Stating the Obvious

For the first time ever, Saudi Arabia has shown up on my stats. Blogspot saves the statistics of how many hits you get in a day, month, etc., which posts generate the most hits, and where the hits are coming from geographically. I don't know about other bloggers, but I run to stats as fast as I can sign in. I live on the numbers. I am being read! Hurrah!

And now, Saudi Arabia has taken a look, and I have a feeling you went right to the post, "Sex". Don't ask me how. Like Harry Potter standing in front of Prof. Snape, I just know.

Yesterday, it being the weekend, my stats hit a low, and I ran to my Muses, the Saucy Brit and Exponential. They, being sterling friends, promptly 'reposted' my blog on Facebook, and my stats went back up. I am so needy in so many ways. But after writing for a year with one or two views a day, if any, it is exhilarating to be read in numbers.

My UK numbers fell off after the Olympics, an opposite brain drain effect, but I seem to have a steady increase in Russia. I wonder if Putin will try to stop it?

Of course, me being me, some days I feel brilliant and some days I feel like I am scraping the bottom of the pan to get a post out. I'm writing about the habits of two cats and a dog? Really? But when one comes down to the End of all, it will be those ordinary things I am leaving behind that I miss the most. My zinnia, the lavender, my friends, those rescue animals...this is life. To state the obvious.

And so I write about today and of those memories it is both painful and delicious to remember: feeding two orphan cats out of an eye dropper when I couldn't feed myself, and picking Rat Face Bastard up out of the snow and taking him home, found while I was searching for Oscar Wilde, who never did come home.  The zinnia and lavender I thought, as an apartment dweller, that I would never grow again in this life. The discovery of new friends after all the old ones, excepting Beth, dumped me. Which was perfectly understandable at the time, insanity is frightening. But it was, and sometimes is, painful to think about.

And this blog. All of my portfolio, all the work I have ever produced in my life, disappeared in the move away from the house in Botetourt County. The poems I wrote when I was 10, my short stories from the period of my father dying...all gone, forever. And all I can do is rebuild it starting with my blog posts. I suppose that's why I write every day. Sometimes, I want back all I have lost.

Sometimes, it's better off gone.

There was a time I even lost the urge to read and write. So now I write, as honestly as I can, so that you can understand how you can lose your mind but not your spirit. How you can lose your soul, but not your life. I write to tell you that I have been where you have been and there is another side to the tunnel. And I write to tell your friends and family how you feel, if you cannot.

Meanwhile, it's time to feed the kindly stepfather. The cats are circling in their never-ending search for that perfect unicorn, and the Spaz is waiting in bed, like a good dog. I'm just glad I will have time to pick more zinnia today...