Goodbye

After over three and a half years (a little over two in this forum) of reliably recapping and knowing entirely way too much about the Sirius XM Hits-1 Weekend Countdown, I have made the decision to bring this blog's exciting journey to a close.

Since I get roughly 500 visitors per day here, I'd be lying if I said this place was entirely for me, so I feel that I owe an explanation to you all.  I am a person that continually resists change and prides myself on reliability and consistency.  A couple months back, I sat down to write a "Q&A" post where I might have offered a little context around what I'm doing here and why.  Probably the most pointed question on this survey that I came up with was "Why do you do this?".  The post was never published, but here's the response I gave (to my own question):

"That's an excellent question, and from time to time I ask myself this.  This blog has been going 2 years strong, and, before publishing these thoughts on the internet, I've been summarizing the Weekend Countdown for others [not that they asked me to] for even longer than that.  There's been weeks where it's been a serious struggle to find time to both log the countdown and talk about it, and those tend to be the weeks where I question why I keep this going.  Most weeks, however, I do have a good amount of fun with it, and for some reason, at least based on the log of page views, people actually seem to like reading it.  I'm also the type of person that doesn't like to quit on things easily and likes to feel reliable.  At least as of right now, I can't imagine just leaving this space sitting around out there on the internet, just cut off after some random week.  It would bother me too much."

Really it's the last sentence that gets to the crux of the issue...the thought of starting something and not finishing it.  But there really is no finish to this, is there?  Am I going to keep spending an hour each week for the rest of my life doing something that increasingly feels like an optional chore, even as my personal and professional life becomes increasingly complicated?  Clearly, there will be an end.

And so, I've decided to not cut this off after some random week.  The end of 2013 feels like a natural stopping point, and I'm going to stop now before I convince myself to stick it out for another full year.  While there are things I'm going to miss about this place, it's a decision I'm fairly proud of because I am typically bad at breaking routine for even components of my life as minor as this.  I'm hoping that this is a good first step towards breaking that mold in more significant areas of life.

A couple last takeaways before my permanent sign-off.  First, if you write about something on the internet, and do it consistently, people will read it, no matter how ultimately irrelevant the subject matter is.  Give it a try.  Blog!

Second, that having been said, thank you all for reading, following, and commenting over these past couple years.  I take the page clicks as feedback that this wasn't the least interesting thing in the world, and hitting the 200k threshold did make me oddly happy, in a way.  So thanks.

For reasons pertinent to my professional career, I have written this anonymously as "CountdownRecap".  If you wish to get in touch with me for whatever reason (though likely this would only be pertinent to Hits-1 music, as I'm otherwise a basically nondescript entity as far as readers who are not in the know are concerned), I can be reached at anonymous000167@gmail.com (this is not fake).

Goodbye.