The Last Time I Got Into A Fist Fight

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ritchie Odak. This is the story of the last time I got into a fist fight.

Regulars to this blog know how we like to start – to the back-story!

You know how in the movies people say they go/went to college to find themselves? Well, I did just the opposite: I went to campus to lose myself. Everything I was and believed went out the window; not totally thrown out, but hanging over the ledge in a bag tied to a rope.
For most of the 4 years I was there, I had very few rules - if any.

Think of it like this: in the first season of the TV show The Vampire Diaries one of the premises of the show was that the vampires could "turn off" their humanity (consciences), and just be decadent, submitting to their every carnal desire. My campus years were something similar; though I didn't go around snapping people's necks and drinking their blood, I basically indulged my every fleshly desire and lived a very 'young, wild & free' life.

I just wanted to put that out there because the version of me you're about to read about is very dissimilar to who I am today.
Just FYI.
Side note: I no longer watch VD. The show lost me in season 2 as soon as they gave Damien 'feelings'. Bleurgh.
While we're talking about the Salvatore brothers: how do you pick the ugly one over Damien? Is it because I'm a guy that I don't see it?

Anyhu, back to our story: the time was 2006, late 2006. I think. It may have been early 2007. I'm not very sure. There's several semesters worth of memories that have kind of melded together in my memory.
Side note: Don’t do recreational drugs kids. Seriously, please don’t!
What I do remember with some semblance of clarity is the events of this fateful day.

It was a warm and sunny Saturday. My roommates and I were randomly struck by the impulse to do a much needed thorough clean of our room. We spent several hours of that day scrubbing from top to bottom. Beds were made, floors were mopped, windows.

were wiped, dishes were cleaned, clothes were folded and put away, trash was emptied. It was one of those once-a-semester events.
We were very proud of our work at the end of it. And rightly so!
For lunch we prepared a feast worthy of our great work, i.e, an unnecessarily large quantity of meat accompanied by an obscenely large amount ugali.
Suffice it to say we were as happy as pigs in fresh mud that afternoon.

Even though we were not in the strongest of monetary positions - I remember it being the week before the end of the month and all purse strings were well and truly tight - we decided to treat ourselves for our very productive day by going out on the town later that night, rather than just hitting the on-campus bar for cheap drinks as would inevitably been our plan for that day.
Plans were made, clothes and shoes were prepared.
Solely based on the enthusiasm the 3 of us had were able to convince several of our friends to join us in painting the town red that night.
Realistically, more like paint the town a dark shade of pink. We didn’t have paint-the-town-red money. But you get my point.
Suddenly, we had the makings of an epic night on our hands. This day just kept getting better!

Fast forward to what I approximate was around 11 p.m. or so later that night. As was our custom, the guys were in some back alley pub, while the girls were in the much nicer club where we were eventually to meet up. This was for practicality: we (the guys) had much higher alcohol tolerance than our feminine compatriots. Therefore, for us to be able to go all night while sufficiently

inebriated, it required us to first down as many dirt-cheap shots in the back alley pub as we could keep down, before proceeding to the club that sold the same drinks for orders of magnitude more than the recommended retail price. Once there, we would then make one or two drinks last the remainder of the night as we danced to night away. Or entertained our significant others. Or, for those that were in need, sought to acquire new significant others. Or, if you were the type, sought acquire a secondary significant other (henceforth referred to as S.O) should your primary S.O not be within close proximity of your physical location.
Different strokes for different folks.

The night was going swimmingly. We were having a blast. Stories were being told, laughter was being laughed, bonding was being bonded?
Yes, I know that that isn’t grammatically correct, but it’s dramatically correct. Therefore, it’s staying.
We were outside, sitting on the kerb, because we didn’t want the pub noise and music drowning out our conversations.
A good time was being had by all.

