MILESTONE

APRIL 21, 2026 – Yesterday’s post was a milestone in the life of this blog: it marked the 2,500 time I’ve slapped an “original anecdote, commentary, rumination [or] occasional pontification” onto the board and hit “Publish.” For the first four years, I observed a self-imposed limit of 500 words per post, but with my extended 2023 series Inheritance, practical necessity forced disregard of that rule. This breech triggered another rule: If a rule is broken too often without consequence, the rule is eventually ignored with impunity. (Exempli gratia, see posted highway speed limits in most jurisdictions.) The significance of the expanded length of these blog posts is that the total word count is no longer estimable within any reliable range of accuracy.

Not all 2,500 posts are gems—if even one might be. The way to think of them is as a baseball card collection you picked up for $10 (bargained down from $20) at a town-wide garage sale. Most of the cards feature no-name players from the 1960s, but you must walk your fingers through the whole lot, because you might just find a keeper in the mix—a Sandy Koufax, a Hank Aaron, a Willie Mays or a Rod Carew-Rookie card. Even then, though you might hit the jackpot and find that among the 2,500 cards are three that will pay for two round trip tickets (with business class upgrades) to Europe, their value isn’t sufficient to cover the cost of that modest renovation of your kitchen you’ve been considering. You’ll have to keep buying Powerball tickets if you’re looking for the “big win.” Same with my blog. If you’re expecting Hemingway, you’ll have to read Hemingway.

Perhaps a better baseball card analogy is my own association with the second most popular national pastime of boys my age back in the early Sixties. Almost every day, it seemed, my friends and I would saddle up on our bikes and roar up to Anoka Drug (often with playing cards from our parents’ bridge decks pinned to our fender supports to “tickle the spokes”) where we’d buy another pack of Topps baseball cards. Most of the time the gum inside the pack had sat in a warehouse, then inside a hotter ‘n blazes delivery truck much too long. After cooling off in the air-conditioned drugstore, the thin pink slab of chewing gum was as brittle and tasteworthy as caked mud—which is why along with the baseball cards, we usually bought the real thing—Bazooka brand bubble gum, wrapped with high-grade (by our standards) miniature comics. On most occasions we struck out with the baseball cards, but just enough times to keep us in the game of buying cards, we’d get a hit, even a stand-up double.

So it is with my daily posts. In the grand scheme of things, most of my essays will pass quietly into oblivion, but perhaps a few will linger a while, savored—by one reader or another—like artichokes off the deli tray at an old Wisconsin supper club. In the case of Inheritance or My Grand Odyssey and other reminiscences, perhaps a good number of posts will migrate into a more lasting record for Illiana, Diogo and Clèo to wonder about and pass on to their progeny to . . . pass over. I have no expectations; just a smidgeon of curiosity about how my written sketches might one day be apprehended in a world far different from the one in which I’ve lived and to which I’ve responded.

As I’ve hinted occasionally, I’ve considered dropping out of this writing marathon on what sometimes feels like a circular course with no water stations. Several readers, however, have rescued me from quitting “Writemakesmight”—or sentenced me to continuing it ad infinitum. I certainly appreciate your (essential) inspiration, but in the calm of my own counsel, I find three ample reasons to stay the course:

1. Plain discipline. Some people do a crossword puzzle a day to keep their mental gears turning. For me, this daily blog serves the same purpose: it forces my brain into gear for at least two hours a day, often more, depending on the amount of “research” involved. As to improving my writing by writing, at my stage in life, I harbor no illusions about becoming a great writer after 5,000 posts, let alone being one after half that number. Twenty-five hundred blog posts bring me no closer to a contract for a syndicated column than playing “Turkey in the Straw” 2,500 times would win me a booking at Carnegie Hall to play the Brahms Violin Concerto with the visiting Berlin Philharmonic.
2. Just as serious landscape photography sharpens the photographer’s observation of landscapes, so does writing a daily post—about pretty much anything—elevate the writer’s awareness of everything that is potential material, which, I’ve learned, is pretty much . . . everything. Life’s details become more noteworthy if I’m constantly alert to them.
3. Writing for actual readers, as opposed to writing for a figurative bookshelf veiled with attic dust, is a way to stay connected with people here and now. An analogy is any of the performing arts. Dance, music, theater—all require enormous amounts of private practice time and work—but ultimately, the whole point of those art forms is to connect performer with audience/spectators; to give life to the choreography, the composition, the playscript. Likewise visual art and writing. What gives the painting or sculpture, the poem or prose meaning is its apprehension by someone besides the artist, writer. In short, I view this blog as a dance, a collection of lieder, a play with countless acts and scenes; an easel-with-canvas; writing paper-with-pen, by which the stories of inner galaxies of one human “universe” can be told.

In all events, thanks for participating in this “permanent experiment” launched seven years ago this month. May a perpetually rising sun bless our efforts—writing and reading—for many years to come.

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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson