Three hundred on Sunday: Bees to Bathrobes

This is my 300th blog entry on Night Blind: Rough Drafts from a Writer's Life.

Since I started the blog in 2005, my most garrulous year was last year, when I posted here 134 times, or every 2.7 days. My second most chatty year was 2007, when I posted 105 times. This year I've been a veritable blogging hermit, posting only 53 times so far -- last winter, as most of you know, included a few months of hell in my life from which I have gratefully scrambled back.

I often forgot to attach labels to the posts, but from the ones I did,the thing I wrote about most, at 72 posts, was Flint, my home for the past 28 years -- this notorious, often infuriating place that prompts so much obsessive reflection and fulminating in my mind and heart. This is where most of my major dramas as a grownup have occurred, so it figures. It is my home; I'm interested in it and always thinking about my life here. The rest of the top ten topics, in addition to Flint, have been writing, memoir, poetry, nature, politics, LA, San Pedro, the body, and tied for 10th place, music and walking. Along the way I've also written about marriage, aging, death, food, insomnia, gratitude, health and hope. Also teaching, of course, and Tonga, the country of some of my early young adventures. And also misanthropy and what I tabbed "cranky standards." I've written about bees and bathrobes and the beer summit, and mentioned numerous people from novelist Charles Baxter to Hizzoner Dayne Walling to my friend and artist Patsy Warner. My former husband Danny has appeared on these screens, along with Jack Driscoll, Barry Lopez, Linda Gregerson, Greg Rappleye and many others. All this is a pretty accurate reflection of the things in my life that matter, that interest me, that worry me, that I love.

The post that seems to have gotten read most often, probably because of Google and which shows up under Google searches, was a piece I wrote last January about artist Jim Dine and his bathrobes. Another one that emerges often on Google is an account I offered about the appearance of Linda Gregerson at UM - Flint -- also one of my own favorites.

Obviously I haven't been as interested in this blog since I got on Facebook, where posting is easy and quick and, I'm ashamed to admit, I like that I get immediate readers, many of whom regularly say something back. As a social networking site, it feels, well, sociable. It usually cheers me up. It hasn't been unusual there for me to get four or five comments on a morning post, but here it's been rare to get even one. So, is it all about readers? When I first started this blog I did it under a pseudonym because I just wanted to write, ship it out to the blogosphere and see what happened. I was feeling reclusive and somewhat darker in my internal life than I am now; my blog entries -- or at least the way I felt when I wrote them -- tended toward the depressive, wrestling with my sadness and regrets. At least that's how I remember it. Things have changed somewhat. I'm less interested in writing about the things that make me sad or unhappy with myself. I'm attempting to savor the present, appreciate the good things in my life, and look forward.

If you've happened into this blog over the past five years, thank you for peeking in. It's been an enjoyable spot for playing out the concerns and curiosities of my life. I hope to return to it, in an attitude of leisurely rumination, a place to keep my writing chops in line when I want to develop my thoughts beyond Facebook's little popcorns.