One of my roommates, let’s call him The Dynamo, had left the back alley to go use the nicer club's restroom. The 2 locations were across the street from each other.
The Dynamo’s return to our location was a lot more dramatic than we were prepared for! He burst back into view in full sprint, partially out of breath, beads of sweat rolling down his shiny baldhead. Though not a long distance apart, there were a number of quite long staircases between where we were and where he had come from (remember that, as they’ll reappear later in this story). The Dynamo had ran all the way.

After he’d caught his breath, he proceeds to tell me, “Ritchie, your girlfriend has been beaten up.”

My significant other at that time was about as far from a dramatic person as a bacon cheeseburger with deep fried chicken for buns is from healthy.
I'll give you all a minute: please Google images of "bacon double down burger". You're welcome.

I was obviously surprised to hear that she had been in any kind of physical altercation. She was clearly never going to be the one to instigate one, so I was curious to find out what exactly had happened.

Having followed his statement a sufficiently long, dramatic pause, The Dynamo repeats himself, "Ritchie, your girlfriend has been beaten up.”
"How?" I asked.
"Big Bird beat her up."

The person I have given the alias Big Bird was – up until this night – a very good friend of ours. We were in the same class, for some time shared the same hostel room, we had a pretty identical circle of friends. Most importantly: our girlfriends were 'best friends' (whatever that means to women. This is a deeply complex concept with females).

I was naturally confused.

The Dynamo having predicted my obvious reaction to this news did not come without additional information; a.k.a, some back-story!
Apparently, Big Bird – as was in his nature – had recently acquired himself a secondary S.O to complement his primary S.O. (significant other).
In simpler terms: Big Bird was cheating on his girlfriend. My girlfriend at the time either saw or caught him. She obviously gave her best friend the heads up about her boyfriend being a cheating scumbag.

When confronted with such an accusation, men will often (not always) react in one of two ways:
1. Man up, admit their mistake, ask for forgiveness, promise never to do it again. (They probably will do it again)
2. Deny, deny, deny!

Big Bird chose the before unavailable option 2-and-a-half: deny, and physically assault a female.

If you're asking yourself how and where this was all happening, given that I said earlier in this piece that the guys were in one location while the girls were in another, you have stumbled upon a key piece of evidence, Watson!
That statement remains to be true.
However, Big Bird was the only 'male' drinking with the females. What that says about him and his character I will to your imagination to interpret.
It is also the only way he would be able (and have the courage) to hit a woman.

Understandably irate, I made my way across the street to where Big Bird and the girls where.
Let me preface what happened next with this: on the Michael scale of people, I am nearer Jackson than Tyson. Meaning, I'm more a lover than a fighter. The primary reason for this is I don’t like being hit in the face. I am not ashamed to say I have run away from my fair share of fights, even those I would probably have won, because in the process of winning I would have to take some hits. If it wasn’t that serious, I was often out of there like I'd stolen something.
As a result, I didn’t really have a reputation for being able to handle myself in a fight; I never got into any!

It was with this same mindset that I confronted Big Bird as he staggered out of the club with girlfriend in tow (they seemed to have patched things up pretty quickly – more on that to come in part 2 of this story). My intention was to give him a thorough tongue lashing about his inability to handle his liquor, and to very sternly warn him that I was only giving him a pass because he was my friend, but if he ever so much as raised his voice to my S.O again, I'd stomp a mud hole through him (for meaning, click here). The plan was to then repeat the same in the counsel of our friends, because all the guys felt the same way and it was more than likely going to turn into an intervention.

Our confrontation goes roughly as follows:

Me:" Dude, what the hell man?"
Big Bird: "What? What will you do? What?!"
Me: "I don’t care how drunk you were, what the hell?"
Big Bird: "What? **** off! ***** *****! Get out of my face!"

OK.

I had wanted to settle this amicably, but I am just a man. There's only so much I can take.

