Other than I've been keeping myself busy, I almost forgot that I had this blog. I mean, isn't that usually how it goes? You start a blog, and you post like a motherfucker in the beginning because you had so much to write about that you had to start a blog so you tell the world.
So you post and post and post. At that point you don't care how many readers you have because you're not writing for them. This is your own personal diary, but it's public because you don't care. You swear, and give out the most intimate details about everything in your life. You write about the syrup you put on your pancakes and Eggo brand waffles. You write about who you had sex with, who you didn't have sex with, and who you want to have sex with. You write about presidental elections and then you write about disappointment.
You tell all.
Then you install a statistic "widget", or tracking code or something because at some point in your blogging career, you get curious as to who is really looking at your blog, and what keywords they're using.
Then you realize that you care about those things. You care that you only had four page views yesterday. You care so much that you register your blog to endless blog registries, and you blatantly shill your website address (www.crushthemall.com) everywhere you go on the internet. You post it as your signature, and put it on your Xbox Live account.
So, you finally get to see how many people are visiting your site. You get excited. Knowing realistically that there aren’t too many people out there who probably know about your site, but you’ve added some blog links to yours, hoping whoever you’ve linked reciprocates. You hope that the shameless plugging you’ve done has garnered some page views. You hope that maybe 100 people read your blog. Not 100 people total…. 100 people a day. So, imagine your surprise to find out that only 1 or 2 people a day visit your blog. Knowing full well, that one of those visits a day is probably you. The other is probably your mom or the government. If you’re lucky, you’ll see a spike in visits, with the numbers reaching 3, or even 4.
Thoughts race through your head. “Am I really writing anything that’s relevant? Do people even care about the random things I do or see?”
Then the blogging depression sets in. You think to yourself, “Why bother blogging? Nobody reads it.”
So you stop writing. And you’ve set up your blog as one of the first pages that you go to during the day, so you constantly remind yourself that you haven’t been writing. Pretty soon you ignore that reminder and then you kind of forget about it for a little bit.
A random amount of time passes. Some things happen. Some things don’t happen. You travel somewhere, you meet someone, you experience something fantastic and you need to tell someone. You’ve already told all of your friends, and your family knows too. Who else to tell but some strangers? You decide to fire up the blogging engine and write some random crap that you think is totally relevant to whatever situation, but completely pointless to the reader. You pour your little heart out, typing all of the biggest, useless words you know. You express yourself openly, including every little detail that won’t get you incriminated in a court of law.
All for what? 4 page views a day.
But you don’t care. You blog because you miss it. You blog because it’s the only diary you’ve ever known. You blog because it’s a way to look back on memories. And every once in a while, someone who knows you, or wants to get to know you, will read your blog, and finally learn that one piece of information they can one day use as blackmail.
And it’s all your fault.
