Mr. Dave goes to Sacramento

First of all, I want to say THANK YOU to everyone who follows my blog, reads it, tolerates me spamming it on my FB page, reposts my articles on other forums, accidentally comes here looking for "giant black dildo porn" (A keyword search that was actually responsible for TWO hits on my blog, how I have no idea...), or just says "good luck, Dave, I hope you go somewhere with all of this."  I appreciate each and every one of you more than I could possibly convey with mere words, including the jerk offs who make anonymous accounts so they can shit talk me for thinking Ryan Reynolds sucks as an actor.  Without all of you, I wouldn't be here right now, even if "here" is only about one, one and a half steps further forward than I was back in February when I started this thing.

It's because of this blog that I have attracted a little bit of attention and a modest following.  As of my latest count, this blog is averaging somewhere around 3,000-4,000 individual page views per month.  That's around 100-130 or so page views per day.  That's incredible to me.  Also, these stats completely ignore my own clicks on this page to proofread my stuff and make sure I still agree with what I posted and don't decide to delete a whole post and write something new instead.  So, whether it's 130 people clicking once, 25 people clicking 5 times or 10 people who really like reading my posts each day, it's awesome and humbling at the same time.

Part of that attention has resulted in an amazing opportunity being presented to me.  Thanks to the incredible generosity of my friend Mark Borba, I will be attending a two-day seminar in Sacramento, tomorrow and Wednesday, the purpose of which is to educate a prospective candidate on the essentials of running a successful political campaign.  Now I'm not currently seeking to begin a career as a politician, but I feel that the learning experience that attending this seminar will provide is going to be invaluable to me.  I intend to take as much from this experience as I possibly can and use it to advance my career aspirations, whether it be as a political staffer, a better-educated opinion writer or whatever destination this journey takes me to.  Who knows, perhaps a year or two from now, I might be out there hammering signs in the ground promoting my bid for an assembly seat or city council or something.  The point is, this is an amazing, once in a lifetime opportunity, and I don't think it would have been possible if I didn't start this modest little blog just a few short months ago.

Opportunity is a wonderful, powerful thing.  I've often said that the greatest resource we have in America is opportunity.  It's worth more than wealth, because opportunity creates wealth.  There's the classic saying "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime."  Well, opportunity is the bait on that hook, it's access to a body of water, filled with fish.  It's the chance for that newly-instructed, would-be fisherman to throw his line out there and begin the deeply satisfying journey of self-sufficiency.  Opportunity is the $500,000 venture capital loan that helped Mark Zuckerberg take Facebook from an inter-collegiate hookup site to the world's largest, most powerful and most influential social network.  Opportunity was a guy named Carson Daly, who used to be a DJ for a local alt rock station in San Jose, who was offered a job at the KROCK affiliate in Los Angeles, who told my friend Greg Camp that he was going to take his band, Smashmouth's, CD to LA with him and get it played on his show because he believed they could make it big if they had a chance to get heard.  A couple weeks later, their song "Walking on the Sun" was the most requested song at the station, Smashmouth signed a record deal soon after and within just a few short years they had toured the world opening for bands like U2 and Lenny Kravitz.  Opportunity, it connects great people to great things.  It opens the door and all you have to do is walk through it.

Tonight, opportunity is taking me to Sacramento, to gain invaluable insight into the political process.  Knowledge that I know I will use to it's fullest.  Over the next two days, I'm planning to document as much of the process as I can and blog about it copiously.  My apologies in advance to any of you who might find my posts over the next couple days to be boring as a result (winky face).  I am grateful for this opportunity and thankful to Mr. Borba for making it possible, and while I'm fully aware that this is surely all part of his diabolical scheme to convert me to the dark side of conservatism, where I can be the Darth Vader to his Emperor Palpatine, and together we can rule the universe (winky face), I am nonetheless very appreciative and eager to get up there and start soaking in the knowledge like a sponge.

So, in the immortal words of Baxter, from The Great Space Coaster "Get on board for a magical trip, and where we land this time is anybodies guess!"