My regular readers of this website (or “Mom” and “Dad,” as I call them) may have noticed that yesterday’s post about being accused by a local teenager of listening to the Backstreet Boys received a record-breaking number of comments: Eight! That’s eight times the number of comments that any other single post on this website has ever received! (In stock market parlance, we’d call that an ‘eight-bagger’ and proceed to demolish a bottle of fine Romanée Conti in celebration. But I’m taking it in stride.)
So maybe my regular readers are wondering if the deafening silence that greeted every painstakingly-crafted post for the past six years finally caused my already-fragile personality to cleave into eight imaginary commenters to keep me company during my slow descent into madness, hmm?
Actually, I’m receiving some attention from Universal Hub, a website that semi-selectively aggregates blog posts, Twitters, and news items from around the Boston area. Yesterday’s post was featured here. A previous post about wet cat food was featured here. And another post about lobster baroness Linda L. Bean was featured here.
As casual as the attention may be, it is gratifying to have a stranger’s tacit appreciation for my writing. But… I actually received more than eight comments. Several people felt compelled to say things along the lines of “Who cares?” and “This is stupid.” I didn’t approve those comments to display on my website, and I was surprised at how angry they made me. I didn’t ask anyone to care. I don’t write to make anyone care. To borrow a line from Green Day, I really, really don’t care if you don’t care.
I abide by Kurt Vonnegut’s seventh rule of writing, which is “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” 90% of what I write on this website is to please my bff Amy, who became my muse in high school when we’d write each other long notes while idling away in classes. I developed a narrative voice solely for the purpose of entertaining her. It’s all quite unconscious, really… I don’t hold an image of Amy in my mind and imagine her reading what I’m writing. But my writing style is infused with a well-honed sense of what she’d like to read and how she’d enjoy reading it. And I instinctively knew that my imaginary Amy (as well as the real Amy, who is as faithful a reader as Mom and Dad) would get a kick out of “She’s listening to the Backstreet Boys,” even if most people would say, “Who cares?”
So I’m trying not to get distracted by the comments or by the idea that strangers are picking through my writing in search of arcane grammatical mistakes with which to taunt me. I write for myself and for one other person, and the day she says “Who cares?” or “This is stupid” is the day that I’ll take up a new hobby, like bull riding, crack pipe collecting, or listening to the mother-effing Backstreet Boys.
