Opus 500

There’s an old joke about eating an elephant that probably bears repeating here. At first glance, you look at the task and say “That’s absurd! Nobody could possibly eat a whole elephant!” But then you start carving off slices and eating, just a few bites at a time, every day. And at some point in the future, maybe a year, maybe four, you find yourself looking into the fridge and calling “Honey! We’re out of elephant! When you go to the store, can you pick up another one?” This basic principle lies at the heart of Strategic Planning, where nearly all of the operations involve breaking huge and complex tasks into smaller and smaller elements, until they are finally reduced to bite-sized pieces that you can assign a single person to handle. Neither of these things has anything to do with writing a blog, of course, but eventually you get to 500 posts and find yourself wondering “Well – how did I get here?”

When I started writing this blog three years ago, I wasn’t really thinking about where it would take me – which I imagine is obvious to any regular readers (assuming I have regular readers) by the amount of ground covered in this space. It was mostly a way of keeping my hand in during a period of under-employment; I’ve refused to monetize it, promote it, spam people about it, or otherwise do any of the things one normally does to increase web presence or increase readership precisely because this is supposed to be a diversion for me as much as it is for all of you. If it became a business it would have defeated the purpose – and I hate waiting for pop-up ads to load so that I can actually read a blog post just as much as you do. But while I can’t speak for any of you, one of the true constants in my life is that it keeps taking me places I did not expect to go, and this project is no exception…

Since BlogSpot doesn’t include a counter on any of these blog pages, I’m never entirely sure how many people read any given post, or which ones. I know a few of my old friends tune in from time to time, but I am always amazed when somebody mentions that they really enjoyed the rant I posted last week, and it’s somebody I didn’t realize even knew I had a blog, much less read it. Most of the time it’s like standing on a lighted stage, telling stories into a darkened theater, unable to see anything beyond the edge of the light; are there three people out there today, or thirty, or thousands? Generally, I’ve got no way of knowing. The lack of banner ads means that I don’t even get the multitudes of spambots trying to leave messages in my comments section with which most bloggers have to contend; it’s just me and a keyboard and the occasional hotlink…

I didn’t start this blog with the idea of documenting my passage through graduate school, my efforts to adapt to middle age and a new life, or my voyages through an increasingly strange and surreal world; all of these things just sort of happened as I went along. I had no plans, no expectations, and no idea of the ways in which writing 500 short essays about the foibles of business and the strangeness of life would change me, nor did I want any; as Jimmy Buffet once wrote, “The best navigators are never quite sure where they’re going until they get there.” Today, three years and 500 entries later, I’m still not sure where this project is headed – but it’s been fun so far. Shall we try for Opus 1000?