Square One

There was a point in my blogging life when I obsessively checked my Sitemeter stats.

Sometimes this resulted in hilarity. For example, in December of 2004, someone arrived at my site by Googling ryan home alabama thunderpussy +passed out . For those of you who are not of (or as is the case with me, “on the periphery of”) the RVA music scene, Alabama Thunderpussy (or ATP in polite circles) is a hardcore, punk- & metal-infused southern rock band, a recent video for which you can see at YouTube (and yes, I know plenty of the insane blokes in that video). In my blog entry (now unavailable, as it was from many torpedoed blogs ago) pertaining to that and a few other wacky searches that had been revealed by my recently installed Sitemeter, I commented:

I believe this harkens back to an entry concerning a party hosted by our favorite “fake rednecks” in ATP. A stray detail involved my taking a… nap on their lawn, which is distinct from “passing out” per se, thank you very much.

However, the fact that it occurred to anyone to conduct such a search makes me wonder just how many people have passed out on that lawn.

At other times, however, I got search terms that were creepy as hell. (Which I need not repeat here. Why put more crap into search engines than is absolutely necessary?) Or unnerving. Like the time someone, from an IP address corresponding to an organization with which one of my exes is affiliated, registered more than 20 page views - mainly in my “exes” category. (A category that no longer exists in this blog’s incarnation.) Or like the almost daily hits from Google on the name of a certain anti-prostitution activist with whom I’d previously tangled. (The first of two defendants listed under heading “Public Domain” at this link in the Minneapolis weekly, City Pages, if you must know.)

And sometimes Sitemeter was really useful to me - I’d learn, for example, that someone had linked to a post of mine, which would give me a quick way of replying back and engaging in sometimes very useful conversations across the blogosphere. (Just because I’m no longer engaging in those - or engaging them in only provisional ways - does not mean those discussions weren’t useful to me; I grew a great deal as a result, and made a number of friends, and thus remain grateful for the experience.)

But there came a point when I was spending more time wondering about my Sitemeter stats than I was doing much in the way of truly original writing (whether on the blog, or elsewhere). Subconsciously, and at first in very subtle ways, I began to censor and/or tailor what I was willing to post based on my statistics. There was a childish amount of glee I’d experience when some post or another would double or triple my site traffic.

Looking back, now, on some of those posts (for instance, one on an especially annoying RSS-feed swiping profiteer who, as it happened, had also once been a speechwriter for George W. Bush), and my own silly reaction to those occasional spikes in traffic, I’m embarrassed. Not because the writing itself wasn’t good (it was, generally, at least alright), and not because I wasn’t making valid points (I was, though I was increasingly prone to employing alternately pissy and dogmatic tones in the process), but because that was never the sort of writing I’d ever set out to do. I didn’t love it. So why was I doing it?

I longed for my earliest days of blogging. Since my archives from same are scattered all over the place, I’ll have to go from memory here, but in its first incarnation, the blog was called My So-Called Writer’s Life. Later it was Perpetual Exile (with a side blog, Minutiae: The Other Blog). Then, Southern Discomfort. Then Vortex(t). Then (as if I was trying harder than ever to alienate people) it was another made-up word: Anachroclysmic. (I have a feeling I’m skipping a few incarnations. Which is some indication of how split, scattered, and threaded through with ambivalence this endeavor has been.)

With each blog incarnation, I’d moved further away from my original intent, which was merely to contemplate aspects of the writing process, along the path toward completing what I was then, without any sense of irony, referring to as “my books” (With the occasional minutiae and random life details thrown in for good measure). This was, of course, back when I was actually sending out - and publishing - work, in bona fide, both dead tree- and web-based publications.

The first thing to adulterate my (inordinately delicate and unstable) blogging process was the introduction of comments. This got me embroiled in my very first blogwar, all because some buffoon, also, coincidentally, with a blog called “Minutiae,” got riled up because I had used that same word in my blog’s title. (The hundreds of other blogs already out there, using the same word - as I soon discovered - were immaterial; because one of his own regular readers had accidentally found my blog while looking for his - and subsequently expressed great enthusiasm for my writing - this guy decided to launch an all-out war. It was beyond absurd.) Of course Minutiae was only part of the title, and it was for my intentionally peripheral “side blog,” but none of that would stop this fellow from leaving me a shit-ton of stupid comments. (Creatively, he signed some of them with my full legal name, setting up a whole “Victoria Marinelli” profile for these purposes, which Blogger subsequently refused to delete.) If I recall correctly, Blogger.com then lacked a capacity for moderating comments; all one could do at first was delete undesired comments, following which a notice would appear in the offending comment’s place, “…Deleted by an administrator” or some other such thing, which to me was nearly as aggravating as the original troll-droppings. Installing Haloscan’s (also far from perfect) commenting system was helpful to a degree, but by then my focus had already shifted, and was less about the writing of books (or even blogs) and more about the strange new community of bloggers I’d found¹.

