Being mildly narcissistic is also why I don't have a Facebook page, so you can stop asking. When I first started my MySpace page as a means to keep in touch with my old Steppenwolf pals, I became obsessed--as many people do--with gaining "friends". A few months in, I looked over my "friends" list and found dozens of folks--sorority girls from Tulsa who didn't like me even then, guys from my dorm freshman year I hadn't spoken to since freshman year, acquaintances from the theatre world I had shared beers with once--and realized I didn't actually like any of these people on any level. So I sheared my friends list from triple digits to something like 60. I didn't care if these folks read the latest dick joke on my totally inappropriate MySpace blog. I didn't need them. I'm uncomplicated like that. Coincidentally, shortly after I met my future wife, I stopped going to MySpace altogether.
However, I found I did miss blogging and that I craved the digital attention that came along with it from the people I did care about. On this blogger, you can track how many people view a certain post and from what section of the world they viewed the content from. It's kind of cool to see someone in Germany access the blog. Conversely, it terrifies me when someone from India looks at the blog...I just know it's some disapproving relative of Krishni's that is making a list of all the many things wrong with me to present to my Father-in-law upon my first visit to his home town.
I have to come to realize, though, that visitors to my blog are not always arriving at my blog intentionally. Sometimes it's just a misfired Google search. I do use a lot of random photos pulled off the internet that I'm sure folks are now pulling off my blog to use. This can skew the results of the "pageviews today" section of my stat sheet.
There have been 4 posts where I saw a sudden and dramatic jump in the number of page views, and the last one troubles me:
1) My very first blog post. This makes sense since I sent a link to just about everyone with whom I'm still in touch.
2) The post about my Mother's memorial service. Again, I forwarded this one to many people, and quite a few folks from the Benet community passed it along the network.
3) My recent post about the check I sent to Mary Kate's Dad for the Notre Dame tickets. This one baffled me. Within an hour, my stat sheet blew up with about 20 pageviews. And that number kept ticking up. This is still my most "popular" posting. I liked that post very much so the results pleased me to no end until my much-smarter-than-me wife pointed out that people were likely just doing desperate google searches for "Notre Dame Tickets". Damn it. They must have been crushed when their searches took them to a blog that can best be described as "Meh".
Which brings us to what troubles me:
4) Last week's post about the obnoxious "child porn" caller I kept getting here at the Rabbit.
This troubles me for many reasons. First off, the level of the spike was kind of insane. I posted that story shortly before I left work (about 4pm CST) and when I checked in later that night, there were something like 30 pageviews. Again, I initially said "Huzzah!" Posts about the insanity of my work--even dating back to my totally inappropriate blog on MySpace--always seemed to generate traffic. People loved passing those types of posts onto their friends with email subject lines like "See? Your shit job could be worse!" and "I told you 29 months of unemployment wasn't so bad!"
But the more I thought about it--and the more I stared at the "viewed countries" on the audience map section of the stats sheet--the more I kept coming back to one thought: "What if people were just googling "child porn" and it brought them to my blog?"
Even now I'm thinking about what kind of sickos are in Russia
Of course, this then conjures the next thought: "Huh. If pedophiles are finding their way to my blog, so is the FBI."
Krishni will tell you this: when I got home that night after talking to that sicko, I had trouble with it. I rarely carry my work home with me--in my "profession" you have to be able to laugh heartily at this type of stuff--but something about that caller really got to me. Maybe it's because I have 9 nieces and nephews or that I am Godfather to two of them or that all of my friends are pushing out babies at a frightening pace...I dunno. But I spent that evening trying to work it out in my brain why that caller disturbed me so. Eventually, I just drank a bunch of vodka, killed things on a civilization game on my computer and hugged it out with my wife.
Of course, maybe--just maybe--I was bothered by the fact that somewhere in the back of my mind I knew the FBI was at that very moment parking a surveillance van outside my condo. If so, they are going to be bored to tears for however long they have to maintain their vigil.
"Dear God. How may episodes of Tosh.0 can they possibly watch?"
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