Over One Million Served

Today is my 1,000th post.  This marks my third year.  Jesus, what have I been thinking?  I am no longer sure.  Over time, I've been more careful about some things and tend to censor myself, too.  I have considered the imaginary audience, I guess, as with a few exceptions, I don't know who comes here or why.  I know that people come.  Sometimes there will be a great rush of visitors, huge hordes, and I assume I have been mentioned somewhere else on the internet.  Then the valley, and I will despair that they have not checked in to stay.  There are days when traditionally the site is not so busy.  Today is one.  Fridays.  I rarely have as many visitors on Friday as I do on Monday.  Sometimes I am tempted not to post.  And that is when I realize that somewhere along the way, I began posting for others and not myself.  Or, at least, I've attempted to consider the audience.  What audience, though, I wonder?  Perhaps it is the Greek chorus or Freudian superego that I begin to consider, something hand-wringing and full of foreboding at anything that might be too chancy.  I've considered other photographers and photo critics, too, some who have come here and some who never would.  And there are always the writers.  I've explored this kind of communication now and know that this sort of internet connectivity, as journalists and academics now like to refer to it, is odder than odd, stranger than strange.  Blogs are so passe that only someone stuck in the two-thousand-oughts would even think about writing one.  The sensibility is outdated now.  The digital world has moved on.

I am contemplating that this morning as the sun rises and the windows sweat blurring the world outside.  Cafes are closing everywhere.  Who has time?  Even if it is clean and well-lighted.  Only an old man sitting in the shadows motioning to a young waiter who wishes to go home, it seems, has any use for them now.  He and a kindred soul, I guess, someone who understands him and has compassion and who, too, needs a light for the night.  It is slow in here, but it is clean and pleasant.  And anything could happen.  Anything.

We'll see.