Two Hundred and Fifty Times None = Clip Show! Click Show? Click Show!

Rum before noon makes you a pirate, not an alcoholic...

Hello, friends! Apparently, after nearly ten years of posting mostly harmless bits of bloggy drivel here at the ol' Windows Vista machine, I have reached a bit of a milestone - my 250th post. I KNOW! No one was more surprised by this fact than I was. 

On occasions such as this, a normal person might be tempted to turn around and survey the miles traveled, but I'll do it anyway. In late-January of 2010, I gave in to peer pressure and unemployed boredom, and created this silly little blog. I started cautiously - even timidly - sharing bits of a memoir I had written for family and friends nearly a decade before I'd even heard the word "blog." At the time, I was in the midst of my longest-ever (and hopefully last) stint on the unemployment line, so I had plenty of time to write. Between bad advice and crushing rejections and wasted unemployment benefits, Mostly Harmless Drivel was born.

Around the same time, I started writing little novels during National Novel Writing Months. There were plenty of zombies, but first there were snarky little children. Speed-noveling got a lot easier when they added Camp NaNoWriMo (the summer version of NaNoWriMo), and I now have ELEVEN first draft novels and novellas - at least three of which might actually be readable. So, yeah. There is that. There was also some stuff about winding down four years of prednisone use, and some breakups with bad years.

There was an inexplicably popular post - my most viewed ever - that was nothing more than a bit of dialogue with a terrible ending. It had a great title, though. Let's all take a moment and click on it and maybe read it, making it even MORE, um, clicked-on. It's called CARDBOARD AND APATHY, and don't say I didn't warn you about the ending. 

With unemployment and steroids behind me, and reluctant as I was to get too bloggy, or to venture into politics, I opted instead to get weird.

That is one great blue heron! (photo by J. Scott, 2013)

That was kind of a bust, so I kept the weird and added a tablespoon of nostalgic Americana, and started spinning the tales of the 700 hoboes, based (often rather loosely) on the names provided by John Hodgman, in his fabulous almanac of inaccurate information, The Areas of My Expertise, which should probably be underlined instead of italicized. The first one was kinda lame, but before long, we had characters like Santa Fe Jinglebell, The World's Most Christmassy Tramp, and many, many hoboes later, we're still dropping these old drifters' stories onto the proverbial conveyor belt. What? There are no proverbs about hoboes? Whatever.

Along the way, I've written in response to many writing prompts from my blogging friends, but none were quite as challenging as DO NOT CLICK ON THIS. Seriously, just don't. If it's too late and you already clicked, I am truly sorry. As I said, I was challenged to do that. 

But fear not - there was also the stuff of unbridled romance, and another memory vividly remembered, and more hopeless romance - this time with lasers. And, on the photo blog I have heretofore failed to mention, we had Frozen Oceans!

A frozen ocean joins our hearts...

There were moments of thankfulness, an ode to stillness, and pining for the perfect shot with [Maris]. The hoboes kept coming, and heaps of derision, at my nostalgia for the simplicity of the Cold War. And then... in mid 2015, things, as they say, took a turn. I resorted to increasingly frequent escapes into alternate memories. In 2016, 2017, and 2018, I managed a total of six posts per year. 

There was the occasional poignant highlight, but at the end of the day, it was all I could do to just keep hope alive with my typing. Another alternate memory, a yard sale, and a couple more hoboes, and here we are. 250 of these things, sitting on the interweb for few to see. 

It's been fun. Thanks for clicking on a few of the preceding links to lovingly and painstakingly crafted bits of Mostly Harmless Drivel. You are all troopers, and I truly appreciate all four of you, and sincerely hope that something I've written over this past decade or so has amused, touched, or moved you in some way. I promise to make it more interesting, next time. Oh, who am I kidding? I promise nothing! I'll try, though...

Peace.

Seriously, peace...

-Joe