I have been approaching 2,000,000 words written on my blog, so imagine my disappointment when at 1,999,999 (yes, exactly that number by some strange quirk of the universe), I uploaded some images for what was to be my next post and recognized that the blog’s word tracker was counting images as words! When I glanced at the stats prior to digging into my writing session, I saw that I’m already over 2 million words. Now, I suppose I have to consider that I’m not over that giant number after all because some 20,000 photos or more are likely skewing the total number. No matter, the milestone has been met or will be soon enough, and it’s just fine for me at this time to post this point of bragging. By the way, don’t even consider reading the entirety of this blog, as it would take you a staggering amount of time, to the tune of over 133 hours.

Some days later, I return to the draft for this post looking for what else I want to say, and it all feels so arbitrary, aside from the fact that I do intend to change the focus of my writing. There is so much momentum captured here with what I put into my blog posts that there’s a sense of loss knowing what I have to curtail, at least for a while. However, I will not give up posting about our travels, and while I can only reluctantly slow down routine updates, I must. So much of this endeavor has lent riches to memories that would otherwise be pale compared to what the minds of the two of us would have retained.

There are over 3,140 posts spread out here throughout my blog, and while that is likely plenty, it still feels like I’m turning my back on a friend. Over the coming months, I’ll be scouring every one of these missives as I hunt for bits and pieces that must be extracted for my next big project.

Something else I’d like to see happen to these 2 million words is to have them fed into artificial intelligence to spit out a profile analysis describing what it can see and learn about the person who wrote it all. Maybe next year, AI will have matured to that point.

This post has been hanging out as a draft for over a week as I get ready to pass it over to Caroline for the old once-over, a pause during which I’ve grown ambivalent about posting it at all because it really means just about nothing. The bigger accomplishment would be that I love writing, and if I’m fortunate enough to dig in every day, I feel keenly delighted that I’ve committed something from my head and thrown it into the cacophony of other voices who write into the void. I looked with anticipation to the day I saw the word count roll over to 2 million words and only now realize that had I only ever written 100,000 words about Caroline and my life together, I still would have likely written 1,000 times more than the majority of humans ever shares about their life and love.

The sketch was a few-minute doodle drawn by Becca Wasylenko, the Barista at WeBe Coffee.

Go places or don’t, read or write, dream or die. The routine, sad to admit, is only mixed up when I opt for a different coffee shop, I’m in a different book, or I demand I do something I’ve been neglecting, such as writing a blog entry after a long break. Feeling like it’s been a long time is not the same as really having been a long time. I checked and saw that I posted a list of things just six days ago, but that was a list, not a blog, in the sense that I want to interpret it. Though this is easy enough to contradict even before I even make my point, as the blog post should share something personal to me, is that really possible? You see, the last post about our diet is certainly something personal, and among some subset of people who live in Phoenix, Arizona, and enjoy food diversity, it is maybe nothing out of the ordinary and then, on the other hand, the majority of Americans would consider us culinary freaks.

This last statement is based on empirical evidence gathered while observing my immediate vicinity when, in one tiny slice of time, I find myself in a situation in which I am in the minority, ethnically speaking. Of course, this is easily proven by taking myself to a “major” supermarket where I find myself in a sea of similarity.

Coffee shops are like seas of similarity, too. As I focus my photos on my isolated work setup, there are the obligatory tattooed baristas, man-bun-wearing big bearded hipsters, a homeless person, two people talking shit about the friend they each talk shit about the other with, the random man in a suit (I’m in Arizona where people don’t wear suits), four to seven computers open for work each with their white illuminated Apple logo, and someone like me (an arrogant wanna-be writer looking in disdain upon these empty souls trying to find a viable way to spend part of the day that would otherwise be empty and devoid of meaning).

And then the next day, I do it all over again, except now I’m further along in the book I’m reading, or maybe I’m editing the embarrassing piece of writing while I’m leery of sharing the same old thing I’ve lamented about 45 other times or maybe it’s 55. I am not sure because I don’t track my worn-out threads because admitting with precision how repetitive I might be could derail my efforts to fill a space so few eyeballs will ever discover.

Is it ironic that this act of attempting to blog is a disruption to reading The Age of Disruption? Well, maybe not if you consider that I’m also reading Radical Animism by Jemma Deer (it’s on-screen), and if I consider that my blog post is a kind of object in nature, then these words take on an animism; so maybe taking a page from her book to tell some story or other is in line with adding to the realm of our earth.

Should you, at this point in this pointless entry, be wondering what this has to do with the title of That Was Then This Is Not? Well, the beginning of this post about whatever I was writing then is not where I’m at now, so maybe you follow that what I wanted to say was I don’t really have anything at all to say.

Back in April, I was posting about a book titled The Plum In The Golden Vase and how we’d just started volume 4 of the 850,000-word mega-book. At the rate we’d been reading it, I figured we had until 2025 before we’d finish it; well, I was wrong. Tonight, we closed volume 5 and put to rest its myriad of characters that had lived with us for ten years. It was never our intention to stretch a title out for such a lengthy period of time, but now that it has happened, I think our fondness and familiarity with the story will have us grieving its end.

I believe that the reason we picked up steam was that volume 4 ushered in the demise of our central character while volume 5 took down those corrupt minions that lived off the excesses that were exemplified in the previous chapters of the 100 chapters this book covered.

