The Whirled turns 18 today

Today, July 27, 2024, this Whirled turns eighteen.

That's a very long time to maintain a hobby blog that almost nobody reads, but it's become a habit over the years. And though the search engines, especially Google, aren't all that generous to Whirled Musings, at least Bing's AI bot has a passing familiarity with Cosmic Connie, as the graphic above indicates, although it got the name of the blog as well as my business location wrong. (There's an inherent contradiction in that brief blurb; Houston, where I used to live, is hardly "the edge of nowhere.")

But jeez... eighteen years. I feel compelled to point out that if this blog were an eligible United States citizen, it would be old enough to register to vote for the first time. And although there's no way that I could have planned it back in 2006, the blog's landmark birthday happens to fall on the very year when it is more important than ever for every eligible U.S. citizen to vote -- whether for the first time or not -- to save American democracy from the reich-wing/fascist peril that threatens its very foundations.

As you probably know if you've been even a marginal follower of this work, I have marked the Whirled birthday/anniversary/blogaversary every year here, sometimes with a brief mention and other times offering a more extended rumination about the history and purpose of this endeavor. Regarding said history and purpose, I have said pretty much everything that I think needs to be said, and don't feel compelled to say it all again, but for anyone who's curious, this page tells it all.

Through the years this blog and I have been through our ups and downs, and for me, 2024 has, to put it mildly, been mostly a year of downs, beginning with the unexpected death of my only sister in March. I'm still coming to grips with that. And now I am facing yet another deeply personal crisis, not of my own making, that is ongoing and devastating and sometimes nightmarish. I am not prepared to write about it publicly yet, but suffice it to say that I am navigating scary new territory in which there is no light at the end of the tunnel. It is a story that will have no happy ending; rather, with effort and proper resources and a little bit of luck, it will have a less awful one.

So preoccupied have I been with personal chaos that I even neglected to post a piece on July 25, the 15th anniversary of the death of Colleen Conaway, a follower of the sociopathic huckster James Arthur Ray, who has become quite the reich-wing/Trumpian apologist himself in recent times (see here and here). Ray, as you probably know, is also a convicted killer, even though it wasn't Ms. Conaway's death for which he was convicted and for which he served a far-too-short prison sentence.

Despite the ongoing crises and my slim readership, I intend to keep on blogging. And as I say every year, I am very grateful to those of you who have made monetary donations to this blog. They're always appreciated, even more so now, because money is a resource that would very much help ease at least some of those personal crises I alluded to above. If you'd like to help Whirled Musings celebrate its eighteenth birthday, and help its mom in the process, here's a handy link to do just that. There's also a "Donate" graphic/link on the upper right-hand column of the Web version of this blog. Whether you donate or not, thank you for visiting.

And if you're eligible and registered to vote in the 2024 US general election, please, please, please Vote Blue. At this point, it is the only way to save American democracy.