This blogging shtick continues to bring surprises. WordPress.com, which hosts my blog, gives me all sorts of feedback numbers about “visits” and “views” and other descriptors I don’t fully understand. This is welcome, if confusing. Since I retired some years ago after fulfilling my capitalist duty to put enough money in the bank to get my kids through college and provide for the probability that at some point my wife and I will need long-term health care I have had the leisure to indulge my high-school ambition of becoming a writer. I started by launching my brilliant thoughts in letters to our local newspaper, hoping they would be noticed by influential big city people summering in our little Connecticut town. I envisioned being invited to join literary discussion circles. I would engage in correspondence with the leading intellectual lights of the age. Now, 30 years later, I have written over 500 essays for two local newspapers without getting more than a couple of dozen responses. I console myself that my opinions have been at odds with the political beliefs of most of my readers. My little town voted two to one Republican, and I identify with the one, not the two. I think the editors of those papers originally accepted my political OpEds more as evidence of their open-mindedness than of their convictions, but I considered this a fair exchange. I got space to air my views and they got credit for being non-partisan. I sometimes tried to spice things up by being deliberately provoking, but instead of the discussion I sought I tended to get either a frustrating silence or angry dismissals (“Why should we pay for a town beach if ‘those people’ are going to be allowed to use it for nothing?”). But I found no specific points that I could use to gin up a conversation. Eventually I gave up — using my columns more as an opportunity to try to clarify my own thinking than to make any attempt at either conversion or conversation.

So when one of the papers changed owners, and the new editor found some of my vocabulary choices objectionable (Specifically, I used the word “nigger” in a piece about euphemisms which she felt might somehow come to the attention of an under-aged and impressionable child reader, scarring him or her for life.) There were in addition other sins involving what the Times sometimes refers to as “a reinforcing expletive” (This was before the Mooch made the word itself the object of the news), and she fired me, I found that I was not happy with enforced silence and I turned to blogging as a solution.

Being of the generation that predated the IT gene, I had the good sense to ask for help from younger friends who were experts. They were kind and patient and set me up with what I needed to get started. I owe them thanks.

I was dubious at first about what the loss of editorial constraint might bring. I could use the words nigger or fuck any time I liked, without fear. But I soon discovered that since they were now easily available they had lost a lot of their power. In fact I haven’t found occasion to actually use either of them so far. I also worried that without having to search for subjects that would interest both me and potentially convertible readers I would end up just ranting. This hasn’t happened either. I find that without deadlines I can spend more time than before on my chosen subjects (and be more careful about researching them), to the benefit, at least in my opinion, of the logic of my arguments. Plus, I no longer felt obliged to comment on every controversial event that popped up in the daily papers, or to post an essay before I was really ready to let go of it. (In this new world, my expert friends explained to me, one doesn’t publish; one “posts”.) My current SOGOTP list (Shit or Get Off the Pot) is currently 31 items long. Blogging has been therefore a blessing on several counts.

OK. A modest audience of no more than a couple of dozen was a major comedown from the combined 9,000 print-run of my two former papers, but I never believed that any large fraction of that supposed readership was mine anyway. WordPress records the number of visitors to my blog every day and reports back. I assume the tallying algorithm is aware of the identity of these visitors, but it doesn’t give me that information. I invite comments at the end of each post, and anyone who wants to can send me a message at the price of disclosing his or her email address. WordPress also gives me a report by geography. It does this by means of a little world map where the country I have reached lights up in highly ego-satisfying color. To see the little map light up in such widely separated spots as South Africa and Sweden and Morocco is a thrill. (All right; I know who it is in Morocco, and the Swedish hits are family members, but South Africa? I have no connection with South Africa.

How do people find my blog and light up my map? My words are of course accessible from the standard web search engines, but I find it more flattering to assume that it is through that “sharing” icon, which is a painless way of passing along to an acquaintance with a simple keystroke something you enjoyed. This surely accounts for a recent unexpected burst of interest from Canada that gave me over 20 hits the other day. I don’t know anyone in Canada who would be reading my blog, but someone apparently just happened in and enjoyed some of my lambasting of the Donald and passed it along to friends.)

But I have one regular visitor who turns up three or four times a month who intrigues me. He or she is in China, which lights up a really gratifyingly huge swath of Asia. I can speculate all I want, but I will probably never find out who that person is. Is he or she some clever dissident who has found a way to bypass the government filters and explore ideas unacceptable to the current rulers of the Kingdom of Heaven, sneaking to the Wifi cafe under cover of darkness; or is he or she a faithful cubicled bureaucrat, keeping tabs on a list of possible sources of information from beyond the wall? I tend to favor the second possibility, given the risks of the first. In my imagination I conjure up an unforgivably prejudicial image of a little man in thick glasses hunched over his laptop and checking the boxes to convince his superiors that he has done this week’s duty to the Party. The really interesting part of this is, of course, that now that I have written this, he or she can possibly be presumed to eventually read it. Will that produce a tear in the cloak of anonymity? Will he or she leave a comment with a return email address? Will we be able to start a conversation?

At any rate, blogging is a new world, and promises new experiences. Life is not over just because you are 94 years old and have been fired by your editor. You can now react in ways formerly inhibited by the state of your bank account (although I was only briefly paid for any of my essays, through a slip of the administrative gears once during an ownership change years ago), and look forward to slowly increasing the number of your hits by paying attention to problems outside your own parochial concerns. Maybe even expand your mind and become a true citizen of the planet.

China, are you there?