John Wise

Over the past 12 months, I’ve posted 166 blog entries totaling 208,897 words for an average of 1,251 words per post. While this is factually accurate, it doesn’t take into account that I posted the book I wrote a decade ago about the Grand Canyon, and over those 19 days, there are 85,401 words belonging to it. So, of all my other 147 exercises in writing, those missives were a mere 840 words each on average. If you pick up an air of mild disappointment, you wouldn’t be wrong, though the fact that I wrote nearly every other day is nothing to be sad about.

Last year, for 37 days, from early May to nearly mid-June, I walked the streets from Berlin to Zagreb, and during that time, I wrote every day without fail. I was prolific and was able to pen 77,458 words in order to capture a thousand details that would have been lost in time had the effort not been spent organizing electrons on digital paper. That was 2,093 words per day, which, as far as I’m concerned, proves to me that I should travel a lot more.

Since January 1st, 2019, there have been 550 days; of those, I’ve made 278 blog posts totaling 328,205 words. Why do I know this and the above numbers? I’ve started a spreadsheet where each line entry is the title, date, and word count that will ultimately detail each of the 2,333 blog posts I’ve made public here at www.johnwise.com. Maybe this is a silly exercise, but I’m curious how many words I’ve written since started blogging back on January 1, 2005, when I was 41 years old. At this moment, I’m calculating that it will be somewhere near 2.2 million words, but maybe it’s closer to 2.7 million, which means I only need to write about another 280 blog entries to reach 3,000,000 words. That raises the question: what value will it have been to have written 3 million words? You know, I don’t have a really good answer, but when I reach that point, I can assure you that I’ll lament that I’ve not reached 5 million.

Trends that start to emerge that should have been obvious is that I like writing a lot more when we are traveling. In November 2019 we visited Oregon, and I found 20,089 words with which to write about our vacation, which is extraordinary when you consider how many times we’ve been up there. One year prior, we were again in Oregon at the same time of year, and all I could muster was 15,334 words for an equivalent amount of time. We had a 21-day vacation in Europe in 2018 that took us to Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Hungary. I had 47,457 words that needed recording so our memories could be enhanced as time passed. Then, there was a trip to Alaska back in the summer of 2017 that started less than two weeks after I fired my entire company. As emotionally distraught as I was, I was still able to draw 18,057 words out of me, but this was one of the most difficult trips I’d been on due to the baggage I was carrying.

Back in 2014, I started a new company, and even before that, I was deeply immersed in all things virtual reality. To a degree, I thought I was a bit burned out on blogging as I’d lost sight of it being an exercise in writing and advancing those skills. To have written only six entries on my own site during 2014 and then another three that were posted on the VR site was certainly a low point. The year before, we were in Germany for the first time in 18 years, and I didn’t miss the opportunity to document every minute, so with 40,338 words and somewhere between 200 to 300 photos, we have some terrific memories to reflect on. At this point in counting words, I’m back on April 3, 2013, with 543 blog entries consisting of 539,616 words. I’m 25% of the way through, and my average word count has dropped to 994 words per entry.

While cataloging my word count from 2012, I just learned that from the two trips we’ve made to Alaska to raft the Alsek River, we’ve spent a total of 26 days in this remote corner of North America, and I’ve shared 41,000 words exactly about our experiences. But then I crawl further back into 2011 and the writing is on the wall. It seems like I could barely be bothered to blog very much, and when I did, it wasn’t as verbose as I appreciate now that I’m older. I’m happy that there is a loose record of things, and on many of our trips, there are extensive musings, but I certainly considered my photography as the more important aspect of what I was documenting.

This brings me to a point I believe I’ve made before somewhere here on this blog: writing should be an activity that is a matter of habit for everyone. Even if it were just once a week, though I’d insist that daily writing while traveling should be obligatory, I believe people would have a better perspective on how amazing their lives are and how important it is to fill their days with moments and activities that are worth remembering. I just relearned that Caroline finished her first big weaving project, where she made yellow and purple towels back on June 18, 2011. By July 10, 2013, I was immersed in playing with graphics software that was about to lead me to the Oculus Rift and virtual reality. On August 15, 2016, Caroline and I saw King Sunny Adé perform at the MIM. I still have 1,696 blog entries, of which I need to record the title, date, and word count; I’m sure I’ll be finding other surprises and also wishing that I’d filled in the gaps.

Midway through 2010, Caroline must be tired of my obsessive-compulsive disorder as she asks with only minor indignance, “Are you really going to go through all 2,339 blog entries to figure out how many words you’ve written?” My answer was something like, “Hey, I’m already through 701 of them, so yeah, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.” Ten minutes later, she’s installed WP Word Count and shows me that I’ve published 1,127,519 words over the years or about half of what I thought I’d find. I immediately saw that my shortest blog entry was just two words, and the longest one, excluding my book, was about my journey into synthesizers, which is 5,298 words. My average blog entry is 474 words long. When I started blogging in 2005, I kept up a great pace until the spring of 2008, when I published my 1,000th entry. It was originally my intent to publish a “Photo Of The Day” with a blurb about the image for one year. After more than three years, I slowed down as I needed a break.

I’ve got to admit that I’m a bit disappointed that between 2008 and 2020 I’ve only added about 1,300 more blog entries. On the bright side, during 2005, my first year blogging, I was averaging 235 words per entry, while in 2019, I averaged 916 words per entry. Not that more words are better, but I think over the 15 years of writing here at johnwise.com, the craft has become easier, and at times, there are levels of details I could have never captured back then. Since January 1st, 2005, there have been 5,664 days between now and then, which means, on average, I’ve written 199 words per day. Ernest Hemingway recommended writing 500 a day and Jack London hammered out 1,500 a day, but I never aspired to be a writer. My inspiration was to compel myself to take more photos and have some intention behind them while practicing describing what I was seeing. So I shouldn’t be disappointed at all as I certainly progressed in the task I gave myself at the end of 2004.

