Blog Entry #100!

It's true! I've hit triple digits. And yet, as I sit here eating my oatmeal with a fork, debating whether it's possible to scribble something with a keyboard, the sense of accomplishment ranks somewhere between getting a really good haircut and finding an open parking spot downtown on a Saturday night. There's something there, but it's not the sort of occasion worth writing about. Except the majority of The Hypocrite's Refuge consists of substance like this.

Should I conduct some informal, personal ceremony to commemorate my centennial achievement? I turn 39 tomorrow, and I've specifically requested nothing for my birthday. Baking a cake for a blog with such limited readership feels overzealous somehow.

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm reading "And Here's the Kicker," which is a series of "conversations with top humor writers on their craft." A recurring theme between them is the importance of honesty in their humor. Which makes me wonder - is there something true beneath my fluff? (I'm not merely referring to my belly hair, underneath which lies too much truth and ice cream.) Must I deliberately incorporate heavier substance to protect these entries from becoming too easily forgettable? Besides the frustration and angst of my wanna-be writer tendencies, the annoyances of stupid people, and the silliness of random wordplay, is there anything worthwhile to keep my followers coming back?

I ask myself again: why am I blogging? 'Tis good writer's practice to put words on paper daily. Discipline. Consistency. The chance hope of inspiration. But mainly, I blog with the hope of making someone laugh. I've no desire to cause you to spit your coffee across your monitor. I dislike LOL, ROFLMAO, and the sub-genre of acronym/emoticon so prevalent in chatting and texting, so my longing to inspire chuckles/giggles/smirks isn't accompanied by a craving for Twitterish feedback. Any belief that this would might viral was squelched before I started. I don't use photos or videos, I don't Twitter, I rarely use Facebook for anything beyond peeping.

Still, cyberspace is large enough that I wouldn't consider THR to be a waste of it. I'll continue forging onward, potentially revealing more of my thoughts than the mental chaff that amuses me. Or not. Years from now, it'd be nice to reminisce on something brilliant I conceived of. But then, why would I look here for that?

Same reason you do, I suppose.

So thanks to the half-dozen readers who frequent this site, more to the fewer who sporadically comment, and especially to the little people, who haven't been mentioned in an awards speech for far too long. The most important job little people do: create a perspective that lets us feel big. And there we are.