MY COSTA BUDDY, HELPING ME CELEBRATE 500 BLIPS

I've been thinking,
What's the whoop-dee-do?
The significance, if you will.
With the number 500.

You have your Fortune 500's,
Your Indy 500's.
But, what's with Blip's 500's?
Or Kathee's 500's
I found the answer in an unlikely place.

Did you see the 2001 movie, Knock around Guys?
...... That's what I thought.
You didn't miss much.
It's a rather uninspired gangster film .

But there's that one line,
An introspective thought from a sometime mafia hit man.
Spoken by tough guy Vin Diesel's character,

500 fights, that's the number I figured when I was a kid.
500 street fights and you could consider yourself a legitimate tough guy.
You need them for experience. To develop leather skin.
So I got started.
Of course along the way you stop thinking about being tough and all that.
It stops being the point. You get past the silliness of it all.
But then, after, you realize that's what you are.
______

So, I guess after 500 blips,
I can maybe, consider myself a legitimate photographer.
Resilient enough to force a photo to work,
When it'd be so much easier to dump it.

Of course along the way,
Friendships are made,
Windows around the world are opened.
Blip becomes part of who I am.

Thank you my worldwide friends for making me feel like the photographer I've always wanted to be.