the start of SOMETHING

SUNDAY WAS QUITE THE DAY. MY NEW 2ND FAVORITE HOOPS team — sorry Texas, but I'm a lifelong Laker lover — won its first NBA championship. And I turned 50 years old.

As a gift to the new old me — holy shit, am I really 50?! — I promised myself I'd start writing more. I've been realizing more than ever that there's something missing — something important — when I'm not writing. There's too much brewing in my head, too much happening in my life, not to get it down in words. I realize that I need to write.

Has it really taken me 50 years to figure this out?

Then tonight I got another sign that it's time to scratch that itch. For the first time ever, I noticed a tab called "Stats" on the page where I write these entries and build these pages. Maybe the stats option has been around and I just hadn't noticed. I'm sure I could've tracked the numbers down if I'd dug around a little.

Yet for some reason I wasn't compelled to look. Even though when I first started blogging back in 2003 — TheGreatestYearOfMyLife.com felt like the Stone Age of blogging — I had a very visible attendance meter on the home page. And don't think I didn't check that number on a daily basis.

But up until tonight, I didn't care to check the numbers on this thing. I'm not sure why. Maybe I didn't want to feel the sting of rejection. Maybe I didn't want to be a slave to the page views. Maybe I was just too lazy to figure out how to fetch the numbers.

Then I saw that "Stats" tab. Now my competitive juices are flowing. Not to mention my numbers-obsessed inner math geek.

I haven't written regularly enough to have any expectations about having a regular, sizable audience. Back in October I had my busiest month, with 631 page views. This past April — two months removed from my last blog entry — saw my page views dip to an all-time low of 80. In May they actually went up, despite no new entries, with 89 page views. Those extra 9 no doubt came back wondering, "Is this bastard ever gonna write anything on here again?"

Hell yes, he is!

Now that I know where to find these numbers, I want to find out what would happen if I started writing on here regularly. As in every other day. We're at a measly 44 page views so far in June. But we've had 9 today — 2 since I started writing this thing — and I've got to think that a regular dose of these cab stories might get those numbers to spike.

Here are the 13 stories I'll be sharing over the next 26 days:

1) Seeing this guy on Friday the 13th at the new Moody Theater and the customer later that night who threatened to kill me before running off with my Flip video camera.

2) A cab ride with this kid the day before he flew back to L.A. to discuss declaring for the NBA draft with his family.

3) Hearing about going to Austin High with the Bush twins from this guy the night before he flew to L.A. to record his first album.

4) Picking up this couple hugging on the corner of Guadalupe and 5th the very night my sister Jeni and millions of other people tuned in to see who the lucky winner was on The Bachelor.

5) Several interesting cab rides during SXSW with the lead singer of this hot new band from New York.

Ah, hell, that's plenty to get me started right now. Every day driving a cab in Austin feels like there's a story worth sharing. But we don't want to overpromise. A blog entry every couple days shouldn't be impossible to pull off. Especially as we hit that stats tab and watch the numbers grow.

Before long, we might even be ready to explore the other new tab I noticed tonight. The one next to the stats tab that says "Monetize."

A guy can dream.