Origin Story

First off, a quick programming note: We'll be back next week, with a preview and review of The Candidate - and Maggie and I will be switching roles next week, as I have to travel for work to lovely Minnesota.

Now then. We've had a fair amount of questions about just how in the hell the Dharma Blog came to be. I can assure you that it wasn't a conscious effort. We didn't think to ourselves one day, "Hey, we love LOST, and there are only 14 million blogs about it on the internet, let's make it 14 million and one!" Actually, it happened surprisingly organically. So, given the off week for LOST, I thought I'd tell the story, for those who care :)

Maggie and I have known each other since grade school. We grew up blocks apart, and went to the same schools, and we've always been good friends. Maggie is a year older than I. She graduated and moved to Boston for school, before returning after her freshman year to finish out at the University of Nebraska. I then went to Texas to attend TCU for four years. When I moved back, Maggie was out in Washington D.C., doing the people's work.

Randomly - or via Facebook, as legend has it - we discovered our mutual love. Our friendship frayed by years of distance, we began to reconnect over our shared obsession in this stupid show. At that time, Eko was still alive, the Others were an abstract concept and W was still president. Sadly.

Anyway. We began emailing each other back and forth about our theories on the show, questions, assumptions, etc. Basically all the stuff you read now on the blog, but in a much more familiar form. As we both had friends who shared our love for LOST, we began including people on the emails. As more people joined the list, we decided to formalize it, with me writing previews and Mags taking the reviews. Once the list got to about 60 or 70 people, it was suggested to us that we ditch the long-form emails and put our thoughts out into the blogosphere for the world to read.

The blog was born at some point in Season 3, and has grown and evolved a ton since then, not unlike the show it covers. Maggie now takes the previews while I handle the reviews. We have changed our perspective of what the show is about a million times. And a lot of people have joined us.

In fact, we are shocked at how many people read this thing. Really. We still can't believe people consider us authorities. I was amazed when a client at my real job told me that his parents were impressed that he actually knew "Charlie who writes the Dharma Blog." He had passed it onto them, and they thought we actually knew what we were doing. We were equally shocked when the local paper wanted to do a story on us.

So, as curiosity got the best of us, we set up analytics on this site back in 2007, to track how many people were visiting us, and from where. In just under three years, we've had:

• Almost 43,000 visits to the site
• Visitors from all 50 states, led by Nebraska (9000), Texas (4000) and New York (3000)
• Visitors from 121 countries/territories, from the US (36,000) to Bahrain (1). Hi, Bahrain!
  

And that is just ridiculous. That's way too many people. But we thank you. We don't advertise on this site, and we don't make any money doing it. We've thought about that, but ultimately, we really just like writing this for ourselves and for those of you who read it, comment on it and think about it. We're glad if we can provide some guidance and clarification to this unbelievably complicated show. We know we miss things, and we know we're wrong sometimes. But we've never really set out to "figure out" LOST or try to predict its ending.

The reason we do this is because, frankly, Maggie and I like a good story. And LOST is one of the best ones we've ever heard. It's so think and so complex that it begs for some interpretation and introspection. And because we're both geeks, both like to write and both have apparently way too much spare time, the blog is a great outlet for us.

And on a personal level, it's been awesome to reconnect with Maggie through this thing. Seriously, she's one of the better friends a person could have, and I was bummed we both lost touch when we moved away. But, silly as this blog is, it's given us a means to reconnect and become great friends again, gathering every week with a few others (Others!) to watch and analyze the show.

It's also been awesome to connect with all of you, albeit only over the internet. Well, sometimes in real life. I moved into a house a year ago, and my neighbor said, "Wait, are you Dharma Blog Charlie?" True story. We're huge in Nebraska.

But really, we love the comments, the questions and the why-didn't-we-think-of-that epiphanies you supply us each week. If I ever go down in a plane onto a mysterious Island that serves as a battleground for age-old philosophical concepts and pseudo-biblical parables, I hope you're all there with me.

Namaste.
Charlie