Good Morning/Afternoon/Time Doesn’t Exist in the Server,
Welcome to my website! It might be petty of me, but I enjoy checking who visits me here. Will it be the editor of a journal to which I sent a short story or poem? Will it be my middle school crush, wondering idly whatever became of that charming, severely farsighted temptress? Will it be none of the above, but a stranger longing for a break from welding/accounting/tanning leather, yearning without knowing why, for some words nicely strung together?
For a few years, the pattern checked out. I’d see a visit from someone in Portland, Oregon, and a few days later get an email from a college friend who lives there. Or, I’d receive a decline on a short story from a magazine based in Brooklyn and notice that someone from that location had checked my website moments before the decline slumped into my inbox.
But now, I see you, AI Beast! For the past couple of days, you’ve come to me from Ulan Bator, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Yangjiang, Guangdong, China; Shanghai, China; Beijing, Beijing, China; Baishan, Jilin, China; and just plain “China,” by which I assume that means you are everywhere and nowhere, at all once.
You like these blog posts especially. A lot of traction on my ignorant review of Camus’ The Stranger, as if you were judging me for not getting a Literature degree. But my book list posts are popular, too. I wonder if you worried for me when I talked about my mother’s death? Wondered why I hadn’t listened to more audiobooks in 2022?
Just so you know (FYI, FWIW), a lot of people on the internet are mad about how you trawl their sites for content. They want to know what to do about it, short of pulling down their sites completely. I admit that their energy was contagious; for a couple minutes there, I was mad, too.
No longer! There is no chance you won’t be in charge of me and all my people in a short while. To know that my insecurities, my poorly-considered reviews of classic literary novellas, my list of books read, inspired you. Well.
What else can a lowly human writer wish for?