One Ninety-Two, Where Are You?

Well, it's finally happened. After months of holding steady, (what some might call "festering stagnation"), I lost another follower.

Where, oh, where did I go wrong?

This, of course, is inevitably what happens when you don't blogvertise, when you don't blogket, when you don't netblog or tweet or slit the slitted sheet on which you sit.

One day random Wednesday, some funky chick in Morgantown, West Virginia or wherever wakes up, looks at her blog roll and says,

"My Masonic Apron-- what the fuck is this cock?" and she hits "Un-Follow."

Un-followed. I have been unfollowed. The blogging equivalent of "De-friended."

Zoinks. That's a real kick in the cyberballs.

The thing is, though, it isn't really. When I look and see that I have (now) 191 followers, I laugh. Because, really, I don't. You know me and my obsessive ways-- I check the stats of this blog daily, because I'm curious, still, even after all these months and these 780 posts or whatever it is. I'm curious about peoples' reading habits. I would say maybe, maybe twenty to twenty-five different individual people read this blog regularly.

191 followers? Please.

I'll not deny that it's an ego boost to look over there on the righthand side of my screen and see all those avatars supposedly representing people who actually read my blog, but I know it's a falsehood. A long time ago, when I was a twenty-something, "My Masonic Apron" was the Featured Blog for some month on 20sb, and an assload of people all-of-a-sudden started "following" my blog. But I don't think it would be unfair to say that most of them do not read it anymore. I wonder how many of them did to begin with. When something's deemed fashionable, the shocks on that bandwagon get awfully worn.

That this blog was ever fashionable, even if it was in a small, fleeting way, still to this day kind of blows my mind. It's antithetical, of course, to the very principles and ideals this blog was founded on, and I do recollect myself becoming a little bit of a blog whore in those days when I was trying very hard to gain readers. I would hit up random peoples' blogs and do what I despised people doing to me: I would read five or six of their posts, make witty comments and hope they would follow me. So that, you know, I could dominate the world and shit while wearing a studded, vinyl face-mask and pink patent-leather chaps.

I tried to remain loyal to the blogs that I found during that period in my life, but most of those bloggers have since stopped blogging and, if they haven't, I've stopped being interested. Now, I read maybe three blogs. I've grown apathetic. I've grown... old.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me when I get unfollowed, and, if I'm surprised by any aspect of it, I expect it's mostly surprise that a person would actually expend the effort to un-follow me as opposed to just stop reading. I'll admit that I harbored a minimal delusion that I would somehow hit 200 followers before I'd written my 1,000th post, but I don't think that's going to happen. Readership has reached a very modest plateau, and, without putting myself out there and being a rocked-out-with-my-cock-out blogwhore, there is no way new readers will hear about My Masonic Apron, and I'm kind of okay with that.

Speaking of the 1,000th post, that seemed to me to be a good, ceremonious place to shut it all down as I was thinking about such things. As I mentioned, I'm about 220 posts away from that milestone, and I haven't quite decided about what I'm going to do when the odometer rolls around. I guess where I am in life at that point matters somewhat-- will I have more to say that I haven't already said four or five different times in slightly different, more-or-less neurotic ways in previous posts. I know I've repeated myself here a hundred times, and I don't very much care about that. But the fact remains that everything must have an end, and I'm finding myself at one of those times where I'm wondering what the point is.

As I suspect former follower 192 was probably wondering a little bit, too.