[Above “homage to Miller’s Crossing” also represents a tip of the hat to Froog.]

So it’s been a year now: 365 days, 309 published posts [Editor’s note: 310, or have you forgotten that you wrote this one yesterday?], 1,295 comments (counting my own replies to comments, and occasional replies to those replies).

When I started Running After My Hat — the blog, not the activity for which the blog is named — I didn’t know, really, what it would turn out to be. I had a few ideas for “practical” goals, (almost?) none of which materialized, and one idea for… well, call it a spiritual goal.

I started my first blog in late 1999; it didn’t last long. (You can see a snapshot of it here, courtesy of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.) Since then I’ve worked on maybe a half-dozen others, some as the only contributor and some as a co-blogger. Without exception, I think, they’ve all been single-topic blogs: about politics, writing, or technology; blogs I’ve been paid to develop for someone else’s purposes; even a blog — currently open to just my siblings and me — for recording family memories we want not to be lost to the next generation.

Only RAMH, though, has worked out to be something like I really wanted to do. Like the creators of the Seinfeld TV show famously insisted about their product, RAMH is pretty much about nothing, at least nothing in particular, and so it’s turned out pretty much to my liking.

One of my favorite Web watering holes is the here often-touted Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast site. (Oddly, or so I keep insisting, even though 7-Imp‘s nominal topic — children’s literature, and especially illustrated children’s literature — even though this is a topic I know little about, nor spend much time following otherwise, I’ve found myself really at home there.) Not incidentally, in their blogroll you’ll find a link to RAMH; if you hover your mouse over that link, you’ll see one of the nicest and most unexpected comments anyone has made about this blog:

John E. Simpson shows us that “a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy.”

As it happens, they got that embedded quote from a page here at RAMH. I’d challenge the “manliest” and the “most sacred” seasonings in that clause, but will happily accept the ardour and joy side dishes. Throw in a bit of labour (especially of love) and the ridiculousness of pursuing one’s hat in the first place, and I’ll be satisfied indeed.

To wrap up this look back, and in connection with the section of this post which follows, I’ll offer these five as among my favorite posts of Running After My Hat‘s first year, for specific reasons best known to myself:

• Where It Was (from April, 2008): one of my first posts here
• “About suffering, they were never wrong…” (July, 2008): in which I attempt something like art criticism
• The Boy, The Boy’s Mother, The Two Trains (September, 2008): fifty-some years crystallized into a vertiginous moment
• Squirrels in the Attic (October, 2008): in which I intersect with wildlife
• Paying Attention to Bits of Everyday Life (January, 2009): the convergence of real life and fiction

Finally, thanks, as ever — for things understood, and for things neither she nor the rest of you may ever pick up on — to The Missus. She’s indulged me a lot as I’ve tried to grow and maintain RAMH this first year.

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