WFME’s Self-Congratulatory 1,000th Post
October 26th, 2005
I rock. No, really I do.
Think about how hard it is to get to the number 1000. Think about how hard it would be to eat 1000 hard boiled eggs. Think about how hard it would be to date 1000 women (Wilt Chamberlain is a robot, so you can’t count him). Think about how hard it would be to do anything a thousand times? Would it pain you to do 1000 pushups? Piss you off to have to call back customer service 1000 times? Annoy you if your next door neighbor asked you to move your garbage pails a little closer to the curb for 1000 weeks?
What about 1000 blog posts?
I got up this morning and was met with a very ironic situation. I have posted a new blog entry on WFME every single day of every single month of every single year since it all began. Rain, or the constant 72 degree Los Angeles weather never stopped me. Yet this morning, for the first time — my Internet was down for no apparent reason. It made me realize one very important thing.
Evil forces were aligning themselves to thwart my milestone. But I would not let them.
So here I sit…at a booth that I once shared with good WFME pal Meme, piggybacking on some corporate coffee shop’s free Internet connection so I can bring you what some will call (years from now), the most significant, most important, most influential blog post of our times. Others might call it the most intelligent, the most humorous, or the most teeth-grindingly exciting blog post ever.
Let me pat myself on my back here for a second.
Let me also suggest that patting yourself on your back is never nearly as rewarding as someone else patting you on the back. Honestly, I just can’t get the good force I want in a back pat by reaching up and over my own shoulder. I guess I could ask one of the people working here to give me a good back pat for today’s 1000th post, but they’d probably just look at me strangely and ask if I wanted a croissant.
One-thousand posts.
I want you all to picture something. I want you to close your eyes, but not yet cause you have to finish reading this before you can participate in this moment here. I want you to get ready to close your eyes and when you do, I want you to hear that Annie Lennox song in your head from the third Lord of the Rings movie and I want you to imagine a huge expansive field on the top of a plain somewhere on an oft-forgotten continent. I want you to see something…yes, right there on the horizon coming right for you. Do you see it? Can you SEE IT? It’s coming closer. And closer. And then, just when you think it’s a spec of dust on your sunglasses (which you never clean with anything but your shirt, which is dirty anyway so can you please get a glass cleaner or something?) — you realize that it’s ME. I’m running at you. Quickly. My hands, flailing in the air in slo-mo. There’s a big smile across my face. HUGE smile. In fact, if my head was as big as I say it is, that smile is filling up the entire width of my face.
Closer, I come. Even closer.
And then, everything comes clear. I approach you and I’m wearing one of those puffy pirate shirt things (but it’s buttoned up so you don’t have to worry about feeling weird or anything) and I’m holding what appears to be a huge stack of print-outs which you, in your head, suspect are the nine hundred and ninety-nine previous posts from Words For My Enjoyment. And I look to you, and I open my mouth as if I’m about to say something and then-
You snap out of it. Because, sadly, doing these kind of eye-closing AND web-reading visualizations usually never hold longer than a paragraph or two, and then here you are again — right back in the middle of reading something off your computer screen.
But know this: Had you been able to stay out there with the Lennox music and the wind and the wheat blowing in the wind at the top of the plain with me in my pirate shirt and my 999 previous blog posts, you might have heard me say something like, “God, I f-f-feel like I’ve been running forever… A-a-and this printout is friggin heavy… You don’t ha-ha-happen to have a raspberry-flavored bottle of Dasani water, do you?”
In my visualization, you do. In yours, your probably don’t.
It’s no matter. No matter at all. Because this is the 1000th post on WFME and more than a pirate shirt, Dasani water and you and me in some far off faux-land…the fact that really matters is that I am patting myself on the back and even though it doesn’t feel nearly as good as having someone else do it for me — the force of the slap is good enough for me.
S*L*A*P.
Huzzah! It would seem you’re also a machine, Pauly. And boy, do we appreciate your commitment.
Comment by Meg — October 26, 2005 @ 10:00 am
Congrats! Will you be celebrating the 2,000th post? Or 1,500 post?
Comment by kartooner — October 26, 2005 @ 10:14 am
Will I be celebrating the 2,000th post? I will never quit. Ever.
(If I do, please be kind and never re-quote this comment back to me.)
Comment by Pauly D — October 26, 2005 @ 10:16 am
Congratulations Pauly.
I think I may reference you 1000th post when it comes time (in the next week or so) for my 1000th post.
Comment by Hilary — October 26, 2005 @ 10:21 am
Congratulations, Pauly — you milestone reacher you. It seems that this has been a week of superlatives in the world of WFME — the post with the most comments, and now? Today? “The most significant, most important, most influential blog post of our times. Others might call it the most intelligent, the most humorous, or the most teeth-grindingly exciting blog post ever.”
Wow. Next week will be hard pressed to surpass this big week — but I have faith — you can do it.
Comment by Amber — October 26, 2005 @ 10:30 am
but…i thought there was going to be prizes…like turkey or something …? am i delusional?
wtf?
Comment by heather — October 26, 2005 @ 10:39 am
Way to go, Pauly!
Your blog is a highlight in my day, and though I have not been around for all 1,000 posts, I’ve been here ever since I clumsily tripped through the doorway of your lovely blog.
