It was a new day yesterday.

A picture of my wife, and me.

This is a celebratory post. Post #1101, and the crowd goes wild. It has been a long time.My first blog post was on 2/16/2012. If my math is correct, and it may not be, (but I can get away with a little numeric foolishness because my wife and sons are nowhere to be seen, no dramatic sighs, no looking to the heavens for strength, no disgusted corrections to a complex calculation, and let's face it, math is hard, math involving time is impossible, nothing makes sense, why divide things into 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours, 7 days, 12 months, I mean who thought up this system. My math is bad, but normally my reasoning is close to average, and I can see how ridiculous this system is... Sorry about that.

Anyway, I think I started this blog over 5 years ago, give or take, and I have published 1100 posts, with 100 drafts left unpublished. Which makes for a lot of words, a lot of words, in all fairness, though most of them have been used multiple times. If there were a way to publish this as one long document it would be fun to see how many times I have repeated words. Universe has been dozens, I know.

Sometimes I want to go back and read some of the early stuff, a time capsule of sorts, maybe I will. Mostly it is like a fire and forget missile. One and done, I might be too humiliated, and never write again. I might be too impressed, and never write again, or I might think, man this needs a little work, and never write anything new again. Someday I will.

Today, though, we are celebrating. "What a long, strange trip it's been." Over the years this blog has changed me. The act of writing has become a method of self discovery. One particularly disturbing discovery is how much I care.

You don't really understand suffering and pain until you look at it, until it looks back at you. Broken bones, stitches, are faded photographs, in the album of life, even the scars are nothing more than good stories. But, the suffering you see, the kind that sears into your soul, the kind you look at to write about, that hurts. It is the last stage of growth, though, and the empathy it provides is priceless.

The bad news for all of you, out there in the Life Explained is I have started to look at myself as a writer, blogging as writing. I have even started a Contently page. So I will be blogging for thousands of more posts. Until you are sick of it.

I would like to thank Street Speech, whose editor was the first to call me a writer, and the wonderful people at The Wild Word who made me believe it. And all of the other people who posted my stuff, and you, my blogging friends, who made me feel welcome. We are in this together, all the way to the end. In the words of Alex Harvey, "I only wish that I could see yesterday, the same way that I can see tomorrow." I don't know what that means but it is so cool.