12,000

(If you don’t have time for the spiel, please hit the PayPal “Donate” button at the top, and give as generously as you can. Thanks in advance! N.S.)


I recently hit the milestone of 12,000 items at this blog.

That may give folks who don’t know me well the impression that writing, or anything else, comes easy to yours truly.

My first publication here was on March 16, 2006: “Liberal Media Bias and Republican Eunuchs.”

Eleven years later, it still has only 45 hits. Although I’d had letters in the Sunday New York Times read by millions during the 1990s (before they whitelisted me), and been published by major dailies and magazines (New York Newsday, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, etc.), in 2006, this blog was as obscure as they came. Now, I average about 1,000,000 page views per year.

(Besides which, although the letters to the Times were under my own name, the articles in the Post, News, and several other outlets were pseudonymous.)

I had my first publication in May 1980, in Statesman, the student paper at my undergrad alma mater, SUNY Stony Brook.

I’d had to harass the editors at Statesman, or they would have just made fools of me, as they’d already done, telling me that they published submissions in the order in which they were received, when in reality they were tossing my work in the “circular file,” while publishing garbage that came in later from their cronies.

I’m not saying my work was great, but the stuff they were running was much worse.

And writing essays took me forever. I’m still very slow, but at least it no longer takes me eight hours sitting at a bar, to hand write a 1,200-word draft! And it was during finals week, so I was neglecting my studies for the sake of that essay, which was about how my best girlfriend and I had parted ways over her feminism.

At one point, I gave a female friend who lived in the dorms adjacent to the Student Union a note to drop off at Statesman’s offices.

One of the editors responded (by note? telephone? can’t remember), “Please stop harassing us. Your piece will be considered for publication.”

What she didn’t know was that I was ready to go to the office, and start punching out people, including girls. How that was supposed to work out, I hadn’t exactly thought out.

At Stony Brook that year, I learned—from the theater majors who put on a rigged tryout for Archibald MacLeish’s play, JB, and the editors at Statesman—how important it is to some people to waste other people’s time.

I never planned on becoming a journalist. I was going to be an eccentric billionaire philosopher.

Well, that ship hasn’t come in yet, but in the meantime, you guys have been great to me, in supporting my work here. Please hit the PayPal “Donate” button at the top, and make a generous donation. I thank you, and your posterity will, too.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Stix