RAMH@13: Scrambling After the Damned Hat

I’m preparing to head out of town (actually, out of state) for a week, which feels quite momentous. Yes, The Missus and I took a much needed weeklong break in October. But this one feels riskier — more exposed, y’know? — because that trip was a driving trip, just the two of us, to a destination where we’d be around no one at all for all but a few hours, total. For this trip, I’ll be flying to the Northeast US, to visit with several family members. Still no large crowds, except in the three airports I’ll go through… but, well, you get the idea. The main point now: at this early moment in its composition, this is shaping up as an uncharacteristically brief annual meditation on the state of RAMH.

The very first of those annual meditations offered some basic statistics:

• 365 days; 310 published posts; 1,295 (published) comments…
• …or a little less than one post a day, and a little over four comments per post.

Let’s see the standings as of now:

• 4,758 days; 1,610 published posts; 7,084 comments (of which I myself apparently posted over 2,600)…
• …i.e., about one post every three days, and — still — a little over four comments per post.

It’ can be entertaining, remotely and intellectually, to consider what these statistics might “mean”: for instance, What’s the state of blogging in general, or of this blog’s “popularity” in particular? Why do I blog, and has that reason changed over time, and what does that say about my audience, such as it is? But after 13 years of so much radical change in the context — society and culture, technology, the pandemic — I’m afraid what such statistics “mean” boils down, for me, to approximately, well, nothing at all.

I sometimes get notices from one company or another, alerting me to how I can “leverage” my “platform” by paying more careful attention to SEO, or search-engine optimization. this would basically require me to really sit down and analyze things like how long did visitors remain at the site, what did they look at while here, where did they come here from, and where’d they go next. Or, of course, these companies would be happy to do the analysis for me, and make recommendations for how to improve it all. For a fee. DUH.

Here’s what I’m pretty sure I’ll think of RAMH as of the moment I click the Publish button for this post: First, I know it provides a much-needed rhythm to my week — especially now that I’m free of the metaphorical time clock of a day job, and especially since the COVID-19 (etc.) mess has continued to grind on. That I don’t blog on anywhere near a daily basis is a blessing in this regard: the habit helps me remember which day of the week I’ve awoken to (heh).

For my Friday posts, I’ve settled into a rhythm of three mornings’ activities: (1) reviewing and selecting from the past week’s whiskey river posts, and kind of grope around for a common “theme” among them; (2) locating — from among my own recent reading, or just by looking online for — whatever seems to “go with” the whiskey river theme; and (3) finding an image (usually), a video, or some other media item to head the whole post. Write the image’s caption. I do a bunch of related tasks (proofreading, assigning categories and tags, editing for length if necessary, maybe writing a brief “maxim for nostalgists,” etc. Finalize the title. Click “Publish.” Confirm the post’s automated sharing, as needed/desired, to other social media.

…and that’s all I put into RAMH, every week, for an average total of six to seven hours. Oh, some bits and bobs of blogging creep in — updating WordPress plugins, moderating occasional comments, that sort of thing. But I generally require a real “something in mind” to blog otherwise… usually, something which I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Which leads me to the two other ways I use RAMH — hence what it “means” to me — right now. Neither will surprise you if you’ve been a regular visitor.

• Writing: I don’t write much here anymore, it’s true. But I also don’t write much of anything at all — nothing “writerly,” essays or fiction or what-not — outside of RAMH these days. I do think about it quite a bit, and in particular I keep thinking I should not (haha) close the book on the novel I once called Grail and, later, Seems to Fit. I have entered (as you may know) a handful of short-fiction writing contests, to no great ongoing effect. But I tend to think of writing successfully, outside of RAMH anyhow, as something I once craved but have lost almost all ambition for. The occasional book review or other one-off post here does keep my hand in.
• Photography: well, again, you probably know about this. (If not, check out the posts in the “My Photography” category; many of these are only peripherally related — a post might simply include one of my photos, for example — but a reasonable number of them now address specifically one or another photographic technique/project in words (imagine that!).

The next year, RAMH-wise, will be very different from those before it, and I can’t tell you what to expect here at the blog because I don’t know. I’ll have more to say about this over the next couple months, as plans get finalized. For now, though, we will probably be leaving Florida, quite possibly for good, and road-tripping around the US for at least several months. “Homeless,” after a fashion: we’re thinking we can mix short-term rentals and family visits for a few days at a time. During such pauses in movement, sure, I’ll look forward to blogging (and the hope of writing, and photography).

But on a schedule? Beats me!

In any case, thank you for dropping in — and perhaps sticking around — during the (so-far) 13-year-old road trip around my head that Running After My Hat represents.

And thanks especially to The Missus, for her patience with my habit! (Well, I think of it as my routine, but let’s not quibble over word choice.)

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About the image: You may or may not remember the photo series I did last summer, called “Hat Dance” — mostly just an experiment in lighting a “still”-life subject which also happened to be in motion. (I posted about it, including the five shots I actually used, in July.)

I was so pleased with the results of that test that I tried again, a week or two later, using four or five baseball caps instead of just the two felt Indiana-Jones-style fedoras. The results: less pleasing. (The problems were many, and my time on the day of the shoot was limited.) Still, I found one shot I could do something with…

As for the title, I wanted to continue the “dance” theme of the earlier series. It just refers to the Egyptian Sufi folk dance called the tanoura. Dancers, traditionally male, wear brightly colored skirts with weights sewn into the hems, so that as they spin, the skirts flair out almost into two-dimensional disc-like shapes. (Of course, any patterns inherent in the skirt’s weave then blur and become unrecognizable while it’s in motion.)