As part of our instant gratification culture one can sign up for a blahg (merely click the tab at the bottom of this screen), tap a few words, hit “publish” and send your thoughts, or lack of same, out into the world.  A thousand of these posts comprise a hundredth of a drop in the ocean.  Of course, it is a virtual ocean.   Debates rage, issues fester, opinions are bandied, bloggers liked, disliked, friended, unfriended– all in an electronic environment only Philip K. Dick could have imagined fifty years ago.

WordPress has a feature that allows you to view constantly updated statistics on how many are viewing, liking, disliking, commenting on, refraining from commenting on, friending and unfriending your blahg.  By clicking a tab labelled “stats” you can instantly see a bar graph of views for the previous few days and by looking at the world map on the bottom, find the geographic location of these viewers.  Today, for example, as of 2:50 pm, four people in Poland, or one person in Poland four times, had checked the blahg.

International readership, yo.  Talk about your cachet.  

But here’s the cool part, for a man who feels his creative energies at low ebb, dragged on by the need to constantly produce upbeat material for a community project for kids that is, as of now, only him.  Check out the bar graph, which I’ll hopefully be able to do a screen capture of (COM-SHFT-4) and then crop, to give you, gentle reader, the same instant gratification, and odd shiver of perverse self-schadenfreude, it gave me.