Big Bird continues to talk smack, and I'm just laughing to myself.
Big Bird went out a lot with my other roommate Roger. Roger is about 6 foot 2 inches tall, and pretty jacked (muscular). On top of that, he has a stiff jab and a short fuse when under the influence. What that means is Roger got into his fair share of fist (and sometimes bottle) fights. And from what Roger had told me, Big Bird was about as useful in a fight as a fork in draining a flooded boat.

Therefore, watching Big Bird put on this show of bravado was laughable. He clearly felt that the Bro Code precluded him from an ass whooping because we were 'close'/'bros', no matter what he had done, or subsequently said to me.
Or, he thought Roger would (as he always did) have his back.
Neither was the case.

For his insults alone, he deserved a beating. That along with the fact that we were only here because he physically assaulted a woman immediately excluded him from enjoying any benefits associated with the Bro Code.

By this point, The Dynamo had tired both of my patience and Big Bird's foolish talk. The Dynamo steps in front of me and squares up to Big Bird and in no uncertain terms explains to him that he is going to get his ass kicked. Big Bird scoffs. Big Bird is a towering 6 foot 3, but with the kind of frame that would be blown over by a strong breeze. The Dynamo is about 5 foot 7, but dense!That’s the best word to describe him: dense! Strong, muscular, compact!

He was our campus rugby team's captain and scrum half. He didn’t get to be that with his good looks and charm; he was that good. There are scores of wingers much larger than him that saw him as the last line of defence as they came sprinting down the pitch and foolishly started to count themselves having scored a try, only to find themselves tackled or dragged to the ground by this 'little' guy, with new bruises and scars as a take home gift!

Big Bird foolishly mocked him, and attempted to physically threaten him.
The Dynamo is deceptively quick and strong. Therefore, he likes to give potential opponents the chance at a 'fair fight' by always giving them the first shot.
"If you think you can, punch me right here," The Dynamo says as he turns his face and points to his cheek, "Go ahead ******, hit me right here!" He then drops his hands to his sides so that he cannot defend himself.
I've seen this dance before, and I love watching it happen every time! Poor unsuspecting sap tries to sucker punch The Dynamo, but because of his rock hard head, he doesn’t pass out. That’s always their mistake! Because if you don’t knock him out, he will beat on you until you're totally laid out!

I was about to get lost in the show before I remembered why we were here. I let Big Bird get his one shot in, and like a coiled spring The Dynamo burst into a flurry of punches before I could grab Big Bird and drag him away. This was my fight; it's my girlfriend's honour we're defending here.

"Stop being stupid," I said, "I don’t want to hurt you!"
"You ***** *** *****, what can you do to me! You're a *punk (word replaced) just like that ***** *punk girlfriend of yours." He replies.

Side note: I don’t like to curse, so use your imagination for what was actually said. Or don’t. It does not particularly enrich the narrative anyway.

I'd had it. I'd tried to be reasonable. I tried to be merciful. He was basically begging me to bludgeon his face in. All the self control I'd mustered had ran out; I was seeing red. I was shaking with rage. I wanted to hurt him as much as physically possible.

We were standing about 2 paces away from a flight of stairs. This was a very steep flight of stairs. I'd guess at least 15 steps; maybe even more. Vertically, it was definitely more than 6 feet because I'm 5 foot 11 and a half, and while standing at the bottom of these stairs I could not see over them.

I'll give you a minute to imagine what happens next.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, I grabbed this wafer thin clown and hurled him into the air, and subsequently sent him tumbling down the stairs.
In such a situation in the movies, people fly through the air for what feels like forever before slowly tumbling down. That wasn’t my experience. It all happened so fast! One second he's flying through the air, the next there's a sickening thud as skull and bones meets concrete.

At this point, I hoped he'd do what I would have done were I in his shoes: gotten up and ran off. But no, the guy had jokes!
He gets up gingerly and yells, "Is that all you've got!?"
I couldn’t believe it. He's clearly hurt. He's clearly out of his depth. Why are you asking for more?

