No Longer Pissing in the Wind

 

by Pa Rock

Gnarly Old Typist

In November this blog will have been in existence  eighteen years.  I started it as a lark on a lonely evening in my apartment in Goodyear, Arizona, intending only to do a few postings in an effort to learn how to blog - and as a way of preserving various writings that I had done over the years.  But, that first posting, which ran on November 4, 2007,  wasn't a preservation project, it was a political piece where I declared my preference for the following year's Democratic presidential nomination.  It was titled "Obama, '08!"  One year later, to the day, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.

(I'm not trying to claim credit - Barack would have probably won without my endorsement!)

Over the ensuing years this space has featured fiction and poetry from my daft mind, political screeds, human interest stories, reviews, travel writing, family history, all manner of personal opinion laced with occasional outrage, and even guest editorials from old friends with time on their hands.   During the first few months I missed a few days, but once the obsession took hold I have pumped it out on a daily basis, and some days published multiple entries.  During the 6,378 days of which Pa Rock's Ramble has been in existence, today marks entry number 6,558.

(That does not count the one piece that Google pulled ten years after it had been posted - because someone had been offended.  If no one was ever offended, I've probably wasted my time.)

Let's explore a few more statistics and then I will (finally) get around to what today's column is about.  There is a counter on the blog's homepage which I installed a couple of years after The Ramble began.  It shows the amount of hits to the front (current) page - and over the years since its installation that counter has registered 137,712 hits.  But, with a blog featuring literally more than 6,000 separate documents, and on a platform run by Google, the world's busiest search engine, many of my older posts are viewed each day as well.  This morning, for instance, I have had only a handful of views of the current post - the one that went up yesterday, but Google says that on this day alone, 368 people have looked at something in The Ramble's archives.

And Google says that since the first date of publication back in 2007, 1,138,508 individuals have viewed a posting on Pa Rock's Ramble.   And I feel very good about that!

I used to promote the blog on Twitter, and would have fifty or so views on every posting on the day they went up.  But I left Twitter when Elon bought it and all of the Nazis came rushing back in.     At that point, without the help of social media, readership dropped to between ten and twenty for each new posting.  As I typed harder and harder, the results seemed more and more dismal.  I seriously considered abandoning the effort at that point, but my OCD wouldn't allow it.  I also considered renaming the blog (with apologies to the late Jerry Jeff Walker) "Pissing in the Wind," because that was increasingly what I felt about the declining effectiveness of the effort - and it was, and still is, an effort.

But, not being proud, I kept on typing - and then the new Twitteresque platform, Blue Sky, opened, and I found a new home there, a place to promote my tired old blog and hopefully draw in some new readers - and it is working amazingly well.  Now the blog's readership tops thirty almost every day, and it is back at the fifty level once every week or so.  A posting about my home town's old city dump caught fire last week (the posting, not the dump) and quickly reached more than ninety hits.

So the blues are abating and I am beginning to feel relevant again.

Then yesterday, and here comes the point of this whole damned meandering post, I received individual emails from a pair of old friends, and both of those communications had the heft and feel of very welcome paychecks.  A lady I went to school with from fifth grade through our senior year - and whom I was employed by at one point many years later - told me that she enjoyed my writing and that I have "good sense."

And a retired master teacher whom I taught with nearly fifty years ago said:

...god sakes i enjoy reading your stuff!! Your biting, dry humor. is a delight. Most times i tend to forget but then i do a binge read...and nod agreement and laugh and wish more would tune in. Keep on writin' Rock; 'tis important.

All of that praise was enough to fill my writing tank.    The feeling of pissing in the wind has blown on by, and now I am probably good for another ten years of tyrannical typing.

It humbles me to feel appreciated.