Rant #2,400: I Want To Take You Higher

As I welcome myself back to my usual weekly perch, I also congratulate myself on the fact that this is the 2,400th entry at the Ranting and Raving Blog.

Or is it? More about that later.

The blog started out 10 years ago as a place where I could say what I wanted about topics that I wanted to talk about when I wanted to talk about them.

When you are a writer that is paid to write about a certain subject--with me, it has been military stores, meaning commissaries (supermarkets) and exchanges (department stores)--you kind of get straitjacketed about what you can say with your words.

Sure, it is interesting, but you can't really talk about things that you want to talk about, and you certainly cannot put a personal perspective on anything you write.

Here, I can basically do whatever I want to do.

And unlike other blogs, I do not search out people reading what I have to say.

I know that people around the world read this blog, but I do not campaign for their readership.

The blog is in a couple of search engines, and yes, it is monetized, but at the rate I am going, I might need at least another five years to see a penny from this thing.

And that is all fine with me.

Now, about the numbering situation ...

In February 2014, or about a year before the original Ranting and Raving Blog was hacked, I evidently made a mistake with my numbering of the individual blog posts, jumping almost 100 numbers at one point.

My eyesight if often bad in the morning, and for a post of, let's say 1,214 I mistakenly entered 1,314 and went from there for a while, until I noticed this and corrected it in midstream.

So while today is the 2,400th blog entry, it is actually more like 1,041 original posts at Ranting and Raving II, added into an additional more than 1,300 posts on the original Ranting and Raving Blog, plus a number of entries that did not get a number ...

So, in fact, the 2,400 posts is probably correct, or off by a little bit, so we will just go with the 2,400 number on go with that.

Of course, I am not including in that number the original Ranting and Raving Blog posts that I put up each day with the original post. Some time next year, I hope to have every original blog post right here, so I can forever close down the original blog site, which was hacked in early 2015.

What a disaster that was, but now, for the past more than four years, we have been back to full strength here.

Now, back to the blog entries themselves ...

It has been fun writing the blog five days a week. It gives me something to think about each day, where I ask the proverbial question, "What am I going to write for my next entry?"

Sometimes the topic, and the words to describe it, just flow out like water coming out of a faucet.

Other times, it comes out in drips and drabs, and sometimes, it doesn't come out at all.

But I manage to write something each day to amuse you, make you think, enrage you, or make you laugh.

And after 10 years of doing it, I still get a mighty big kick out of it, so I see no reason to stop doing it, even though I joked during a past April Fool's Day that the blog was dead.

So, the Ranting and Raving Blog will live on, because I can always find something to write about, even if it is so benign that it makes you brain gurgle.

That is fine--you can't write a masterpiece each and every time out.

And thanks to you, my readers, for coming here each and every weekday, often times starting your busy day by reading the blog.

Again, people from all over the world read this thing--I get plenty of readers from Russia, the Ukraine, and South Korea, as well as from Portugal and the United Kingdom--and I post it each and every weekday on Facebook, so I get countless others from around the globe reading what I have to say.

I also get that from my work writing, which is in a publication that goes worldwide and also online so anyone can see it, so I am pretty much covered in that aspect of my writing, that people internationally are reading what I have to say, one way or the other.

So once again, thanks to my audience, and tomorrow, we will have Rant #2,401 (or thereabouts), and we will be marching on to Rant #2,500, a real big milestone, which I predict we should reach by the tail end of this year or into early 2020.

What a great trip it has all been, and I will speak to you again tomorrow.

Onward and upward!