Who's out there?

Is anybody besides me reading any of this? 

Comment on this post and tell me something about yourself.

Of course there are trillions of websites on the Internet. (Is that even the right order of magnitude? I pulled it out of my ass. It could easily be too big or too small. Oh wait ... I just asked Google, who pointed me to the answer that as of January 2020 there were "over 1.74 billion websites of the Internet. So I guess I exaggerated.)

Anyway, there are a lot of websites on the Internet. The odds of anybody randomly stumbling across this one are correspondingly small. 

That was true when I first started this blog too, but back then I knew how to change it. I became a "comment whore." Back then I was struggling with my wife's chronic infidelity, so I commented on websites that offered support to the cheated-upon. I also started following some blogs by adulterers, to try to understand them from the inside (as it were). I left comments and plenty of linkbacks, and gradually people began to drop in and read what I had to say. Then I went private for several years, for a variety of reasons. Some people stayed with me, until in the natural course of time they slowly drifted away. The way everybody does.

Meanwhile I've gone public again, because the reasons that drove me private no longer obtained. But if anyone is reading today, they are keeping quiet.

And I no longer have a single, overarching theme. I write about whatever I'm thinking about. That makes it harder to play the "comment whore" game a second time, because there is no obvious place for me to go to leave my comments and trackbacks. Do I care? I don't know. Maybe this blog can just take the place of a journal, where -- as noted -- I can write down everything that happens to flit through my head. 

Or, well ... not everything, not with no filter at all. I still try to disguise my identity, so that I don't have to disguise what I think or say. (Oscar Wilde:  "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.") And I mostly try not to talk about politics, because that feels somehow sub-personal. Anything overtly philosophical gets posted on another site, which I refer to casually as "the Patio."

If I knew that I was in conversation with someone in particular, that might help me shape my thoughts. Or not. But it would be nice to know.