Post No. 1,000

Was looking back over the blog this week -- the whole sucker, I mean, going all of the way back to April 2006 -- and thinking about what would do for some sort of suitably momentous, whiz-bang-type message to deliver here in post no. 1000.

It’s a big, intimidating number. What should I say about it?

I considered various ideas, such as compiling a list of the posts with the most hits, or maybe my own list of favorites. I thought about doing one of those funny “word clouds” using all of the words I’d ever written on Hard-Boiled Poker. I fussed over that for a while, during which time I discovered the total number of words on here was approaching 900,000.

As I’ve said before, that’s a damn lot of scribblin’.

Of course, when you’ve written a thousand friggin’ posts, you’ve said and done a lot of things before. Like that word cloud idea -- I realized I’d done that once before, too. Besides, the word cloud pic looked ridiculous. Just a big ol’ mess of words that didn’t really seem to communicate much that was meaningful.

So I thought about the blog a little more. And what it means. And I thought about how many people I’ve gotten to know because of Hard-Boiled Poker. Really great, smart, funny, interesting people. And how many more with whom I’ve communicated over the years thanks to the blog, whether in comments on each other’s blogs, via email, or in other ways. And of all the nice things people have said to me and about me regarding the last 999 posts. And a lot of other stuff that can’t really be measured or counted or quantified in any tangible way.

And that’s when I had to admit... I was at a loss for words.

I mean, really, there’s no way I get this far along without help. You can’t play poker by yourself. Not really. And while you can write for yourself, the meaning of what you write grows with every reader.

A thousand thanks, everybody, for helping give all these words more meaning.