If life could be reduced to numbers, mathematicians would be our story-tellers, not writers. But it's too late for that, since as a species we seem to have chosen words over digits, although as far as I'm concerned, either form of language would have been fine.
I'm a 1-2-4-8-16-32-64-128-256-512-1024-2048-4096-8192 kind of guy and always have been. People will tell you all kinds of things about themselves in words, weaving a narrative that, depending on their personality, may be modest or arrogant.
But, as the cliche has it, the numbers never lie.
As I look back over my life, I could have gone either way. I could have followed my math brain, as my father wanted me to do, and become an actuary or some other sort of stat-head (official scorer for a baseball team would have been a nice option).
But I didn't.
Instead, somehow I flopped in calculus in my freshman year of college, and escaped from slide rules to my college newspaper,
The Michigan Daily.
***
Google claims this is the 2,000th post to this blogsite. I cannot even imagine how this could be true, but when it comes to numbers, I
do trust Google. Somehow, I have done that in what by my count has been only 1,924 days. So for five years, three months, and seven days now I have averaged roughly 1.0395 posts per day.
Who knows who reads these posts -- every now and again someone besides the few who choose to comment publicly contact me to say so -- but everyone is and has always been welcome to both read and interact with the content posted here.
I feel like for a while now I've been slowing down, losing my passion for this kind of communication. No one writes only for himself, or if he does, she's a different kind of writer than me.
But even though I always hope my words may offer some comfort or sense of connectedness with another, the main experience I've taken away from blogging is it is not much different from any other kind of writing. It's just me staring at a blank screen, just as much as it was just me 40 years ago staring at a blank piece of paper.
What on earth could make me possibly think any of this matters?
It is exceptionally risky to blog. This may be a relatively young and primitive communication channel, but it also is an art form. Traditional artists work in well-established fields, where the rules are clear and the results easily evaluated by critics, as well as those who commission and view/purchase/witness their art.
Here, in the world of blogging, there are neither rules nor awards. You can have no sense of whether you are good or bad, useful or useless, achieving greatness or mediocrity. You're just another common blogger.
Maybe, in the end, that's the point.