So, the main takeaway from reading such a long work over many years is that I believe everyone should pick something of this extraordinary length and read it slowly enough that it lives with them for years. Sure, we get attached to characters in much shorter works, but to live with those featured on so many pages year after year, they grow over time in our memories and, in some way, become family.

While we’ll be jumping into The Water Margin, a.k.a. Outlaws of the Marsh, soon, we’ll take at least a short break from classical Chinese literature to indulge in French literature via Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, and once we gather some serious traction with its 1.2 million words, we’ll be folding The First Crusade by Peter Frankopan into the mix.

There are nearly three weeks between my last post and taking the time to sit down for some small talk with myself: the gravity of change that comes with traveling needed a longer moment to settle. That part of me thriving in constant stimulation must allow expectation to fade as I return to a routine and a culture from which I feel increasingly alienated. But this is my life at this time in Phoenix, Arizona, one of bearing witness to the mendacity of a population trying to buy happiness.

Well, the fact of the matter is, I really never stopped writing as I have three documents on my desktop representing some 2,400 words of observations that linger in the realm of uncertainty, meaning that maybe they find their way to the blog, and maybe they don’t. Not that this was all I wrote, but I was also busy dragging some ancient memories out in the writing about Caroline’s adventure at Yarn School in Harveyville, Kansas, back in September 2007. That was triggered by my ongoing attempt to account for every travel day Caroline and I’ve taken since the advent of consumer digital photography.

If you look to the right column of this blog (or near the bottom if you are viewing this on a smartphone), you will see a block with the heading “Other Pages.” At the top of that section is a link to a page titled “Travels In The Digital Age” which is my attempt to eat all of your bandwidth; just kidding. Seriously though, as of today, there are 540 records (images and links) that track our adventures away from home, starting at 9.9.99. I found our oldest digital image, and from there, I’ve tried posting a photo from each day out on the road. So far, I’ve caught up to October 1, 2007. During that time, it appears we were traveling on average 67 days per year, which seems like a lot of vacation, but more precisely, we vacationed 5½ days per month, which doesn’t sound like that much. Ultimately, I think I’ll be adding about another 1,000 images before I catch up to where we are today, but at that time, I’ll probably never recommend someone clicking the link because it will download hundreds of megabytes in imagery. And that moment won’t be very soon as I’m nearly two solid years into trying to bring this effort together.

What’s taking so long to assemble this massive post? As I move from year to year, ensuring I’ve grabbed at least one image from every day we were traveling, I stumble into trips that have never been documented, so I review the photos and try to write something to those. In other cases, I posted only one photo of a trip as bandwidth limitations in those days wouldn’t support the posting of 30 of my favorite images from the 200 – 500 I could shoot in a day. So those posts get updated too, and, luckily, Caroline hunted through a bunch of our old notebooks, discovering travel diaries that came in super handy in fleshing out some of our forgotten stories.

While we were in Germany, I hit a new milestone: 1,500,000 words published here at JohnWise.com. Back in July 2020, I wrote that I’d shared a little more than 1.1 million words, so having written nearly 400,000 between then and now, I’m pretty happy. What does this number mean? Really, nothing at all, though it is a good metric assuring me that I’ve been diligent in exercising my nascent skills. Sadly, my next bragging milestone requires a half-million more words to be written, so after a bit more than another year out, I’ll be posting an entry with the simple title: Two Million.

But does any of this answer “Where I’ve been?” No, it goes into some small details of what I’ve been doing, and the snarky answer of where I’ve been could simply be stated as I’ve been in the milieu. This has become a question that is stymying me as I scan the last couple of weeks trying to discover if there’s been an overarching theme tracing through my mind, and, other than generalized malaise, I can’t put a finger on anything particular. Yet, I have this nagging feeling that just beyond my conscious view there is something preoccupying me and that if I just posed the question of where I’ve been to myself, I’d ponder and then answer this. Nope, not coming up with anything, so I must have been nowhere.

As I wrote yesterday, I’d successfully written John Wayne Gacy; how about trying Charles Manson? I didn’t really have much of anything to say to him as, at 24 years old, I was a noob, and I was about to find out just how stupid I really was. I first wrote the California Department of Corrections asking for Manson’s address; the response offended me with its language of effectively calling me a deviant. The guy who wrote me closed his letter with a kind of best wishes to find what I was truly seeking as though I was on a pilgrimage. I was, to say the least, upset.

My next act had me funneling my indignation back into the typewriter as I hammered off a letter to the office of then-California Governor George Deukmejian. I let him know how incensed I was at this attempt at trying to guilt me into not exercising my 1st Amendment rights. I sent it off, never expecting to hear another word. When I did hear back, I wished I never had. The Governor’s office apparently reached out to the Department of Corrections and let them know about the butt-hurt idiot in Germany using a military address to whine about not being able to write a madman without a lecture. I was assured I was free to write to Charlie at San Quentin Prison, and the letter that was sent to me was being taken out of circulation. My first thought upon reading this was, “Well, this is going into my State Department file along with all the other crazy shit that’s in there from my time in the military.”

Manson never wrote back, and as I shared in the previous blog post, I lost interest in exploring this avenue of deviancy as it really was just a morbid curiosity to communicate with someone seriously on the fringe of society. When people around you are boring conformists and what you seek is potent stimulation, the paths you might take could look peculiar to those around you, so it goes.