The 2000-Post-Old Man

Happy Postiversary, Driftglass! It would be easy to pat myself on the back because I have more self-housed posts than he does, except that Drifty had a brilliant career over at the late and still sadly lamented News Blog long before he stopped sleeping on Gilliard's online sofa and got his own digs. And as we know, number of posts, or even comments, doesn't mean shit. It's about the writing, as we used to say over at the equally defunct Cinemarati when evaluating new critics for membership. (And look where that got us.)

Drifty's 2000th post comes just days before the Blogtopia(™ Skippy)-Wide Day of Remembrance for the great Mr. Gilliard, who inspired so many of us, even those of us who never had the privilege of meeting the man (though I did get a cherished link once). Now that I have a job where I actually have work to do, instead of waiting around to be deemed worthy of a project that requires use of the gray matter in my head, it's often difficult to skim a few sites, come up with something to write, and then write it coherently after not enough sleep and the ever-present deadlines that hang over me. I wouldn't trade this job for the one I had before, for all the slack I had then that I don't have now. It's nice to be respected for your abilities at work, even if it does mean 12-hour days and the sacrifice of almost everything else in life. It's also nice to not have the ever-present threat of layoff hanging over my head. This isn't to say that my current employer couldn't hit bad times, but for now it's pretty secure. But given that the company is self-insured, I am an overweight 50-year-old, and they want to give us "lifestyle" coaches so we can live a healthier life (presumably by cutting out fast food, which I don't eat anyway; cutting down on sweets, which I've done anyway; and getting more exercise, which is hard to do when one is putting in 12-hour days and doesn't think a life of nothing but work and working out is terribly appealing), somehow I suspect that if times got tough, my job performance would matter not a whit when weighed (heh) against my body-mass index.

But with newspapers now having top-secret conclaves to decide whether to collude in charging for online content, and most people having little time to read the paper versions, one wonders just how long rantbloggers who go off to corporate America are going to be able to survive without staffs of full-time investigative journalists of their own -- or if HuffPo, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo are going to inherit the earth.

But for now, please join me in sending postiversary wishes to one of the Four Horsemen of Blogging Curmudgeonliness. (For the record, these are the other three).