39 months. Many thanks, regardless, to those of you who continue to read,
often checking in vain for new posts. My frequency has dipped since that heady
first month—which remains the
standard-bearer, with seven posts. By contrast, I’ve posted no more than twice
any month this year. And two months—February and April—went completely dark.
In August I wrote
about how I’m going to try to start writing shorter and more frequently, by not
making each post a day-long project that I dread because, as much as my ego
likes to see my words up there on the Internet, my lazy ass would rather lie on a couch or sit in a movie theater seat on my days off. Suffice it to
say, I’m still working on that.
Anyway, a lot has
changed in my life and in the world since July 2010, while other things have
remained the same, for good and for bad. In that first month of posts, for
example, I made reference to our greyhound, Ellie, who had cancer, and to our
cat, Winnie, who as far as we knew had many years ahead of her. The Big C since
has claimed both of them. Ellie’s successor, Bean the three-legged mutt hound,
to whom I dedicated a post in December 2010, still is very much with us. He’s a
joy in his own sloppy, massively shedding way. And Tess, Winnie’s littermate or
mother (we never knew which; they were rescues we acquired together)
continues to delight us with her demanding, complaining ways, which have earned her the
nicknames “Crab Cat” and “Crumb Kitten.” Tessie is aging and shows signs
of possible serious health issues. As I type this, however, she is luxuriating,
stretched out, on the carpet in front of our upstairs bathroom—one of her
absolute favorite spots.
Also in that first
month of posts, I wrote about John Wojnowski, the obsessed senior citizen who
has made it his mission to shame the Catholic Church for its tolerance of
child-molesting priests. He’s still out there, battling Rome and his own
personal demons, straddling the line between determined and unhinged. I see him
whenever I drive down Embassy Row on weekends, hoisting his provocative signs.
I haven’t noticed whether John has yet indicted Pope Francis as a “sodomizer,”
as he had Francis' predecessor.
In August 2010, my
post “The Immortal Mortals” discussed celebrities and other people in the news
who seem as if they’ve always been with us and always will be, and whose deaths
somehow surprise us when they inevitably occur. Some examples I gave then were newly
deceased newsman Daniel Schorr and, before him, comedian and actor George Burns—a
guy who’d had played God on film and seemed intent on mimicking His lifespan. Three
other luminaries in the same vein who still were plugging happily along at that
time—fitness guru Jack Lalanne, comedian Phyllis Diller, and football coach Joe
Paterno—since have passed away. And Paterno’s end, of course, was an
ignominious one.
In September 2010 I
wrote the first of two posts to date about “the other Eric Ries”—a 30-something
guru of web-savvy entrepreneurship who hails from California. He has a national
following and has relegated the Eric Ries whose words you’re reading now to an
extremely deep scroll—several hundred links down—on any given search of our joint
name. My “Dynamic Doppelganger,” as I dubbed him in that initial post, hasn’t
responded the couple of times I’ve encouraged him to rebut my characterization of
his life’s work as so much lucrative bullshit. (And boring, to boot.) When I told my friend Jason
that this blog was approaching post number 100, he suggested that, if and when I
ever hit 250, I dedicate that one to success in forcing the
other Eric to engage me. We’ll see—about getting to post 250 and about goading my Left
Coast counterpart to response—but I must say I'm intrigued by this idea.
The death of an
older woman named Joyce prompted me, in February 2011, to reminisce about the
wonderfully memorable senior citizens I’d gotten to know over the years as a volunteer
visitor to Springhouse of Westwood, a local assisted living facility. Joyce had
always berated me for having failed to get on Jeopardy!, where she was certain I’d have raked in the dough. She
also was incredulous that the dusty junk proffered for appraisal on Antiques Roadshow tended to be valued so
highly. God, I missed her when she passed. I still do. Joyce would be appalled
that I’ve still never appeared on Jeopardy!,
and that the Roadshow continues to find
great retail value in all manner of hideous knickknacks and home decorations—items
Joyce more likely would have donated to the Salvation Army.
In fact, last fall—as
I subsequently noted in a January 2013 post—I ended my dozen-year run of Monday nights at
Springhouse when the last of my most recent group of “TV buddies” died off. I’m
grateful for the friendships and memories, but it still feels weird not to
drive over there anymore. I recently have taken on a second person to volunteer-visit
through a senior services agency in Washington, DC, in part to assuage my
ongoing guilt.
