Let's talk about something else

So I'm back from Peru, ready to begin my productive, fruitful existence in my Connecticut hometown. To celebrate my return to the land of milk and honey, I made myself a big-ass sandwich and poured a cold American beer to keep it company. I shaved my wild man beard, got back on Facebook and of course Blogger, to begin the important business of bragging about everything I've done.

I now have a writing job and a salary. I'm not complaining, though it would seem wise not to mingle my professional work with some of the foul-mouthed diatribes that I launch here. Also, I have been running like a mother and have a my first marathon this weekend. Go ahead and skip the next six paragraphs if you're not in the mood for a heavy dose of meta-commentary.

Finishing up writing everything that happened over the course of my travels has been satisfying. The other day, when I should have been making money, I scrolled through all my posts, like some loser jock reliving his glory days through the high school yearbook. As I went, I cut and pasted all the words into a master document. The end product was 93 single spaced pages (allowing for a liberal use of margins) and a grand total of 34,844 words. That's a lot of diarrhea and bitching. The sum total actually beats out my thesis, which weighs in at 29,757.

The real foil for my vanity however is the Orwellian "stats" tab that Blogger puts up on the screen every time I go to write a post. That's right, I may not know who everyone is, but I know how many times you've visited and what countries you were in when you were reading this. Why do I feel a stab of pride knowing that someone was reading this in Singapore or Denmark? Just a few precious more page views and I'll be over the 1000 mark!

I don't pretend that the obsessive attention that I've squandered on monitoring the site's popularity isn't pathetic at best. Now that I'm home and in many ways alone, I find the little line graph monitoring the readership of Tom's On The Move to be a form of affirmation. Imagine if I'd monetized this sucker! I might have bought myself a beer with the profits. But it's the fact that this site garners any kind of attention, which really gets me off. After all these years of trying to be an individual, I've sunk to the worst kind of whoring, worthy of any Facebook diva. And I'm not going to stop.

Here's the problem. Now that I'm not in Peru, doing cool shit like climbing up mountains and losing control of my bowels, do I have anything else to say? After my last Peru entry, I flitted back to the precious stats page and made a terrifying discovery. The trickle of visitors to this site had slowed to a scant dribble. I tried to resign myself to the fact that my site, which had lived a brief life, had now expired. But in that moment, I realized I could not accept it. I couldn't let go of the small buzz that the stats bar affords me.

All well and good--but what's there to write about these days? I have ideas--ideas that may lack the grand narrative arc of my Peru saga but may be enough to keep the reading public coming back just like how bored people read blogs in order to procrastinate other stuff.

I am looking forward to shedding my enlightened perspective upon all matters outdoors and fitness related and explicating upon whatever future adventures I might embark upon. Hell, maybe I'll even throw in some pop-culture related commentary if you tell me that you like reading my stuff. As someone who reads books, listens to music and hates many things ( unlike you illiterate, tone deaf, happy fools), I'll be happy to throw my two-cents worth at you.

Good thing you skipped those paragraphs. Anyway, I'm running the Green Mountain Marathon in South Hero Vermont on October 17th. You wanna hear about it? Come back to TOTM some time in the next couple days. I want to keep doing stuff. Don't let me get lazy.




Sorry for abbreviating my site name back there. I mean just who the fuck do I think I am, RHCP, DMB?