Here’s to a happy 1,000 and to many, many more…
Cheers!
Comment by Flower Girl — October 26, 2005 @ 10:46 am
uh, yeah. i’m with heather, dude.
wtf, mate?
Comment by kristine — October 26, 2005 @ 10:50 am
Congratulations Pauly - you rock!
Comment by Kathleen — October 26, 2005 @ 11:00 am
Pauly - you are the Wilt Chamberlain of blogging: you may boast a lot, but you’ve satisfied plenty and will just keep going and going.
Comment by monkeyinabox — October 26, 2005 @ 11:18 am
i KNEW i wasn’t losing it.
i want turkey. NOW.
Comment by heather — October 26, 2005 @ 11:38 am
i am so honored that you returned to our sacred booth for inspiration. we really ought to have those plastic benches bronzed.
Comment by meme — October 26, 2005 @ 11:49 am
Hey, Pauly, I just got back from the future in my converted Hyundai Santa Fe/ time machine and it was fifty years in the future and you had just finished writing your 100,000 post and President Dakota Fanning was giving you a Presidential Medal at the Starbucks Center (formerly the Kennedy Center) in Washington D.C.) and she made this speech:
“Two score and 10 years ago, a young man named Paul Davidson wrote his 1000th post. It was a time of great celebration. He could not forsee his influence on bloggers everywhere or that generations now know him as simply “Mr. Blog.”"…
Comment by Neil — October 26, 2005 @ 12:08 pm
OH. I finally tried that Dasani water. You were right! Delish!
And Congrats on 1000 posts! What will post #1678 talk about?
Comment by jenny — October 26, 2005 @ 12:39 pm
Congrats! I only have 989 more to go hit the century mark. Maybe I will stay up late and do them all tonight so that I can catch up.
Comment by Dave — October 26, 2005 @ 1:10 pm
Congrats!
After picturing you in that puffy shirt, I think I need to go be alone now.
Comment by Hope — October 26, 2005 @ 1:37 pm
*applause*
Comment by C(h)ristine — October 26, 2005 @ 1:38 pm
A thousand congratulations! Or a thousand paper cranes. Or, 500 congratulations and 500 paper cranes. Or, 268 congratulations and 732 paper cranes. Or…well, you get the idea.
Comment by annabel lee — October 26, 2005 @ 3:45 pm
How much is “1,000″?
Comment by hazelblackberry — October 26, 2005 @ 7:27 pm
Wow, congratulations!
Comment by Daniel — October 26, 2005 @ 7:34 pm
Primo, dude. And to think I’m only coming up on #100 on mine! You rock, and even ocassionally roll.
Comment by Fun Joel — October 26, 2005 @ 9:05 pm
PARTY AT PAULY’S HOUSE!
Cheers, man!
Comment by nic — October 27, 2005 @ 6:23 am
Wow! That’s quite a milestone. And I’m impressed more by the fact that this probably does not include many of those “i’ve been tagged” things but instead actual thoughts of yours and posts. I wish I had been there from the beginning because now I realize I have a lot of reading to catch up on.
Thanks too for the visual. I can totally see you with the pirate shirt and stack of past entries.
Fades out to the tune of “did you ever know that your my heeero. You’re everything I wish I could beeeee. I could fly higher than an eagle, cuz you are the wind beneath my wings?? ” (blech).
Comment by Jacquie — October 27, 2005 @ 8:09 am
Awesome feat and congratulations!
Comment by groovebunny — October 27, 2005 @ 1:41 pm
Well done, Pauly. Weld. Un. Er, I mean, um…
Well. Done.
Comment by Will — October 27, 2005 @ 2:39 pm
Wanting to read back to some of your earliest posts, I decided to go and rad your first one.
http://www.pauldavidson.net/?p=1 to be exact.
Oops, it doesn’t exist.
None exist, up until your first post finally appears, post number 14
http://www.pauldavidson.net/?p=14
Now that is weird.
Instead of going into the mysteriousness of these missing posts, I’d just like to be a dick and point out then, that this is only really post number 987 (if I do my maths correctly).
I really need to get a life.
Comment by Ben — October 27, 2005 @ 3:39 pm
That’s some clever detective work you got going there, Ben.
I, on the other hand, go by the number post my blog software provides me — which was #1000 yesterday. But if you are right, and the re-tally WFME currently has going on is correct at all, you’d better believe we’re going to celebrate again in a few days. And a few days after that. And a few days after that.
But until such a tally is legitimized, this will have to serve as number 1000 instead of a few shy of that number.
I’m sure everyone will be OK with that.
Comment by Pauly D — October 27, 2005 @ 3:50 pm
yes, ben. i concur on the getting a life thing
Comment by kristine — October 27, 2005 @ 3:57 pm
Corambolations!
Comment by Glen C. — October 27, 2005 @ 4:55 pm
1K certainly is not a small feat. I’ve got a ways to go on my TypePad site to reach 1K. But if I were to count the posts from my static HTML site…
Too much counting…
Head swimming…
Don’t want to look back at the old, shoddily written crap of yore…
Comment by Kevin — November 2, 2005 @ 9:49 am