Business is bad. My website statistics show that visitor count and page view hits are down, way down, since the beginning of the year. If this were a for-profit enterprise, I would be forced to lay myself off. Then I’d have to look for a new hobby… and in this economy, too!
I can make excuses for the drop in traffic that sound similar to a media company’s earnings call at the end of a pathetic quarter. It’s a seasonal blip: consumers are reveling in these last moments of summer, they are vacationing, they are glued to the athletic and political circuses on their televisions. The competition has grown keen: millions of blogs proliferate the web, many aimed at a niche audience, many search-engine optimized, many produced by professional bloggers who have all day to hone their image, cultivate connections, and spin much cooler commentary than I am able to do in my 1 hour of daily allotted writing time.
All rationale that studiously avoid the truth: This website is stale. From a technical standpoint, it’s archaic Web 1.0. The lack of commenting, tagging, and linkable individual posts all deter potential readers, yet there’s nothing I can do without starting over by employing a blogging tool. The idea just exhausts me. What would happen to my five years of HTML hand-coded archives? Would they just sit on a server collecting cyberdust, destined for infinite obscurity?
Also there’s the content, which fluctuates from banal to hurried to tedious. The lifecycle of a blog mirrors that of most creative endeavors: Conception; experimentation; maturation; perfection; declination. I suspect this website is declining, and I’m half denying its senility, half wringing my hands over its fate. In the meantime, my life has changed. I’m married and happily reaping contentment from domesticity. My worldview of unfocused anger and hostility has evolved into exasperated sadness. I cannot simply imitate what worked for me in 2006. Great artists have the ability to reinvent themselves, to resist the comfort of formulas, to output concurrently with the normal stages of life.
So I can continue on this downward spiral from mediocre to pitiful. Or I can quit and focus on another creative project. Or I can stop whining to the few poor loyal souls who still come to this website, and focus on my new goals: To make this website pleasurable again. To remember that the topic is secondary to the diction. To shut up, and write.
Normally I would pad this denouement with an Oscar Wilde or T.S. Eliot quote about writing in order to solidify my commitment to this website. The words would be inspiring, but the gesture would be jejune, so instead I’ll say: Reimagining this website won’t be quick. It won’t be easy. It won’t be pretty. It will be the literary equivalent of slapping a rubber mini-dress and stiletto pumps on this matronly blog and making her do jumping jacks and squat thrusts until she’s as fresh as a fish.
