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The world is bigger than one man; this or that social media sensation.

What difference does it make if I mention the name of whoever it is I am listening to this week, or whose videos I came across thanks to YouTube‘s very unreliable algorithm this afternoon?

A few months ago, I’d be found watching therapeutic bricklaying videos by Stu Cromptom. These days it’s Kris Harbour and some Chinese bloke who welds amazing contraptions while wearing flipflops.

A few months ago I’d be listening to Blanco White, then Passenger and Al Lewis. These days Pachelbel, Beethoven, Chopin.

A few months ago I’d be found following everything Devi Sridhar wrote. These days Jonny Smith rambling on about cars.

And on religion… let me check my subscriptions… hmm, looks like I’m not following anyone these days, except for a channel that occasionally post updates from imprisoned Hassan Farhan al-Maliki, whom I’m fond of.

My blog has a loyal readership of five. It occasionally receives an influx of visitors if a famous person I once knew says something controversial, and their opponents feel the need to share some old post I once wrote in rage as if it makes some kind of difference. Of course, it doesn’t.

Dear visitor, I am a nobody. Always have been and always will be. This is my place to ramble on as I see fit about whatever momentarily exercises me, as a form of peculiar entertainment for the odd passerby (and I mean odd).

Nothing I write is of any consequence at all. I have no influence on the world beyond my tiny family, and even there influence is waning. Nobody of any stature or importance — your own good selves excluded — reads a word I write. Long may that continue.

I am not really sure why I write in public like this, other than that it sometimes helps that a passerby responds to my talking to myself to say either you’re not mad, or you absolutely are. This is a positive feedback mechanism, which helps supplement the judgement of my heart, which more often than not demands I self-censor whatever it is that I am wittering on about today.

I write because I am not a speaker. As I have often noted, my voice is the exact same tone as background noise. I cannot do social gatherings; I get lost in them. This blog is the nearest I get to intelligent conversation, even if it is conversation mainly with myself. That is fine.

Even at the height of blogistan, before Facebook and the Twitter sent it into an interminable demise, my blog was always a mere footnote, dismissed as the ramblings of a fool, which it was and still is. For a time I enjoyed a spot on DeenPort, in tiny text, sending visitors my way to declare me a heretic. Fortunately the turbaned ones are CEOs of major investment capital firms today, so I can rest easy in my bed.

The only reason I keep my blog going is to avoid squatters seizing my domain to post spam about crypto-mining to the last explorers of the open web. Daily I think I will park it and place a witty holding page where once there was a heap of words. I may yet, if ever I find the courage of my convictions, to return into my shell and become a hermit.

Copious footnotes are all I generate. On and on. I take pride in being opaque, in the hope that it will enrage a reader who thinks I am talking about someone they know, when really that is highly unlikely, since most of the people I know are private individuals as boring and insignificant as I, whose only claim to fame is warding off gossip around the water-cooler at work. Out here in the real world, everything really is boring and mundane.