happy 20th birthday, busblog

everything good that has happened to me over the last twenty years was because of this blog

so for that i want to thank ev and the team at blogger, and then google

i want to thank the terrible conditions i was under at E! which inspired me to blog and not give a shit if i got fired

and i want to thank all of the people who have read and commented on here. it was all energy that kept this thing rolling.

one of the things they teach you when youre a poetry major is walt whitman and his famous collection of poems, “leaves of grass”

i couldnt understand at first why he would write a book of a dozen poems and keep fiddling with it year after year, finally winding up with 400 poems in his Deathbed Edition.

this blog started with a stutter. i had a perfectly good website so i created this blog to advertise what i was doing on it.

once i learned what a blog “should be” and could be, i cut down on my photo essays.

although 20 years later, it is interesting how Dear Kids of Afghanistan, a photo essay i did soon after 9/11, sadly still relevant. it became the first thing of mine to go viral.

it’s always the dark ones.

even though i have added to this blog from different countries, hotel rooms, and boudoirs, the bulkload of it has been written in the same hollywood bachelor pad ive inhabited for those entire 20 years.

so thank you ken layne for moving out in 2001 so i could move in here.

and thank you Geena Davis, the old tenant in apartment 8 who rented me this great place for below market rate even though i didnt have my job at E! yet

i had bad credit, and i couldnt even afford a car.

thus i rode the bus.

i drive a mercedes benz now,

thanks to this blog.

lets see what podcasting does for me now.