Streak addiction

There was a story in the papers last week about Jeff Reitz, who visited Disneyland on 2,995 consecutive days between 2012 and 2020, when the theme park’s pandemic-related closure forced him to quit just short of the 3K milestone.

Jeff seems mostly positive about his experience, which he started as a way to keep active during a spell of unemployment, but I’m sure that there must have been some mornings when maintaining the run felt more like a tiresome obligation than a fun day out.

I have similarly mixed feelings about keeping this blog going. I must admit that, nearly sixteen years on from our debut, it’s hard to make the case that my occasional missives have any sort of relevance, and it is sometimes a chore to cobble something together for the deadline, but still, I’m loath to break the streak of posting at least once in each of the past 190 months. In a world where regularity is increasingly difficult to find, especially as one gets older, it’s comforting to have some dependable rituals, however irrational they may seem.

In the article about Jeff in the Los Angeles Times there’s a suggestion that he might have taken a break if he had reached the three thousand mark, but I think that without the force majeure of Covid he would have found it difficult to step off the treadmill. I might tell myself that I’ll quit blogging when I hit 200 months, or 20 years, or some other arbitrary target, but I know that I won’t. At this point “blogger” has, for better or worse, become part of my identity, if only in my own mind, and they’ll have to prise this keyboard from my cold, dead hands…