Happy Blogday to Me!

Well, we made it Gracie. In a world in which there is a new blog created every second, with the blogosphere doubling in size every 6 months, the birth of a blog is no big deal. But the infant mortality rate is high. Everyone wants to blog, but few can make it last, at least comparatively speaking.

I'm the first to admit, BillyBlog is no big deal. It's a personal project, and I'm just shy of 7500 hits (7412, as of this composition), which is small by BigBlog standards. The poet Ron Siliman's blog, for instance, active for 4 years, is running at 838,000 hits, and that's a poetry blog. And I owe a significant number of my hits to the fans of Pearl Jam, who flocked in small numbers to BillyBlog when I posted some video just as Eddie and the boys were embarking on their world tour.

Of late, I am averaging 23 hits a day. Some of these are bloggers randomly jumping from other blogs. Others find me on google, then vanish. Like the person who googled the terms "Billy" and "Needs". What were they looking for? They hit this post here from last October. One of my favorites.

But a significant number of you know me, or know me through the beast that is BillyBlog. Hullo. Some of you have been with me from the beginning, others have just caught on (to which I refer to Dear Old Dad who sent me a heartfelt email earlier in the week astonished at what he had found, not realizing the depth to which the BillyBlogPosts traveled. Welcome aboard Ancient One, Blessed be He!

Or Melanie coming back from Vegas, on a trip with nine of her girlfriends (sorry, but I have to recycle a joke I have used too often in the last month, but if I went to Vegas with nine girlfriends, no one would be hearing about it, except maybe in court proceedings), and telling me that several of her friends alluded to not only visiting, but to visiting regularly.

In the Spring of 1986, a woman in my dorm, I mean residence hall, named Meg McCarten, walked off campus and while stepping off the curb onto York Avenue, in a quest for some food from Troy's Burgers, was hit by a drunk driver and killed.

I wrote a poem about her and shared it with some classmates. It was all very emotional.

A few weeks later, I was visiting someone down the hall from where Meg lived and, when leaving, I saw she had taped a piece of paper to the wall. It was in her handwriting, but the words were familiar. She had copied my poem by hand and posted it so she could see it every time she left the room.

I still remember that moment, an unsolicited acknowledgement that what I say, or what I write, means something to someone other than myself. Everyone who writes craves that recognition, in one form or another.

When you visit, you give me strength. When you post comments, you give me validation. Thank you for spending some time on BillyBlog. Thank you for helping drive BillyBlog forward into another year. Y'all come back now, you hear?