The Sixth Blogaversary!!

Time for your Bloguero to uncork some digitized champagne and bust out the pixilated caviar! It’s the 6th Anniversary of The Dream Antilles! Let the party begin!

On August 7, 2005, your Bloguero put up the first post. And here he is six years later still hammering away at the keyboard. Lo and behold, this is post number 1,099.

Your Bloguero believes you are reading this. He doesn’t know for sure that you are here. Actually, he has no idea whether you’re reading or how many readers have visited. Or who has read what. Or when. Why? In a moment of self righteous indignation several years ago, your Bloguero deleted all the web counters. Good riddance, he said. “I’m doing this whether or not anybody reads it,” he announced pompously. Later, much later your Bloguero caved in to his own curiosity about you. Were you really there? Were you really reading? Of course, he wouldn’t admit that it mattered to him. So he quietly put up the map with the dots (you can still find it near the bottom of the right column) so he could see you. If you read The Dream Antilles a tiny dot appears where you are and it stays there for a while. Your Bloguero still likes the dots, particularly when people of every continent visit. Other than that small reassurance that you are there, your Bloguero writes The Dream Antilles on the faith that you read it. This faith is not rock solid. Far from it. Sometimes your Bloguero has towering doubts. He imagines that he might be standing on the pitcher’s mound in a completely empty Yankee Stadium making believe the seats were filled with people paying rapt attention to him and laughing at his jokes and understanding what he is telling them. Sometimes your Bloguero doesn’t care that all the seats might be empty and that newspapers are blowing around in the infield and that the PA system is turned off and pigeons are swooping in from the eves. Banishing the emptiness from his consideration, your Bloguero declaims that the blog is a writing practice. And your Bloguero is another Eveready Bunny. He does it for himself, he says. Really? You ask. Yes, sure, and your Bloguero’s obvious vanity? Hah! Your Bloguero never claimed he was so perfect. So free from doubt.

Thank you for visiting. And thank you for reading.