hung out in gas stations. ~ JOAN DIDION
I’ve struggled — okay, not a lot, but enough — to find a common theme in the 10 blog posts I have selected as representative of the breadth and depth of Kiko’s House over the past decade. That theme, I suppose, is that the world has very much departed from the narratives to which we have always been accustomed, the ones we were nurtured on as youngsters, were reinforced in our textbooks when we were students, later still by politicians and other supposedly smart people when we were all grown up, and we comfortingly took to our graves.
We stopped blowing our horn about milestones at Kiko’s House a few years ago. For one thing, it was a tad narcissistic considering that some current affairs blogs have more visitors before breakfast on a slow day than we’ve had in our entire lifetime. And while history has a really annoying way of repeating itself, there also has been a certain redundancy to many of our posts.
All that noted, November 2015 is a milestone. We’re now not only 10 years young, but are closing in on 2 million visitors, among them some charter readers who are still with us, including the little old lady from southeastern England who sees UFOs from her loo. (Thank you so much for your loyalty, Tillie.) These visitors hail from 200 or so countries, including Milwaukee.
Visitors seldom leave comments, although there have been conspicuous exceptions. A post on the epidemic of cancers in American golden retrievers has received over 200 comments — an extraordinary number for a smallish blog. This post has, completely by accident, become a Wailing Wall for people who have lost their beloved dogs to cancer and have reached out to share their experiences.
Kiko’s House has been photograph oriented from the jump, and we’ve run over 800 standalone images from photographers the world over in addition to images embedded in posts. But the photo above shot by Doug Mills of The New York Times in Chester, Pennsylvania a month before the 2008 presidential election rises above the rest because it is such a striking visual metaphor for Barack Obama’s travails — and America’s, as well — an all too frequent topic here.
I would also like to point out that we’re still being fed the same old narratives. And like Joan Didion, the people I preferred to spend time with in high school hung out at gas stations.
— Love and Peace, SHAUN