Forgotten remembrance: 20 years of Don’t Call Me Ishmael

I missed my own anniversary. 

Sometime around Memorial Day 2006, I noticed everyone I knew had a blog of some sort. What else could I do but try my own hand at that game. I wrote two posts after driving home from a campout and attending the Worthington Memorial Day parade. It was an outlet to my opinion column, a place to write with less restraint. 

On Memorial Day 2026, I never gave though to the blog-a-versary. Only in July, remembering a favorite summer some 20 years ago, did I realize the occasion had not been marked. The writing has changed over the past two decades, with travel the dominant topic, along with hiking, local exploration, and music. Some of those old posts are downright embarrassing, but I leave them up, letting it serve more as a diary than a grand repository of thought. 

Across thoseyears, I accumulated 1,528 posts. That averages to 76 posts a year, although that is skewed due to the one year when I managed 250 posts. I still don't know how that happened, although the posts skewed shorter in those days. I tend to write longer now, in search of something more qualitative or thoughtful. I don't always accomplish that, but the blog's half-dozen regular readers have not complained. 

Twenty years later, I still aim for 50 posts a year. I’d like to think the writing might still be ongoing as I approach 70 two decades from now. As long as I still enjoy it, the blog will be there in some form. 

The readers have never been there and if I did it for validation alone, it would have not survived 2006. But it has lasted through three times, two multi-state moves, four cats in the house, one significant other in the house, and gives me an outlet I sorely need most days.