Ten Years

Happy April Fish Day!  Usually the internet is awash with heart-stopping pranks and false information on April 1^st (and every other day, come to think of it…but April Fool’s Day is especially bad), however this year, I am hoping that the pandemic and the quarantine will cause people to tone down their practical jokes a little, especially since we have seen what false information can do!

Joking aside, April Fool’s Day is certainly a very special day here at Ferrebeekeeper!  The blog started on this day in 2010.  This is the 10^th anniversary of posts about snakes, crowns, underworld gods, art, mollusks, and Gothic things.  And we have sure had a lot of snake gods and dark squid!  Today’s post is post #1959. Pretty soon we will have to have another special anniversary when we get to #2000.

For that 2000^th post I will really do things up with guests, pageantry, special events, and prizes!  The 10th year anniversary is a bit more solemn though.  When I started, everyone was a blogger: great herds of us roamed the internet, bloviating about everything.  Yet now I am one of the last of our kind.  I feel like a Peter Beagle novel or a CGI dragon voiced by Sean Connery…

I guess everyone else left because they weren’t getting famous or making money with their writing or something, but blogs are not about remuneration! A blog is an obeisance to Athena.  Like life, it is a search for meaning, truth, and fellowship.

And writing certainly helps the writer struggle with truth and meaning (although it might not always help the poor reader, and for this I apologize).  Even among people who love ideas, thinking is hard.  If you had to remember a list of phrases or items you would write them down so that your brain could concentrate on understanding and contextualizing the thing which you were immediately working on.  Writing about ideas is like that but in a much larger and more open-ended way.  It helps you realize the quest which you didn’t realize you were on.  I will write more about this in the weeks to come, because thinking about my favorite things for a decade really has led me to some realizations about the subjects which I care about most…but we will get back to this in subsequent posts!

Additionally, my blog has also led me to fellowship.  Over the years, so many people have posted such lucid and fascinating comments and questions.  Forgive me if I didn’t respond correctly (or at all–for everyone asking to use images which I don’t own) but I appreciated every comment and I appreciate every reader.  It is crazy to think I have friends I know and yet don’t know in Augsburg, Australia, and Alabama.  From the streets of Brooklyn to the Drakensberg to the foothills of the Himalayas to Matsumoto there are people all over Earth who are curious about the same things I am!  What a gift it is to know that!  Likewise, thank you for the priceless gift of your precious time and attention.  Thank you all so much.

I don’t have a real post for today, but when we got to a thousand posts I posted a list of the ten most popular posts from among those thousand.  For this occasion I am going to selfishly post a list of my favorite posts from the last decade.  To be honest I don’t really love hierarchy or numbers, so this isn’t a listicle.  In no order, here is a glob of the posts I liked best (perhaps you will notice a hidden theme lurking in them like a hungry flounder hiding among the pebbles and sand dollars…or maybe not).

Anyway…Here is a list of my personal favorite posts

• Otherland
• Mono no Aware
• Fish Dream
• Santa
• Apollo and Marsyas
• The Orange Mirror
• Concerning Fear
• Man and the Animals
• The Little White Parrot
• Good Rats
• Colonies on Venus
• The Undead

 

Thank you again for everything.  Please let me know if you have any complaints, suggestions or [shy blush] compliments for the things you like.  We will be back soon with the 2000 post jubilee and, of course, we will be back tomorrow talking about the affairs of the world.

Sincerely,

Wayne

 

 

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