500

This is my 500th post. As we all tend to do with nice round numbers (why not 498 or 503?) I suppose I should mark the milestone (interesting word choice since a milestone is exactly as it sounds. A stone placed along a roadway at regular intervals to mark the distance traveled from, or to, a location in order to give the traveler reassurance and establish their bearings.)

I saved this piece written by Andrew Sullivan for the Atlantic last November for just such an occasion. Why I Blog is a wonderful examination of the phenomenon and form as well as his experience of it. As he establishes the etymology of the word log, he writes,

"As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did."

Cigarettes and Purity has taken on the role of making me mindful. It serves as a series of bookmarks for the information that I take in as well as thoughts, ideas and events which I experience. I fall well outside the statistics of bloggers and certainly outside the niche of fine art/contemporary photography blogs. Almost daily I think that I am finished, that I have nothing of interest to say (there are those, no doubt, who would heartily agree). Perhaps there will be post 501?