On Regular Readers

It surprises me sometimes that anyone would want to spend their time reading my webpage. People do, and I’m grateful for that because I would rather not shout into the wind, yet it still comes as a surprise.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that I have regular readers.

Some I’ve learned to identify by IP address in the website logs. University of Michigan, Miami of Ohio, I see their footprints in the logs. I haven’t figured out who’s reading on the UCLA campus, but I know someone is.

But that’s not my furthest reader. There’s a regular reader in Saudi Arabia. There’s a handful down below in Australia. And someone on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. I don’t even know where the Cocos (Keeling) Islands are, but I’ve seen those footprints, too.

I know some of the people who read here personally. Some work for me now. Some worked for me in the past. Some were customers. Some are people I’ve met at conventions or who crossed my path at one time or another. Some are people I know only through the Internet–we’ve traded e-mails or IMs at one time or another. I imagine there are readers I don’t know at all, who know me only through the two stories I’ve had published. Or the people who have come here thanks to the graces of Google, wanting information on Denny Crane, the Babes of Norrath, or William Poole of Winchester, Kentucky (to take three top search draws of late). Transient readers, but readers nonetheless.

The primary audience, though, is myself. There are things I would like to write about–like an incident at work that made me sad, for instance–that I can’t, and when I do write about them I do so in very oblique terms. Instead, the things I write about are the things that strike my interest, a passing thought, a rant to vent, a social oddity, the kind of stuff you tell your best friend or a buddy at the bar after work. Un-profound stuff, and frankly, it sometimes bores even me.

Why write it, then? Because I can is a reason, but not a good reason. No, I write the stuff, even the boring stuff, because sometimes the trivial things need to be said just to expunge the mind, the way you sometimes whistle the tune stuck in the head in the hope that by whistling it you won’t hear it anymore. When I lack for an audience in real life, I make up for with an audience here.

Suffice to say, there’s an audience here. An eclectic audience, to be sure. I may beg their indulgence at times in my more pointless moments, but it’s also gratifying to know that I’m not always shouting into the wind.