This Mystic Decade

Ten years is a long time to do anything, let alone produce a podcast. But sure enough, today marks the 10th birthday of Completely Conspicuous. Thankfully, I never had any grand aspirations for the thing other than to make it. I started in the early days of podcasting when nobody knew what the hell one was and kept plugging away while the popularity of audio entertainment waxed and waned. I still toil away in obscurity, but it's no big deal. I'm having fun.

With 431 episodes ranging in length from 11 minutes to nearly 2 hours, I've recorded thousands of hours of myself jibba-jabbing; most of those are with guests, but the first few years were all me. Some shows were recorded in front of the computer, many remotely with my Zoom H2 recorder and many over Skype. I've tried to maintain a weekly output and have been mostly successful for the last seven years or so.

There have been many guests over the years. The most frequent have been Jay Breitling (who allowed me to use his song "Theme to Big F'in Pants" as the podcast's theme), Brian Salvatore, Ric Dube and Matt Phillion, but there have been plenty of others who have been gracious enough to join me. As for the future of the show, I'll do it as long as I'm still enjoying myself. There were a few points when I considered calling it a day but held on so I could get to the big 10-year mark. Now that I'm there, I've got no inkling of how long it will go. I've been doing this expansive look at years in rock (1980-1999) with Brian Salvatore and I'd like to see that through; we've got four more to go, I believe. But really, it's been therapeutic to talk about things I'm interested in with people I like. If nothing else, it gives me an excuse to get together with friends and really talk about things. In this day of texts and Facebook likes, there's something to be said for in-depth, face-to-face (or computer-to-computer) conversation.

It has never been about download stats (which is good, because they've never been substantial) or attention. As with all the other extracurricular things I do, the audience is small and the feedback is minimal (although I will say the exception for the latter is the running column). And that's fine. The main audience for everything I do is myself. If anybody else checks it out, all the better. So here's to 10 years!