Less casing, more sausage:

I’ve written somewhere north of 1,800 of these little suckers by now, all as snortworthy as I can make them. Or almost all. When the need arose, I ventured into pissy political polemics such as this one about the mistreatment of Obama, but actually that one was pretty funny too. It would still be another seven years before the state of the country made hyperbole obsolete and sarcasm soured into impotent rage and there was nothing funny about anything anymore. I am sorry about that.

Anyway, I thought it was high time I saluted you marvelous readers and thanked you for what you’ve done for me. Some of you have been with me since the beginning. I had started a blog because I was informed I needed a “platform” for my “content” and it was fun to see my stuff all printed up pretty on the screen, and I kept going long after the blogosphere faltered, wobbled, and fell out of orbit. There are a few of us still cranking, but for the most part the bloggy fun turned into obligation, and people realized they had shot their wad in terms of having something to say about their cats or kids or dinners.

Meanwhile, I plugged on. I haven’t missed a single Wednesday or Saturday since December 2008. I’m proud of that, and I don’t make a habit of being proud of things. I’m also proud that Murrmurrs plays host to the best comment section ever, and that so many of you pop over just to visit with the regulars. The awning in front of the Murrmurrs café stretches pretty far. I don’t even remember what my actual post was about the day all the male commenters began to overshare about their middle-aged to elderly penis foibles, but the rest of us were fascinated.

At some point I moved operations over to Substack. I sort of had to. Joe Blair (of the remarkable and highly recommended Joe Blair Parts & Labor) suggested it to begin with, and pledged me real money to do it, which was startling. But I am a procrastinator without rival, especially if it involves learning new computery stuff. Then my friend Pat Lichen piled on and hounded me about it for actual years. One cold winter week when she stayed at my place because her furnace had died, she pinned me down and zip-tied me to the Substack site and made it all happen.

Which was a good thing, because my old blog was threatening to break my perfect Wednesday/Saturday streak by self-bollixing just as I was trying to put in new content. Apparently there are sinister elements out there that like to attack harmless little sites like mine for no reason other than sheer digital obstrepory, and so I packed up and moved over to Substack, where the people in charge are not intimidated by such scamps.

Some of you readers trooped right over. Some of you whined for a while. I know. I don’t like change either. But eventually the old gang reconvened under the Murrmurrs awning, and some new friends came by too. And here’s what you do for me:

Well, let me back up and introduce you to Mary Ann, whom I’ve written about from time to time. Mary Ann has been my friend for (holy shit) 50 years and she’s read every one of my posts from the very beginning. I need to tell you about her tiny, tailless pet dog Helen. Helen was my dog Boomer’s pup but she strongly favored her grandmother, who was a full-blown Chihuahua. Basically, Helen was not an entire dog. She was more of a tremblesome hamster with issues. One day I saw Mary Ann following after Helen retrieving strings of sausage casing from her butthole, and the vision never left me. The poor little almost-a-dog was simply unable to poop past the sausage casing and needed to be relieved of it, in strings and bits, in order to allow her to become a nearly complete dog. A real dog such as your Labrador Retriever can poop out an entire raincoat and then turn right around and go for the galoshes. Helen probably couldn’t have passed a button.

I would have thought it was asking a lot of even a devoted dog owner to conduct this sort of personal pet maintenance, in any case, but given that the butthole in question was only about two inches off the ground, it was truly heroic. Mary Ann is who you want in your corner for almost any contingency, not just that one.

Point being, you readers, simply by the act of reading, are pulling the literary sausage casing from my system and allowing me to put out more shit. Nothing unconstipates a writer like a reader, so thank you, people. You keep tugging, and I’ll keep…well, you know.