In the present day, I am quite the fight fan. I watch dozens of mixed martial arts fights every month, and have taken a great interest in boxing and muay thai. If I got into a fight today, I'd be very smart about it; integrating principles of head and foot movement, punch and kick variations, and strike combinations to outwit and defeat my opponent. In 2006/2007 however, all I knew was hit and don’t get hit! So if you're a fight fan, please bear with what follows. It isn't the prettiest.

I hurdle down the stairs and straight thrust kick him (#ThisIsSparta!) in the stomach, so that he was gasping for air. He bent over slightly to try to catch his breath, and I went to town! Right hook to the face, right hook to the face, right hook to the face, duck a wild swinging right, right hook to the face, right hook to the face, right hook to the face, duck a wild swinging right, right hook to the face, right hook to the face…
This went on for a while.

I don’t know how aesthetically pleasing the fight fan I am today

would find my 'technique', but at the time, it was effective. Though my memory of events is a little foggy, I do remember I had a lopsided speed advantage. I would get off two or three punches in at a time before he threw one of his own. He never caught me with a single one. I battered this poor chump with countless unanswered punches to the face. No body shots, no left crosses, jabs or uppercuts. Just swinging the same right hand over and over and over. My hand quickly tired and my knuckles were incredibly sore. Were it not for the fact that he had such a soft face, I'm certain I'd have broken my hand!

I eventually just stopped. I was tired. I inquired later as to why no one broke us up, I'm told my roommates The Dynamo and Roger, as well as the cabbies in the area (we were right in front of a taxi rank) were running interference for us so that we settled things uninterrupted. Apparently, when people would ask why that one guy is beating up that second guy, they'd be told it's because the second guy beat up the first guy's girlfriend, at which point they'd join the crowd in cheering me on. There was an audience, but I had no knowledge of it. I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t hear them. I was singularly focussed.

I felt I had done enough to make my point, so I turned around to walk away.

As I'm scanning the now visible-to-me crowd to find my friends, I hear some familiar – yet very unexpected – words:

"Is that all you've got!?"
*cough*

You've got to be kidding me?!
I felt like Apollo Creed in the opening rounds of his first bout with Rocky Balboa: how is this guy still standing, let alone wanting more?

Side note: if you did not get that reference, please do yourself a favour and go look for the 1976 film classic Rocky I. It just might be the greatest movie you see this year.
Thank me later.

I blame myself really. I wasn't the strongest guy in the world. Had I had slightly more upper body strength, all those blows to the head should have knocked him out, or at least incapacitated his valve-less mouth!
I didn’t trust my ability to throw punches with my left hand, and my right hand hurt too much to get involved again. But he was begging for more, perhaps he wanted to go out on his shield.
I had to oblige!

Like the pro wrestling fan that I am, I went to plan B: use the environment to your advantage! He was reaching for a rock to even the scales, so I had to act quickly! I cut him off, grabbed him, lifted him up and dropped him back and head first in a modified Rock Bottom (see what it looks like here) onto the hood of one of the cars parked next to us. I picked him up and dropped him again. I picked him up and dropped him a third time. The cabbie on whose vehicle I was slamming him finally protested: "Ay! Please stop getting blood on my car!"

At this point, I finally noticed how battered the guy looked. He was a swollen bloody mess. I felt my point had been made, so I went to walk away again.

Again, I hear, " Is that all you've got!?"
*cough* *cough* *cough*

This guy was certainly proud. He just wouldn’t stay down. Finally, his girlfriend had seen enough, and came over to drag him into a waiting cab. He kept yelling at me as they drove away. She saved me more than him. I was exhausted, I had no more beating to give!

