July 4th came and went without my having acknowledged this blog's 12th blogiversary (I started in 2003), but we couldn't miss ol' nine thousand, now, could we?
It's been a good twelve years. I've written about anything and everything. I also notice, with grim satisfaction, that my blog has outlasted quite a few of the old-guard Koreablogs (although, truth be told, I never really thought of myself as a true Koreablog, given how infrequently Korea itself actually appears as a blog topic), including the blogs of temporarily popular bloggers who hated my blog, like Brian Deutsch of Brian in Jeollanamdo, a guy that once singled me out as the blogger who offended his bitchy sensibilities the most. Well... he's gone and I'm still here, like herpes. I'm chugging along while these weaklings and haters have all pussied out. (NB: I mean no disrespect to those now-defunct blogs that I sincerely admired, like Incestuous Amplification and Lost Nomad.) True, I never had the site traffic that these bloggers had—probably never will—but those guys certainly didn't garner such traffic because they were superior writers: they simply focused on a single theme or a very limited cluster of topics, which is how you gain the hits. Those of us who write on everything can never expect to have anything like that kind of audience, and that's fine. And as for the haters, well... fuck 'em. Fuck 'em right in the ass with a splintery broomstick. They all eventually lose steam and fade back into the garbage whence they came.
On a more positive note: blogging continues to be my outlet, my therapy. I love doing it. It remains a great way to get things off my chest. It also continues to be a resource for future book projects. I've been thinking about compiling some of the humorous posts that have accumulated over the years to make a sort-of sequel to Scary Spasms in Hairy Chasms. I've also been thinking about creating a textbook based on my many movie reviews. A possible followup to, or revision of, Water from a Skull might also be in the works. This blog is a trove of ideas—some well developed, some half-baked—just waiting to be mined.
Ever since I opened up my comments section years ago, I've received interesting and informative reactions from some of my five readers. Other readers have chosen to remain silent over the years, preferring to be, in the common parlance, "lurkers." That's a bit frustrating to me, as I've long wanted to build some sort of commenter community in which the commenters talk to each other as much as they talk to me, but that's not where we are. It could be that my draconian comments policy is at fault, but I feel the policy I have in place merely reflects the basics of civil discourse. Occasionally I'll receive an asshole comment—something insulting or accusatory or condescending or boneheaded, or some combination thereof—and I'll simply delete it so that it never sees the light of day. It's up to me to keep my own place clean, and I try to do a scrupulous job. Still, despite the occasional work involved in policing those rare appearances of verbal sludge, I enjoy most of the comments I receive, and even—gasp—learn from them.
Where do we go from here? Hard to say. All I do know is that I'll keep blogging, day by day, for as long as blogging interests me. I earn no money from this, but blogging has its perks (most of them psycho-spiritual), and that's why I keep at it. I can only hope that my five readers are entertained and/or enriched by my efforts. I can never say, from day to day, what topic might strike my fancy—an unpredictability that contributes to the blog's desultory nature and gives it such limited appeal—but as long as I have an audience of even one reader, I'll feel that I'm communicating something to someone.
But now it is time to dance the 9000-post dance.
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