rick goes...

90% of the people who read this know where I was last night, but for the one or two who might be reading who do not, I will explain.
Through Steve, I know a guy named Rick. Rick is an avid hiker, but still manages to be a pretty interesting dude. He is, I believe, a cartographer. His job, more or less, is to map the bottom of the ocean. He goes out on ships for long periods of time, sailing out around Alaska, watching and mapping the ocean floor.
He bought a farm and weights about 11 pounds.
Last night, there was a party held for him. Kind of a going away party. In about a week, he is taking a flight to Maine. He's going to hang around Maine for a couple of days, then take a flight to Georgia. From Georgia, he's going to hike the Appalachian Trail back to Maine. It should take six months.
I am awed by someone who could reasonably be expected to do someTHING for six months straight.
I know that one of the concepts that make a blog or whatever successful, is consistency. Pick a topic and write about it. Every day. If people like your topic, they will read about it, every day.
As I think I have talked about before, any niche thing you can think of, any hobby or pursuit, if you can think of it or are a little interested in it, it's someone else's entire life. Probably quite a larger group of someones than you could have guessed.
I'm not going to go deeply into it because I have already. My point is, find one of those things, write about it, and let people who love that thing know you are writing about it. Unless you are horrible, a lot of them will read a lot of the time. You will have a successful blog.
Rick is going hiking for six straight months. I can't write about ghost pictures on the internet for more than three days without losing interest.
Several people who read told me they really liked the ghost picture series, too. Does that inspire me to go do some more ghost picture posts? Not as much as it would a person with a successful blog.
I can't pay attention to anything, therefore pay attention to everything.
If you have funny wiring in your brain, you will understand that last sentence.
Here's a good example.
Rick is a well liked guy. Which he should be, as he is, from what I've seen, an honestly decent dude. As he is well liked, there were quite a few people at the party last night to see him off. So, there were many conversation going on at the same time.
As the party was winding down, I was involved in one small collection of conversations, but could still hear people saying good-bye to Rick.
I heard:

Take care of yourself!
Be careful!
Be safe!
Good luck!

These things are all really appropriate as what he is doing is dangerous and arduous and something the rest of us are only going to read about. It's like, the hiking equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. It's not as dangerous, outright, but it takes sooo much longer that the danger level increases. Where people climbing Everest might lose some toes or the occasional nose or, like, die, people who hike the App trail can change their entire physiology. The typical person drops 20 pounds. As I've said, Rick weighs 11 pounds, so that's going to be a good trick.

I suggest you look into the trail yourself. It's a big deal.

What I didn't hear anyone say, as they were leaving the party, were things like:

Have a good time!
Enjoy yourself!
Have fun!

I'm not saying no one said those things, I'm saying I didn't HEAR anyone say those things. I have ADD, but I am not omniscient, as much as I would really like to think I am.
When I was leaving, I asked him if it was appropriate to say, "Enjoy..."
"Yourself?", he finished.
He said that it was appropriate and that he intended to do just that.
I said I thanked God for that, because, if you're going to do something huge like this but NOT enjoy it...?
"Don't do it?", he finished. And agreed.

HAVE FUN, RICK!

As a side note to my not being able to pay attention to anything, I have to give big props to M for throwing me off course last night. He swears he didn't do it on purpose, but man he seemed to be enjoying himself.
Here's what he did and sometimes does. It pisses me off because it works so well, but it is pretty funny.
A conversation will be going on. Doesn't matter what the conversation is. M will throw out a line from a song or a quote from a movie, knowing that I will then totally lose track of the conversation while I try to figure out where the line came from.
Then, he will whip out his semi-INTAwebz capable phone and start looking up where the line came from as he will not know himself.
The race is who can come up with the right answer first.
If he was sporting an iPhone, I wouldn't even bother. He isn't. His phone browsing is almost as clunky as mine, which is very, very clunky.
Last night he messed me up completely because the quote he threw out, was misquoted.
He sang, in full on non-sequitur voice:

Listen to the money talk, money talk.
Listen to the money talk.

And claimed that it was Sheena Easton. I knew it was not Sheena Easton, but could not come up with from where it came. I spun widely and wildly away from the conversation, to the point where, even now, I have no idea at all what was being talked about before he interjected so.
It took 4 people, spread out over two tables to come up with the knowledge that the quote was actually:

Listen to your body talk, body talk.
Listen to your BODY, NOT MONEY, talk!!

Which of course is from Physical by Olivia Newton John. Duh.
This song has, for my money, one of the most disturbing videos ever.

Come on.