Doing the write thing

I have been writing a blog for 15 years now. I've written about countless random things. Sometimes it is funny. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is reflective. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is entertaining. And sometimes it is not.

In the beginning I was enthusiastic and wrote pretty regularly. I remember being amazed when the first person commented. And there was a brief period where several people read and regularly commented. I developed, for a lack of a better term, virtual friends. But it turned out that that they were just virtually friends. They for the most part scurried back to their real lives.

My blog stats indicate that on some days my pages get a couple of hundred hits. Not totally understanding how metrics work, I have grown to assume that very few of those hits are by humans. I now assume they are bots roaming the Web searching for life. I feel like my blog is like the moon, lifeless and scarred by bot-meteors striking it randomly.

I miss real comments instead of  nonsensical things like, "2016 En Popüler Kitaplar Tavsiye Edilen Kitaplar (which is apparently Turkish for 2016 Most Popular Books Recommended Books."

It's not even legitimate spam.

Since I am by profession a marketing person, I have tried marketing my blog. You can subscribe to my blog through Amazon (no one ever has). There is a Dizgraceland Facebook page. And I have a Twitter account and an Instagram account. There is also my YouTube account that I tried to create video versions of some of my most popular posts. I even have a TikTok account. But I never post anything to it because the average age on TikTok is 18 and I would be ostracized if I posted. And I'm more than a bit pissed that some people on TikTok have thousands of people following their crap and all they do is post short videos of them brushing their teeth.

I suppose I am reflecting on all of this because at times I wonder why I still blog. It is clear that few if anyone still reads it.  But I can't seem to bring myself to stop. It is one of my only creative outlets. And although most of the photos I Photoshop are of myself, I still get a kick out of creating the images.

So I continue to write my messages on my desert island of a blog, slip them into a bottle and toss them into the Internet ocean.  After all, who knows who will ever find them.