My last memory of the night was being mobbed by my friends, getting a very tight hug from my girlfriend, and being ushered into the club feeling like a million bucks. I was promptly flooded with drinks, and next thing I knew it's noon the next day and I'm lying in my bed back in the hostel.
I'm told that I spent the rest of the night walking on clouds and shoving every male I did not know and telling them not to mess with me. The club's bouncers, though initially quite pleased with me when I walked in, eventually got tired of my obnoxious behaviour and I was ultimately violently ejected.
I was socked in the eye for good measure, and woke up with a BEAUTIFUL black eye. It was incredibly painful, I'd never gotten one before, but it looked so beautiful. Considering my 'fight' – I'm hesitant to call it a fight – hadn’t left me with any battle scars, I was quite pleased that my first fight in years had ended so well: a resounding win, and a lovely shiner as a souvenir.

EPILOGUE:

When I started writing this article my intention was to tell the story of the time I got arrested.
Yes ladies and gentlemen, the day after the events I just chronicled I did get arrested!
In the process of writing the story of the fight, I realised it's a story on its own that needed telling.
Plus, this article is already long enough!

So, as I had alluded to earlier, this is just part one of the story!
Next time: the dramatic story of my subsequent arrest (and incarceration)!


Today I'm not proud of having resorted to physical violence. Two wrongs don't make a right.
And so even though I have no regrets about sending a woman-beater to the hospital, still, that is not OK.

This is how good blogs die!

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ritchie Odak. This is the story of how my last blog died.
Perhaps it may also foreshadow the death of this one (fingers crossed that it doesn’t).

As is customary to this blog, we start with the back-story: At the end of 2008, a strapping young lad (the writer of this piece) with nothing more than a dream (and a brand new suit) graduated from university with a bachelor’s degree in physics.

As many recent graduates might tell you, finding a job legitimately in this current economy is not easy. Some might even say it's nigh-on impossible (and that's for courses more market/employer-desirable than Physics). How many people do you know who answered an advertisement in the papers/online, applied, went through the processes involved, and actually got hired to the said position without greasing the wheels, or getting help from a friend or relative in the right place? I'll hazard a guess: not many; at least not without 7 years of management level experience, superpowers, a published novel, a Fortune 500 CEO's references, and a recommendation letter from the Pope. And for the few of us that did, it's considered a miracle from God (which it honestly is). And it took 3 years to get to the promised land. But that’s a story for another day.

And so for a couple of years after graduating I tried and I tried, I sent application after application but nothing bore fruit. The phrase 'humble background' is so often used in so many people's origin stories that we're almost at the point where the meaning is lost. I won't go into the details of my own, but I will say that as far as humility of backgrounds is concerned, mine is pretty humble. For me, it was gainful employment or bust. There was no plan B; there was no contingency to start a business should work not materialize, there was no internship at my dad's work place to pad the resume. I needed work, and I needed it badly!

Fast forward to 2 years after I had left university, my dreams had turned mostly into despair. I had just one thing still going for me: the suit held up very well. I am not ashamed to say it's still the only suit I own to this day. (Again, story for another post)
During this 2 year job hunt period, I also happened by some miracle to be dating a fairly attractive female at the time. Without too much back-story, I'll just say that just getting from my place to hers, or a neutral locale in the city, for a date was a daily miracle for me. And after about a year of dating me, there wasn't enough love in her world for her to stay with my broke ass; especially after she had found a fairly well paying job, as well as other projects she had going on on the side doing fairly well, and constantly having to fend off the advances of gentlemen in positions to give her a lot more than just the love and affection that I was able offer. I was swiftly, and painlessly (for her), dumped. On the day of our 1-year anniversary.

Side note: Let me just say: fair play to her, and this is all pride talking, but not many women can say they were the ones to leave me, so more power to her.

As a parting shot I encouraged to – and I quote – "stop being lazy and work harder to get a job".

There is much, MUCH more to that story, but I tell just that to say this: it was at this point I truly felt hopeless. Though I like to consider myself a pragmatic optimist, I struggled to see the glass as half full around about this time.