Finally, I was looking at Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” which rings in as the Guinness World Record holder as the longest novel at 1,250,000 words well, I’m almost there, but if I want to reach 2,500,000 lifetime words in the next ten years, I’ll need to pen 376 words on average per day. That would allow my internet writing to compare to a book of over 6,000 pages. I can get this. As for the earlier note of maybe seeing 5 million words, well, that would require me to write more than 1,000 words every day between now and my 67th year. That sounds tough.

One hundred and ten days of self-isolation! I was hoping it wouldn’t be this long, but by now, I’m not going to be surprised when, at 220 days, I’ll be sharing a self-isolation update. “But what do dead birds, panties, and taco sauce have to do with self-isolation, John?” I hear you asking. Well, I’m happy you asked. You see, while Caroline and I were out on our early walk that starts the day, I had my bucket and grabber with me. The first 3/4’s of our walk was your normal stuff like plastic bottles, straws, rubber gloves, plastic bags, dead birds, single-use cups, lids, scraps of paper and candy wrappers, fast food bags, pieces of shit-stained toilet paper, napkins which also appear to have been used for public defecation, a couple of bags with dog feces, half-a-dozen empty mini-bottles mostly of Fireball cinnamon whisky, and aluminum cans. Those are the normal things.

On the last leg, we stumbled into an explosion of a homeless woman’s gear. However, I can’t be certain if this cache belonged to a homeless woman because how many homeless people would be traveling with a dozen pairs of panties? Not that any of them were big, but most would qualify as butt-floss. Whomever they once belonged to, they now belonged to the street. Being the dainty type they were strewn down the street for quite a ways. I’ve got to say that picking up clothes, rags, socks, and shoes on these litter collections is kind of grody. You see, I’ve picked things up that can elicit a deep retch when the smell of the thing is overpowering. You never want to look too close once the decision is made to eliminate the eyesore from public view, but you just know I had to inspect those women’s drawers. The first, second, and third pair after a quick glance, all looked fine. So much so that I started thinking that maybe somebody was moving and something fell from the vehicle until that one pair showed up I wished wasn’t in the clutch of my grabber. The ubiquitous thong, when worn during ovulation, does exactly what the euphemism says it will do: it flosses the folds below. That caked and dried goo was exactly what greeted my trained eye as the grabber moved them toward the bucket that was only an arms-length away from my face. Of course, at that moment, I wanted to throw my catch back into the stream of blowing underwear, but then I’d be littering, which would negate exactly what I was trying to do, and so those encrusted funky panties laid atop the rest of the trash until I could bury them below something else.

So, where does the taco sauce come in? I could tell you that what was in those underwear resembled taco sauce, but that would be too easy a pun to play. No, the taco sauce was found in a dozen packets in the street, just down the way from the panties. Strangely enough, while I do find lots of small plastic containers with those small snap-on plastic lids that Filiberto’s hands out and a lot of empty ketchup packets, I don’t find many mustard, mayonnaise, or taco sauce packets. When a bunch of unused taco sauce was obviously emergency-ejected from a passing car,  one might wonder just what happened to the frantic minds in the car that panicked and had to rid the vehicle of all that still unopened taco sauce? It’s not like we ever find partial bottles of Fireball, half cans of beer, little baggies of white powder, or marijuana buds littering the street.

Enough about panties and taco sauce; this is an update here on Day 110 of Self-Isolation. A recap of some stuff: at 60 days, Arizona had 12,674 cases of COVID-19; at 90 days, we were at 34,600; and now, just 20 days after that, we are ripping right along at 87,425. Why is this? Our governor, in order to gain favor from Trump and company, went cowboy and unleashed the horde, and now the horde is releasing mayhem upon our hospitals. Personally, I’d love nothing more than for our healthcare workers across America to go on strike, demanding that every citizen, without exception, other than small children, be required to wear a mask. Nobody is asking people to wear a pair of these skanky panties I was picking up off the street, just a simple old mask for the 15 minutes or so they are in the store. Sadly, our rodeo clown culture is more interested in tempting fate of the Coronabull and is running around bareback. A meme has gone through the American illiterati that masks are harming people as though no one has worn a balaclava during the winter, nor have doctors and nurses worn masks in surgery.

Back to the numbers: Germany today had 503 new cases out of their population of 83 million, while Arizona, with a population of 7.3 million people, saw over 3,300 new cases. To me, this is the difference manifested by an educated populace on one hand and a citizenry made up of idiots on the other. This old song has been sung here far too many times, but to this day, I regularly speak with people who don’t recognize our shit situation nor understand or care to understand what the underlying causes could be. Many call it our desire for freedom; they kid themselves, it’s their comfort with mediocrity.

You wanna know something? I’d rather go find that nasty encrusted butt-floss and slap it over my face and squirt the taco sauce into my eyeballs rather than be surrounded by this cowboy culture of Johnny Badasses who want to show the world how toughening up will protect them and their families from a fake pandemic. It’s nearly comical when one looks at these fundamentalist patriots and their fatalistic outlook and contrasts their hysteria about masks and minor restrictions with their alleged understanding of democracy and freedom. I should have just shared my story about the panties, huh?