NO POINT

Before we start, this really, really isn’t directed at you. You are, after all, already here, but these musings and rattlings of the bones of the skeletons in my cupboard are really being read by less and less people all of the time and, on occasion, I feel that I have to “take a moment” to reassess quite what it is that I’m hoping to achieve whenever I take it upon myself to sit down at a keyboard, string a few words together and then decide to share them  with the (not exactly) waiting world outside, who seem to be mostly indifferent to whether I actually do, and are hardly anxiously hanging on with bated breath waiting for the next instalment.

When I say “you” in that last paragraph of course, I could of course be referring to absolutely no-one at all… There is evidence to support the fact that one or two of these pages have never been “viewed” by anyone at all, so “you” might not have read one word of this so far, which makes every word of it so far appear to be just a little bit pointless.

Such is the strange duality of the life of the habitual bloggist. You write to share, but mostly you just write. The sharing part is beyond your control and, much like in shop-keeping, there isn’t a great deal you can do about it apart from presenting your wares where you will, and hoping that people will feel intrigued enough to poke their noses around the corner, have a quick look around and hopefully feel compelled enough to visit again.

Meanwhile, there remain all of the little, I can only call them “disappointments” I suppose, that come along with this weird world that I’ve chosen to join. I post links that aren’t followed, and they’re rarely, if ever, “liked” or “recommended” to anyone else by those who do venture here. Those are the moments when you really do feel like just giving up, when you start to realise that this is how things are “supposed” to work if you are ever going to achieve a modicum of what those “in the know” might call “success”, so that, in the end, the whole sorry enterprise can seem like the colossal waste of time that you always suspected that it really is. Very few of my “visitors” take the time to “comment”, so when they do it’s like finding a gold nugget and I feel that I should respond, even if, in the end, those responses lack the care and forethought that I like to think I put into these writings before I dare to hit “publish” and can end up seeming crass and flippant when really, I’m just so very grateful for the opportunity to engage in a bit of an exchange of ideas.

However, this nagging sense of not making any progress with making the mutterings themselves more widely appreciated could be because I don’t have the vast mass of contacts that many people seem to have who actually take some sort of an interest about whether they’re still breathing or not, but that’s nobody’s fault but mine, as the mighty Led Zep might have put it, although not about something as trivial as this, I’m sure.

The actual truth is that most of my internet “friends” don’t read a word of it, and, if you look at the figures, it appears that most of my “followers” (and I do dislike the messianic overtones of that) don’t read it either. Most of the “real” people who I actually see and know don’t read it, despite the many hints that I’ve dropped over the last couple of years. My family (such as it is) don’t read it either as a rule (mainly because some of them don’t even know it’s here and I would like it to stay that way, thank you very much), although one of them seems to drop in from time-to-time to work out just quite how mad I’m becoming…

Some days it might seem that even I don’t read it (but then you may have noticed that from mi spelinz and the gramer wot uze I…) but that’s because since I worked out how to “post date” or “schedule” these things, I do occasionally not quite remember which of them I have chosen to “entertain” you with on a particular morning. I do, after all, like to get slightly ahead of myself to allow for those “braindead” mornings when no words will come, although playing that particular game is risky and it does cause occasional havoc when real-world current events overtake the schedule…

What tends to happen is that you get a really, really “good” day and all of those people realise that there’s nothing there that they like and so it’s followed by a really, really bad day...

A friend of mine went “fishing” the other day, attaching a quick self-deprecating memo of  the “I can write what I like, nobody reads it anyway” variety to his latest posting. Naturally this elicited a small but significant flurry of positive responses (and one slightly more cynical one from a certain blogger you might know…) claiming that each and every one of them was reading every word he wrote every day which, I presume, wasn’t the experience that the author was getting, otherwise he wouldn’t have felt the need to add his memo in the first place.

At least people did claim to be reading him, though. Here in Lesser Blogfordshire, these pages are regularly read by three or four rather lovely people and the occasional stray, and similar attempts at flagrant “fishing” that I have tried in the past have had a response resembling the tumbleweed blowing through an old wild west ghost town.

Like in most things, it really comes down to who you know…

In fact I think it’s impressive that he has a large enough circle of people who are prepared to actually notice when he mentions such things, and it does prove that numbers really do make a difference when it comes to making connections in life. I think it also makes it pretty clear that, despite the fact that he might believe his efforts are stuttering or even stalling, in the end they will prevail, whereas, eventually I suspect that my own will falter and cease.

“Falter and Cease” – Undertakers to the Under-appreciated.

Not, I know that I am not really under-appreciated. You few, you happy few, are very loyal and very supportive, which is why these mutterings have managed to keep stumbling along through the darkness during those times when I’ve really considered calling it a day. I do know that if I ever properly stop (as opposed to taking one of my “little breaks” in which the thoughts and ideas still manage to come to mind despite the change of focus), like my Amazon reviews, they are very unlikely to ever start up again. If I let these pages lie fallow for a couple of months, like I keep on fully intending to on occasion, I know that when I try to resume them I will wonder how I ever found the time, make a half-hearted attempt at writing something that will feel to me like it is a really bad piece of writing, and then just give up.

It’s a pattern. It’s what I do…

But I guess that we all need to feel that what we’re doing has some kind of point, however pointless it might be in itself, because it’s a fairly common practice amongst many of those of us who swim in the murky waters of the internet peddling our feeble wares. Some just bulldoze their way along without really caring one way or another, and others are far more introspective and worry about it all the time, hence the need for the occasional reassurance a “fishing” trip can bring.

A bit like in real life, I suppose...

After all that, of course, May 2012 turned out to be a particularly robust month in terms of “page views” of my own humble efforts at entertaining the world from my headquarters in Lesser Blogfordshire, as last month eventually hurtled into an “all time top two” position, and it might very well have climbed even higher if I hadn’t had a crisis in confidence at the start of the week and decided that my last few offerings were far too tedious to bother posting links to…

After all, subjects like lost keys and morning coffee are hardly the kinds of things that you should feel proud enough of to want to draw any attention to them now, are they...? As it happened, events beyond my control rather overtook the nice little routines that I had managed to put into place in my new life. After all, like cousin Mycroft, it takes monumental events to shift me off the rails of my predictable routine, and when they do, my own quiet little place in the great scheme of things can seem permanently shattered and changed forever, and small things, like my quiet little piece about my morning coffee last Monday, now feels like it belongs in another world.

Another acquaintance of mine did one of those “I’m checking to see who reads my stuff, so post this to your status” experiments during the same week, but in that instance the “fishing expedition” finally drove even me to switching them off in my news feed (now that I know you can do that) after weeks of reading what came across to me as being their “Look at me, aren’t I great? Please tell me how great I am…” postings that seemed to me to have an air of increasing desperation about them which, as we all know, works for some people, especially those who are easily manipulated, and are a definite (or literal) “turn off” to others.

But then, perhaps that’s what everyone else thinks about me, and perhaps they’ve already done precisely the same thing. After all, none of us are above a little bit of fundamental hypocrisy when it comes to this sort of nonsense, are we...?