Side note: So as not to dampen the mood of this blog as you continue to read, allow me to put a bit of closure on the above heartbreak. A couple of months after my broke/'lazy' ass was dumped, I started seeing a very close friend, after proverbially realizing that what I really needed had been right next to me all along. That was a fairly tale romance that lasted a solid 3(ish) years.
Yes ladies and gentlemen, I bounced back by conquering the friendzone!

A moment of silence for our brothers and sisters still in the struggle: keep hope alive!

You can all wipe away the tears now, so that we can resume our origin story.

Where were we again? Oh yeah, hope having turned to despair: I've been looking for work for years without luck, nor did I have much hope in terms of future prospects.
As one does in such circumstances, you try and distract yourself as much as possible from your life not going as planned by filling up your time with anything, anything, else!
I spent several hours every day learning how to play the drums, I watched years worth of films, everything from current box office releases to classics from the 80's and 90's. I started working out; or trying to anyway. In the end, I was pretty much just walking incredibly long distances, jumping a skipping rope, and doing a few sit-ups every few days.
But what took up a lot of my waking hours whilst doing most of these things, or chores around the house, was listening to radio; specifically, the BBC World Service. I listened to a lot of the BBC, and would basically schedule my day around sports news bulletins, because out of everything that piqued my curiosity in the world, and there was/is a lot, I loved to follow sports more than anything else.

After a while, I realized I was hearing the same sports stories being told the same way over and over again. Even online when I'd go various websites to read up on updates, it'd be the same style of reporting all the time, everywhere I looked.
The factual reporting of events as they happened is very important, and it had its place, but I was looking for something that was a little different, something that added a bit of personal commentary/analysis on what had occurred. Because most analysis/opinion pieces are still very stat/fact based, what I wanted was a lay man's take on the happenings; a person that knows enough about sports to have intelligent opinions, but not so nerded out to just re-report events with more statistics, but actually put it in a fan's perspective.

Then it dawned on me: I want to hear from myself!

No seriously, that was exactly how my thought process went. I realized there might be someone out there that writes what I wanted to read, but I couldn’t find them. Therefore, I decided to write what I wanted to read for myself.
It also occurred to me that I knew a few people that are just as into sports as I am, and whose opinions and perspectives I respect/enjoy. So, I reached out to them with the idea of starting a blog, and just like that, we started writing what and how we wanted to read.

In the beginning, it was mostly Facebook friends that read the blog; articles would have about 50 page views per post. But with time, what I was writing, and how I wrote, really began to catch on. I built up an audience to the point where I'd regularly have over 500 views per article. In addition to that, everyone I talked to – especially people that weren't particularly sports fans, or even followed sports in any regular manner – seemed to really like my posts; or at least enjoy them.
I shared some pieces with journalists from local news outlets (shoutout to Carol Radull for reading my posts, offering constructive feedback, and even a few shares back in the day), I shared some articles with foreign writers and even got to useful feedback from writers for The Guardian & The Times (never the BBC though, sadly).
There was a site for sports writers (most of whom not affiliated with traditional news outlets, like myself) where people publish articles and people would rate each other's work where I regularly charted in the top 10 every week. Suffice it to say the blogging thing was doing well.

About a year into my new pet project, I was quite pleased with my progress. However, if we recall, the genesis of all this was me finding distractions from the fact that I still hadn't "done anything with my life" as some had put it at the time. The blog was going great and all, but it wasn’t putting food on my plate.

I now considered my writing (and following) as having some marketable value, and thus began to investigate means of monetising it.

I had two ideas for how I would go about doing this: 1. Selling advertising space on the blog, and 2. Getting paid by an external outlet for my writing. I did research and sent out feelers, and the response I got for both was pretty much the same: have a site that's active for a certain amount of time, and have empirical evidence of both viewership and following.

This I can say confidently was the moment that my blog began to die.