My cantankerous
senior friend Helen, whose strange middle-of-the-night phone call to me I
recounted in a March 2011 post, also has since passed away. I think of her—fondly,
mostly—every time I run past her old condo building near American University,
where I visited her for years, before her health deteriorated and nursing homes
became her fate. When a social worker for that DC senior services agency
recently asked me if I could deal with a senior lady who often is “difficult,”
I looked back on my friendship with Helen and answered, essentially, “Bring it
on.”
April 2011 was the
first time I wrote about my long and unhappily dysfunctional relationship with
the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team. In fact, the post just before this one,
written last month, was about how the “Bucs” finally, after two decades of execrable
play, were about to ensure a winning record for the first time since 1992. I
wrote that I would celebrate that long-elusive 82nd win of the 162-game
baseball season with a celebratory cupcake, which I would savor. Well, what
happened was this: Win number 82 was several agonizing days in coming after
that post was written. Eating the cupcake just made me feel fat. And, although
I’d kidded myself that I’d be content with 82 wins, when the team subsequently
blew a couple of games in the late innings on their way to a regular-season
record of 94-68, I was bat shit beside myself. At this writing, the Pirates
have won the National League wild card play-in game and are set to meet the St
Louis Cardinals in the next round of the playoffs, starting later today. I truly feel that I’ll be
fine with whatever happens from here. But, well, let’s just say it remains to
be seen how well that’ll work out.
I still love my no-longer-so-new
driver’s license photo, which I felt compelled to serenade with a post in June
2011. Even now, every time I’m called upon to produce an ID, I think to myself,
“Who is that handsome devil?”
July 2011 was the
first time I touched on the scourge of gun violence in this space, prompted by
the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Phoenix. I revisited the subject in subsequent
posts, but I now wonder if there’s anything left to say. After all, nothing
ever changes in this gun-crazy country. And I do mean “crazy,” as the defiant
disconnect between all the carnage and our laughably lax firearms laws strikes
me as insane.
Moving on. The death of Steve
Jobs prompted me to write in October 2011 about my mostly hate relationship
with the Digital Age he did so much to usher in. The hyper-connected world in which
we live continues to disconcert and depress me in myriad ways. But, as I would
note in later posts, Lynn and I do now have smartphones. And although I’m far
from surgically attached to mine, I do find it useful and I am glad I have it.
Still, the 21st century seems not hear my constant cries of “Enough, already!”
The digitalization of our every moment (waking and not) continues, at a
breathtaking pace.
In a February 2012
post I shared my somewhat counterintuitive affection for bluegrass, given my utterly
suburban upbringing and that music genre’s cheerleading veneration of God and
country. I remain a fan, but I was saddened by the retirement from the airwaves
last week of Ray Davis, my favorite DJ on WAMU Bluegrass Country. Whenever I
hear a particularly woeful fiddle-and-banjo-laden tune, however, I’ll think of
Ray and pronounce it a “plum pitiful.”
A June 2012 post
was devoted to the guilty pleasure I derive from the Investigation Discovery
channel’s all-murder-and-mayhem-all-the-time programming—rife as it is with
lurid, cheesy reenactments, and as celebratory as it is of the very violence I abhor in
American life. But what can I say, it’s still my go-to source for fixes of sex,
sadism and serial killers. When a friend told me a few months after that post
that she knows the guy who played the BTK killer in one of those cheesy
reenactments, it was all I could do to refrain from requesting his autograph.
Re-reading my scant
selection of posts so far this year—only 10 in past nine months—I don’t really
see anything that needs updating. My nemesis Bruce Feiler (March) continues to
vex me. Bertha and I continue to make halting conversation and bemoan our lack
of lottery success as she empties my office wastebasket (June). Oh, my British
friend Clive, about whom I wrote in August, subsequently e-mailed me to report
that he has never himself employed the rather excellent word “rumbustious,”
even though it reputedly is a UK creation.
So, that brings us
up to date. Thanks for taking this trip with me down the Lassitude Come Home
version of Memory Lane. If I ever make good on my intention to start writing shorter
and posting more frequently, it won’t take me another three years to reach post
200. At which point the other Eric Ries
had better start watching his back.
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