TRENDING

Am I a bit premature in spotting a trend here...?

I mean, I know that I’m never going to set the literary world alight with any of my astonishing prose, but the last two months of this epic daily two-year blog-fest have been showing a surprising increase in the numbers just at the time when I really believed everyone would, could and should have lost all interest.

Whilst I know in my mind that I’m always just talking to myself and, in fact, tend to feel slightly disturbed whenever I find out that I’m not, when September burst through that “best ever” barrier I thought “well, that’s fair enough” but when October did it again, and by quite some considerable margin, I did start to wonder what the hell was going on.

Now, of course, I’m suffering from “November anxiety” as the counters are all reset to zero again and we begin the inexorable climb up from nothing once more. The daft thing is that I know that I ought not to look at the numbers, and that, in many ways, the numbers are completely irrelevant. After all, it’s not as if I need to worry about “sales” or “ratings” or anything daft like that. My livelihood does not depend upon these pages to put bread on the table…

Thankfully.

No, believe it or not, I sit here writing, all alone in the dark purely for the “fun” of it. In other words, doing this every day has become, for better or worse, my “hobby”.

It’s what I do to “relax”, whatever that might be…

I might one day curl up and die due to a complete lack of interest, but that would be in the real world, not because of some massively inaccurate counter on a website somewhere, which bears no relationship to the numbers on another counter on another website somewhere, and both of which prove to be that my hard-grafted words, carefully honed thoughts and cleverly chosen phraseologies and bon-mots are looked at on average for less than five seconds, and usually only then by robots or computers from fat corporations trying to work out what my “interests” are…

They’re wasting their time. I have no other interests. Life is merely what I do to get by, and writing fills in the gaps. I’m patently not doing it for any “enjoyment” I might get out of it. I think that ship has well and truly sailed.

After all, none of those increasingly large monthly visitor numbers are down to “real” people. They’re patently not “real” people because, out of the hundreds of pieces of rubbish that I’ve written during these past two years, only three of them stand out from the crowd in any significant way, and all three of those have the word “post” in the title which seems to be what draws their visitors to them, albeit only for a microsecond, and usually because they’re “bots” of some kind tuned in to that particular word, phrase or saying…

But fully two thousand of those mildly impressive “all time visits” have been spent looking at those three pages and the rest, well the rest have kind of passed everyone by, which I think is a bit of a shame, but then I would, wouldn’t I…?

Sometimes I think that things would be no different at all if I merely sat here writing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again for the entire winter. I’ve got a couple of unpublished posts that are a bit like that, actually. If you do regularly follow these witterings, you might very well start to spot the moment when I finally “snapped” if either of those ever appear. Perhaps I should impose upon you to request that you might want to send for the people in the white coats if that morning ever dawns, but seeing as you’re unlikely to have read this far in your five-second visit, and are probably a robot anyway, why should I hope that you’ll remember to do that…?

Anyway, I’ve done the numbers, and made up the gaps and, as we sailed onwards into November, the daily postings, at least in mathematical terms, completed their two years and by adding the 61 from the end of the first year to the 375 in the second and sneaking in a quick 296 for this year we scraped together enough bits and pieces to add up to two times 365 (plus one for the leap year) and so can claim to have reached our target, whatever it might have been.

Yay! Balloons, whistles, little twirly bits of paper falling from the ceiling and so on…

So I can clearly state that I’ve kind of done the numbers and this would be as good a time as any to come to a complete full stop and look for something else to do with which to fill those gaps, but you know I won’t. The backlog of other thoughts, notions and ideas would already drag us wearily towards the coming year if I never wrote another word, and we know that the addiction is far too ingrained for that to be likely.

No, my friends, we seem to be stuck with each other or, at least, I appear to be stuck with this obsession, and you are free to come and go as you please. Well, those of you that aren’t robots are in any case.

As for me, well it’s just Huey, Dewey and Louie and the remains of the “Valley Forge” until that graph plummets back down to zero and we sail into history…