Why was this the beginning of the end you might ask, given I was just bragging about how many views I was getting and all the positive feedback I was getting?
On the surface it appeared I was doing well, it turned out evidence couldn't be found to suggest things were as hot as I had thought they were. For one, it isn't easy to sell an advertiser the idea of the possibility of 500 people viewing their ad. That just isn't enough eyeballs to spend significant money on (they could spare some change, but it was explained to me that it would be simply that: spare change). Therefore, I had to grow my viewership. Challenge accepted; I had no problem with that. I was tracking well growth-wise and could show based on my progressive trajectory at the time that I had a rapidly growing audience. I was confident with time I could build my audience even further.
THE major issue was the fact that for all my page views, I couldn’t show distinguishability of the viewers.

Side note: My computer has vigorously underlined the word distinguishability; apparently, it isn't a word. But it is the perfect word for me to make my point with, so I'm keeping it. Grammar Nazis (of which I count myself a casual member), please try and keep calm. Or don’t. It's here to stay either way.

What distinguishability means here is that there is no way of telling that 500 page views equates to 500 unique individuals each viewing the page. For all we know, it could be the same person, or a just a handful of people, refreshing the page repeatedly as the page view tracker isn't like say what YouTube uses, which counts views from each individual signed in to their account as a single view no matter how many times one watches a particular video.
And yes, I did have viewers in several countries, but it could have been one person in each refreshing the page several times; the analytics look at number of page views, locations viewed from, and device/operating system used to view. But beyond that, it doesn’t look in any more detail.
So if for example you pay for bots to randomly click and refresh pages a certain number of times you could get your views up to as high as you can afford.

So how could I show I had a consistent fan base? There's 2 avenues: following, and interaction.

The followers aspect is simple to quantify: using this blog as an example, on the right hand side of this article, near the top of the page, there's a dialogue box (as is illustrated in the picture on the right →) that asks you to submit your email address to subscribe to the blog. What that means is that whenever a new article is published, you get an email notification, with a part of the article, the first couple of paragraphs or so in it, so that if the sample snippet intrigues you, you can with a single click from that email go to the full article on the blog and read the rest of the article.

At the death of my old blog, I had 7 followers signed up.

Seven.

There aren't enough words to possibly quantify – to this day – just how disappointing that number is.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Those are how many people were willing to commit to reading the blog; not were willing to read, there clearly were more of those, but seven people were willing to actually commit to reading the blog regularly. Seven people looked at the blog and said, "You know what, I enjoy this writing. I would like to be notified when new articles come out because I like what I'm reading and would like to continue to do so."

Seven people.

And who exactly were these seven people?
1. Myself
2 & 3. My 2 co-authors
4. My girlfriend
5. My sister
And 2 other people.

The first five basically had to subscribe; to some extent they each had a vested interest in the success of the blog. There were only 2 other people – out of possibly hundreds – that were willing to commit to the blog by subscribing.

To put that in some sort of context: the Facebook fan page for the blog had over 350 people like/follow the page.
If you're confused, join the club.

I still to this day ask myself which of the following 3 scenarios is responsible:
1. Kenyans in 2010/2011 did not understand the concept of subscribing to a blog.
2. A one click like for a Facebook page you'll never return to, and will probably mute from your timeline, is easier to do than the "process" of submitting one's email address and having to actually regularly read the blog.
3. The blog wasn't as good as I've always told myself it was, and people were just being polite in checking it out, or would just visit to see how awful it was.

Like Schrödinger's cat, one of life's great mysteries.

The second means of determining distinguishability would be interaction.
What that means is how many other people were talking about the blog, or various posts, how many likes on the blog post feedback section, how many shares to Facebook/Twitter? If you put the title of the blog into a Google search, how many people (other than the author) would be talking about it, or have shared it online? On how many profiles not my own could articles be found on? How many comments were there on articles commending/recommending/criticising various posts?

I went back and I checked the stats: the 10 articles with the most page views had a total of just over 7,000 unique page views. Of all those readers, there was a sum total of 2 comments left on them.

Two.

Like your hands: one, two.

