50,000 Reasons Not To Kill Myself
There was a time not long ago when I would panic over not having anything to post about. Oh how a naive young Pops would fret and sweat and scramble for material in a desperate attempt to keep his loyal readers engaged lest their minds wandered, distracted by, say, another, better blog or perhaps something in their eyeline that was shiny.

But those days are long behind me now. I have left comi-tragic space-filling references to Brad Pitt's dick in the past. I'm older now, more assured in my craft. I am a professional blogger. My first blog-check should be arriving any day now, I just know it.

Professional bloggers know that when you're stuck for things to write, you can either turn outward for inspiration (your hurricanes, your earthquakes, your rigged foreign elections) or you can turn inward. I know, blogging in and of itself ranks somewhere between masturbation and Battlefield Earth on the scale of the World's Most Self-Indulgent Projects, so perhaps we should be reticent about the latter. But then, if we were capable of feeling shame, we wouldn't be blogging in the first place, now would we?

Choosing the inward option, a seasoned blogger knows that whe s/he is up against it, there is always the Landmark Post. Thanks to the existence of Sitemeter and other such tools, it's possible for us to crunch the numbers together to make a phony-baloney blog-related numerical "landmark" and then spin it into some first-rate self-congratulatory space-filling horseshit.

So without further ado, it is my great privilege to announce that just yesterday, your beloved Bucket passed--at long last and with great anticipation--the 50,000 Total Visit mark.

Wow. I know. What a landmark. What a milestone. What a shame I didn't think about this when I reached 40,000 or 30,000. I could have phoned those days in as well.

Hmm... maybe "great anticipation" wasn't the right sentiment. Hey, what's the opposite of "anticipation"? Anti-anticipation, I guess. Wait, that's a double negative. The two of those "anti"s should cancel each other out, leaving us with just "cipation". Is "cipation" a word? It must be. I've already used it twice. I can type it and everything.

Because delusion is a blogger's best friend, I'm going to pretend that it's 50,000 visits from 50,000 different people and not 35,000 repeat visits between Rita and SJ alone and the rest from you other stragglers and spambots.

I can't thank all of you enough for your support. You know, this blog started with one man and a dream. He had a dream to one day become a world-famous writer whose words were cherished the world over. But that seemed like way too much work and his ego was too fragile to handle all the rejection inherent in a writing career, so he did this instead.

Now he can see his words published without the fear of rejection. Except from Blogger when it's feeling stroppy, but at least he can tell himself that it's a technical problem and not Blogger rejecting him specifically, though he suspects deep down that that is a lie.

And now, as a gift to you, my loyal Bucketeers, I will now stop referring to myself with a third-person impersonal pronoun.

After 50,000 visits, I'd say you'd earned that at least. At the very, very, very least.

Further, if you look down at the bottom of my infinitely long, yellow-yet-strangely-colorless sidebar to your right, you will now find a section called Pops' Bucket Hall of Minimal Suckitude. Included therein please find a collection of posts compiled by me, written by me and judged by me (with a little help from SJ) to be the least offensively incompetent, the least grotesquely unreadable of all my posts thus far.

I know it seems self-aggrandizing, but that's only because it totally is. This way I take pressure of myself to be wickedly brilliant every day for the sake of new readers. They can now easily stroll through old posts when I was engaged and focused and on my Ritalin and I can maybe take a few days off to be lazy, unfocused and basically take a nap at my keyboard.

Like today for instance.

But for some reason, you people keep coming back. Curious.

I've never been more grateful for the existence of the human intellect and it's capacity for masochism. It's what this little slice of the internet community is built on. Thanks, Jesus.

And now, forward. We take our first baby-steps toward 100,000 visits. I'm sure you, like me, look forward to that day with unbridled cipation.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 10.0


Pops

PS- I was 12 in 1986. I remember this:

I cried.
So to all the little boys in Houston born circa 1993 who last night had to watch this:

I feel your pain, kids. Here's hoping you don't have to wait 16 years before it becomes OK. Stay in school.
- posted by Pops @ 10:31 AM