I published my first post, “I live in a land downunder. No, the other one…” on September 13, 2006 at 10:53pm NZST. It began as a log of my life as a gay American who moved to New Zealand to be with the man he loved, but by the time I started this blog, that adventure was already eleven years old. I had no way of knowing for certain that last year’s anniversary blog post would be the last celebrating the log of the story of my life in New Zealand with Nigel, but even by then I knew it was possible.
Shortly before I published last year’s “blogaversary” post, we were told that Nigel had liver cancer, and the prognosis at the time was maybe a year or two, and I believed that to be true. Maybe it was just that I desperately wanted it to be true. In any case, in last year’s post I talked about the improbability of achieving my annual blog post goal of an average of one per day, something I still cared about at the time (and not since). I alluded to a difficult journey ahead when I said, “I know that I almost certainly won’t achieve my blogging goal this year, for reasons I’ll explain another time.”
When I wrote that, I thought I’d be busy taking Nigel to treatment and looking after him, not that only a week after that post was published, he’d be dead. That post became my last one until October when I returned to document the dramatic change in my story.
All of which makes this the last significant anniversary before the horrible anniversary a week from today, and this particular anniversary is especially relevant because I only began this blog in the first place because Nigel urged me to do it, something he started suggesting a year or two earlier. This blog, then, as well as my being in New Zealand, are both because of him.
My life is now on an entirely different trajectory to the one I’d planned, the one I blogged about, and this new trajectory is still one I can’t even begin to imagine, much less see. But if the previous fourteen years have shown anything, it’s that I’ll keep talking about my journey, whatever it may be. Until I don’t. Because one thing I learned since last year’s post is to never take anything or anyone for granted, nor to assume any sort of long-life for anything or anyone: Everything ends some day.
But not today, not as I write this post, in advance of its publication. As I’ve done most years, I’ll set this to auto-post at the exact moment I published my original post fourteen years ago. It’s one of the few traditions I have left; I’ll take it.
As always, thanks for joining me on the journey so far.
Previous posts on my blogoversaries:
Anniversay Time (2007)
Blogoversary 2 (2008)
Anniversaries Three and Fourteen (2009)
Fourth blogoversary (2010)
Fifth blogoversary (2011)
Sixth blogoversary (2012)
Seventh Blogoversary (2013)
Ten years of the AmeriNZ Blog (2016)
The AmeriNZ Blog is eleven (2017)
The AmeriNZ Blog is twelve (2018)
The AmeriNZ Blog is thirteen (2019)
An AmeriNZ Video I made in 2015 explains the origins of the name “AmeriNZ”:
1 comment:
I'm still doing a blog post a day. It's more difficult than t used to be. I always now once I stop, it'll never restart. I'm like Cal Ripkin Jr of baseball's Baltimore Orioles who played hurt when he should have sat on the bench for a game or two.
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