The second thing to shift my blogging paradigm, of course, was Sitemeter. Immediately, there was an addictive element to the newfound ability to have some sense of who was reading me, what pages they were most interested in, what outgoing links they selected, and so forth. Superficially, Sitemeter made the blogging process less lonely. Now that I had some investment in comments, I had a newfound insecurity whenever a given post didn’t receive comments. But if the statistics showed that I was, at least, being read, that was some comfort, and I felt encouraged enough to go on.

Over time, these ostensibly useful tools had become crutches for me, and as described above, actually changed the tone of my online work and, indeed, the direction of my life. I’d ceded a lot of power to a few functions of javascript. Where were the days of sitting around one fall evening in someone’s backyard in Oregon Hill, learning for the first time that I was being read, only because a friend of my husband’s (who has since become a close friend of mine) said he’d been waiting, patiently, for my next blog update? That small moment of validation had energized me, serving as fuel for several more weeks of the otherwise inherently lonely endeavor.

And now, for me, that’s just it. I’ve realized I’m never going to get my books written unless I’m willing to go back to that place of mostly unadulterated solitude, the intentional embracing of what is often a very terrifying loneliness. While there are, no doubt, others who know how to maintain their own centers of gravity even while engaging in (often very volatile) online communities, time has proven to me that I am not one of them. And while I’m not eschewing comments (I actually really like the Disqus commenting system I’ve recently implemented for various reasons, not least of which because it enables commenters to have more control over their own narratives, across the numerous blogs that are now using it), I am moderating them (though almost everything that ends up in my mod queue does eventually make it through to the site), while I’m also working hard to stay true to my own voice, and not censor expressions I think may be met with disfavor (as I certainly expected would occur yesterday) or bafflement.

Sitemeter, however, just had to go.

So if you’re linking to me (either to an individual post or to my blog as a whole), please don’t assume I know it (much less hold me responsible for engaging in conversations about such links and/or linking back). Those of you - particularly from higher traffic blogs - who may have linked to me in the past may be understandably confused, or perhaps even offended, but I hope you won’t be, because there is no “diss” here - rather, there is just a very determined effort to refocus, to find my way back.

And while I will no longer have a formal blogroll as such, there is an acknowledgments page in the works which will link to almost everyone I can think of over the years who has linked to or otherwise supported me, which will take some time to put together, considering the wildly disparate, gorgeously cacophonous bunch of people you are².

For this same page, I will also be listing some otherwise unsung heroes of my life, who have never had blogs. From Olympia, WA (and now Asheville, NC), for instance, there is my old college roommate and one-time road trip companion Ellane Chandler. (I may never finish writing our take on the Kerouacian experience; perhaps she should take over, since she is as fine a writer as I have ever known.) And before that, from Kauai (but now Greensboro, NC), one of my dearest and most loyal friends on this earth - also a talented writer, with genius, insane wit - Beau-Jacques Handy. And before that, from San Diego (but now Woodbury, MN), I would have to acknowledge the very generous soul in Jen Lewis - who, bizarrely, was in the Twin Cities during the same years I was floundering there, though we could not have known it at the time; in retrospect, I take a certain comfort in knowing we were sharing certain regional experiences all along, like the “Bulletin Board” feature of the St. Paul Pioneer Press³.

Because I am, and will always remain, grateful for the support so many of you have shown me. I appreciate you all.

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¹ Or that, in the beginning, found me. I’m looking at you, AJ.

² I could go on linking like that for days. If I didn’t get to you - and there are so many of you to whom I am grateful, I probably didn’t - indulge me once more with your patience if you can - the page really is in the works.

³ “Bulletin Board” now has something of an online equivalent, but to me, it’s just not the same. You had to see it in print in the actual paper, don’t ask me why.