If any of those readers enjoyed the articles, they certainly didn't say so. If they didn't enjoy them, they didn't say so either. So if after reading a post and you fell into one of these two camps and were curious what other people thought about it, there was nothing to compare your experience to. Maybe it's just me that does that after reading/seeing something online.

The same could be said of likes on the article feedback section, or shares to social media. Other than the 5 people I listed above in the subscribers' section, I know of about 4 people who after reading an article of mine would share it to their own social networks if they had enjoyed it.

I say all that to say this: by the time I had done the inquiries and realised I could not monetise my blog to a level that could sustain me financially, I very quickly lost all motivation to write.
I enjoyed my articles, still do, but just writing for writing's sake was no longer enough. I was putting in a lot of time and effort, but in the end my passion for writing and sport were no longer enough to distract me for my continued lack of a job and perceived future prospects.

Something that made it even more frustrating is that when I stopped writing for prolonged periods, friends of mine and fans of the blog, would quite frequently ask when the next article is coming out. Did they do this by commenting on the blog/the blog's fan page, or on my MULTIPLE social media presences where other people might notice their query and perhaps invite curiosity to lead to a new reader? Nope. People would ask me when we met in person, or in the course of a text/IM conversation, or over the phone.

What this means is if a new reader stumbled on the blog, and perhaps enjoyed a first article, they wouldn't see in the comment/feedback section anything pointing to the fact that people are actually enjoying the blog/looking forward to subsequent articles and perhaps based on that might determine that this is actually a good writer and not that I stumbled onto the one article this person ever wrote (which is perhaps a slanted perspective, but I do personally make a lot of determinations that way). Nope. They'd see what they thought was a good piece, but no one else agreed, and so they kept their opinion to themselves, and maybe didn't feel the need to spend time looking at other articles.
At least that was my reasoning.

Around the same time as this was happening, three long years after I had left university, I finally got a job. Not the greatest job in the world, not one I particularly enjoyed, but a job it was; and I was grateful for it! The workload there was RIDICULOUS, the hours were LONG, and it did NOT pay anywhere near commensurate to the work done; I still lived with my mom, ate her food. But, it was a job! I could afford bus fare to work every day (and to church on weekends), lunch most days, the ability to take my girlfriend on 2 MODEST (I cannot stress the modesty part enough!) dates a month (always after and close to church, to minimise the need to pay bus fare multiple times to varied and exotic locations), and load up my phone sufficiently to be able to text, and surf the web for the month (calls were an extravagant luxury).
To this day, I still do not call people just out of habit picked up from this period in my life. Today I'd much rather – by choice – text you. Unless a call is absolutely necessary. Or in special circumstances.

So, given the fact that one of my major reasons for starting a blog was to distract myself from the fact that I didn't have a job, now that I had one (which took up 10 to 12 hours of my day), I really struggled to find both motivation and time to write.

A few months later, I got the job I have now (Hallelujah people, Hallelujah!). And this job IS the dream: making a decent wage (with benefits, and a pension) doing physics every single day. Not a lot of people from my graduating class actually got to directly translate what they studied into what they're doing currently: and that doesn't just apply to the physicists. I know chemists, botanists, hospitality management people, statisticians, economists, and so many others who had to re-appropriate whatever knowledge they had to new industries/sectors. Therefore, for me living the dream, I suddenly could not think up a reason, nor muster the motivation, as to why I should spend a couple of hours at my computer writing articles basically for my own amusement.

And just like that, the blog died.

RIP.


Epilogue:

So what changed that I started this blog?
I started writing again mainly to amuse myself. I genuinely find myself quite entertaining.
I also want to have certain things on record so that if I never get the chance to tell my kids about them, or they want to revisit them after I'm gone, they can find them here.
I still struggle for motivation, but I am determined to try.

Will I be more consistent with this blog? Will I give up on it again?
I don’t know.

But this time, I'm just writing for me, and that’s OK.