This is my 300th post of this blog. I had originally planned to write a short Hallmark™ card and be done with it. But it’s the Vernal Equinox (exact at 10:48 PM PDT, last night), there are 305 days left before the Bush family junior has to stop squatting on White House grounds, and today, yesterday’s post was honored with a vorpal sword milestone.
Today this blog is featured on Salon’s Blog Report, Crooks and Liars‘ Blog Roundup, on one of my all time favorite blogs, the most excellent and non-heinous Preemptive Karma, on Too Sense, and snarked at on a rightie site (we’re called “libtards“) called Infidels are Cool. (Always nice to get the droolers’ left-handed compliments, as a leftie AND a left-hander. Poor Righties. Don’t they realize that Ted Nugent pees himself whenever he sees my shadow?)
And today’s the biggest day in this blog’s history. This history:
This is the fourth installment in a more-or-less continuous series that began in March of 2004, as a writer/candidate’s blog. I was running to expose egregious and flagrant violations of campaign rules, and the very basis of civil conduct by two candidates in the Democratic primary. Instead, I learned that our local press is as dumb as a box full of rocks, and about as sensate. 92% of the cash in the winning candidate’s coffers came from out of district, and over 50% from Washington STATE! (Yes, the legislator for the Oregon Ducks is owned by — and his campaigns are run by — Washington Huskies.)
The blog was called Skiing Uphill.
After the 2004 presidential campaign, I kept blogging. Was featured on Counterpunch a couple of times. Was a regular (as “Master Blogger”) on our AirAmerica affiliate, KOPT-AM, “Oregon’s Progressive Talk” for a couple of years. (KOPT died this spring.) When I decided to retire Blog Mark I, it was longer than the Lord Of The Rings trilogy in wordage. And that’s a lot of writing.
I finally packed it away in the summer of 2006, and went on vacation. But in the car on the way back over the spine of the 
Ochoco Mountains of the Transcascadian Wilderness of Eastern Oregon, heading into the basalt bluffs of Prineville, I heard two words click together in my brain for no real reason, and when I got back to town, I started the next phase of this blog, Boregasm. For that summer and into the fall, I fell into the story of a lifetime, and I had the distinct privilege of “outing” the Howie Rich gang in a dozen states and scores of stealth initiatives, and virtually every one failed. My blog got national attention from PBS’ NOW (“with David Brancuso“) and I left the blog up as a resource, and started Zug. (Confusing Swiss everywhere.)
I began posting and sometime in the spring, as the rabid “Catholic defense” jerks started attacking blogs who’d noted that with Sam Alito, we suddenly had a Catholic majority on the US Supreme Court, and was that kind of epistemological monopoly a good thing, say, for people who believed in reincarnation?
I was invited to post on another blog under similar attack, and I began cross-posting. Pretty soon, I was neglecting Zug for The Democratic Daily because it got national attention in the aggregators. I was part of the blogging mainstream. I began THIS blog as a way of having a personal copy of my TDD blog posts, in case (as proved to be) the owner of that blog became petty, vindictive, arbitrary or nuts. (Some happened, some didn’t.)
And his vorpal sword had been the name of my homepage ever since its founding in 1995, so this blog brings it all full circle and I am not changing titles again (I hope.)
The complete corpus of work is equvalent to Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, with Dune thrown in. That’s a whole lot of writing going on. But I’ve always tried to delight, and make sense of the madness of our era, and, according to my regular readers, I’ve done that.
I have always been fortunate as a writer inasmuch as two elements have continually been at my disposal: first of all, I don’t have trouble writing. I made my living through the late 1970s and 1980s exclusively as a freelance writer and editor (and temporary secretary and typesetter) because I could sit down and TYPE, dammit. Occasionally, some cur suggests that I write well. I take an aluminum baseball bat to the cur, and move on.
Secondly, I have always had a weird gift for being around interesting happenings. Why this is, I do not know. Much has come out in stories, but I thought I’d tell you this: When I was researching the Nellie Tayloe Ross story last week, I stumbled on a mini-bio of her from the Wyoming “American Heritage Center”, who’d had a contest for “Wyoming Citizen of the Century,” a few years back, at the millennium.
And I KNEW the citizen of the century, from when I was a little kid. But it got worse. There were several categories: teaching, business, science, politics, arts, etc.
And damned if I hadn’t known the “citizen of the century” in several of those categories. And I came away thinking: WOW. I just thought they were normal men and women, but how weird is it that I, who have been away from Wyoming for all but 16 days since late August of 1969, would have known so many prominent Wyoming citizens in all walks of life? (My mother, the inveterate social climber and schmoozer didn’t know as many of them as I did!) Everywhere in Wyoming, it seems, there are parks, roads and buildings named after people I knew from when I was a kid: John Wold, Stanley K. Hathaway, George Humphrey, Cliff Hansen, Samuel H. Knight. There are many, many more.
Well, bizarrely, the beat has gone on, ever since. I happened to be around people and events that would later be history. When I got to Hollywood in the spring of 1976, the
front pages were all blaring about a famous murder case in Fort Worth, Texas, which I’d just left a little over a week earlier. And I knew two of the crime victims. I’d actually seen the fellow (Stan) who was killed three weeks earlier, along with Priscilla and her omnipresent white mink or chinchilla mini-coat. Now, I live in Oregon. Same kinda things keep happening.
That kinda stuff. So the blog has simply been about combining those two talents: I can write, and I’ve witnessed things worth writing about. So, I’m probably doing the right thing. Or not.
Thanks for reading my stuff.
Now, like the Spartan 300, let’s see if we can hold off the racist assholes at the pass.
Courage.
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All illustrations by Hart Williams © 2005-2007
