Monday memory: the Rushalanche

A recent post reminded me of a blogging milestone.

I believe whatever talent I have for writing is indeed “talent on loan from God.”

I’ve done this blogging detail for over eighteen years, from Blogspot to my own domain and website to my Substacks, and to be honest a lot of it has been a fate of toiling in relative obscurity. Certainly I have a fan base - and I value and am thankful to have each and every one of them - but it’s a fairly modest one that mainly resides in my adopted home area.

Yet every so often in my writing career I’ve been blessed with an opportunity to secure a wider audience, and the reaction to my recent post on the controversy surrounding Franklin Graham’s visit to Salisbury was one of those chance occurrences.

One thing I love about Substack is that I know how many people read each post, so I’m aware my labor of love called The Knothole has just a few who stop by each week but this site usually runs somewhere in the double digits a post. Imagine my shock when I saw triple-figures and watched over the next few days as the number kept climbing into the four-figure range as the Franklin Graham post was shared again and again. I really didn’t promote it any differently than I usually do, but it blew up and netted me several new subscribers.

That success got me to thinking of an incident I had with monoblogue.

2007 was probably the peak era of blogging - thousands upon thousands of people were on websites like Blogger and Blogspot, making their voice heard on the internet. It was the halcyon era before Facebook, and just before Twitter came along to create the form of 140-character microblogging.

Having began monoblogue a year or so earlier (and subsequently joining a group I found out about called the Maryland Blogger Alliance) I was looking for suggestions on what blogsites to read and link to. That was the second part of what was about to transpire.

The first part came some years before that, when I became a Rush Limbaugh fan thanks to a former co-worker who’s still a supporter of my writing, Bob Densic. I worked back home in Toledo in what was called a “Rush Room” thanks to him, beginning way back in 1993. Even though he and I parted ways as we went on to different employers, I kept that afternoon habit going through other workplaces, including the one I was working at back in 2007. That was easy because my boss also listened to Rush in his office and I could hear it.

So I heard all about the “stack of stuff” and found out it had gravitated from articles clipped from physical newspapers to printouts of online sources of news. That got me to thinking: if I want to be as informed as Rush is, what should I read and (especially) link to?

My employer has had a policy which continues to this present day: we work 7 to 5 Monday through Thursday and 7 to 11 on Friday, for a 40 hour week. It was yet another variation of a practice that seems to be common in my field, as I used to work alternate full-day Fridays at another employer. So I was free on Fridays to go home and listen to Rush there for “Open Line Friday.”

It was October 5, 2007, and since I was home and was curious to ask the Maharushie this question I decided to dial 1-800-282-2882 and see what would happen. Miracle of miracles, I got through and told Bo Snerdly what I wanted to know, and came on just out of the 1:30 break.

Rather than go through the call, though, I’ll just link to a private page on monoblogue where I preserved the transcript. For this purpose, let me just tell you that, despite the fact that my server initially didn’t know what hit it, I ended up with over 5,000 visitors that day. Now this was a time where I got perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 readers a week: pretty much peak popularity for monoblogue since, as I stated above, it was prime time for bloggers. Yet maybe 300 readers a day on a good day pales in comparison to 5,000 in basically 2-3 hours. And yet I never really had my question answered, for a reason I could understand.

Had I been a little more prepared for the moment, though, I might have had something less esoteric on the site than a look at the platform of then-presidential candidate Alan Keyes. Yet that post received a huge (for me) number of comments since it was the one up at the time.

So now I’m in something of that same position in that I gathered a lot of interest with one post. But this time I was prepared since I could wrap up the story arc a week later with a summary of Graham’s visit.

As for Rush, I miss him on the radio. I had something of a falling out with him for several years because he was so far up on the Trump train and I couldn’t understand why when he claimed to be conservative all these years. And, truth be told, it just wasn’t the same show by that point - in the beginning it seemed so much more light-hearted and less formulaic. I think it was all the commercial spots he had to read that messed up the flow, but I missed the various update themes. Wasn’t it Slim Whitman who did the environmentalist wacko update theme? But toward the end I was back, listening when I could.

So when I hear My City Was Gone, I don’t think about The Pretenders but the guy who probably made them more famous than AOR radio ever did by having a minute-long theme song played three times a day. And once upon a time, I had the chance to make the host look good.