“Some will come back. So post wisely and well.”
―Lambert
Strether
First, the Backstory
Monday.
Earth Day. 10:00 a.m.―oh, alright, quarter-to-eleven―I roll out of the sack in
anticipation of a fairly laid-back day, not quite awake but too awake to get
back to sleep. There’s nothing on today’s agenda more complicated than booting
the computer, checking e-mail, fixing breakfast, doing some prep work in my
garden, visiting with my neighbors, fixing lunch, with time for reading and
writing near day’s end followed by a late dinner and more reading before
retiring around 2 a.m. So far, at least, it looks like just another routine day―minus
a few of the routines.
Except
this is not a routine day; today is Earth Day―a major holiday for me―and I plan
on giving it a rest. The petitions can wait. The pleas for donations can wait. Blog
and blogosphere can wait. Although I have yet to lay eyes on my computer this
morning, I already envision deleting e-mail as fast as I can pound the delete
key, because I know most of it will be the same kind of vacuous bullshit that
shows up during every holiday―essentially meaningless trivia trying hard to
disguise the fact that the message contains nothing of great importance. No
time for that today. Delete. Delete.
Delete.
Fifteen
minutes later I’m at my computer, breakfast in hand and coffee close-at-hand,
scrolling and scanning for e-mail that might demand my immediate attention when
something leaps out and grabs it. Yippee-ki-yay! Someone commented on the piece
I posted on Saturday, and before I can stop myself I click the mouse. In less
than a minute, my plans for the day begin to unravel.
It’s
not the comment that causes the unraveling, however, but what’s happening on my
Feedjit Live Traffic Feed. For some reason, Frieddogleg suddenly seems to be every
Internet surfer’s favorite destination; the traffic is insane. Clearly,
something unusual is going on, possibly something important, and almost
certainly something that bears further investigation. Before I can stop myself,
I click the mouse.
The
Feedjit Live Traffic Feed window on the blog page shows the last ten visitors
to the blog. Clicking the Real-time View link at the bottom of the window takes you
to the Feedjit site, where you get to see the last 50 visitors. In my case,
only the most recent visitor hails from Portland, Oregon; the previous 49
represent visits from diverse locations all around the world over the last two
or three hours. It’s unprecedented. I’ve only seen this kind of activity on A-
and B-list blogs, never before on Frieddogleg. The standard questions―Who?
What? Why, How? Where?―are most in need of answers, but how many times have this
list turned over is the question now burning brightest in my mind.
(to be continued)
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