Right. I have to be honest with you about something, because if I don't say it out loud it just sits there in my chest going bad.
I was checking the stats forty times a day.
Maybe more. I never counted (the irony of not counting THE thing while counting everything else is not lost on me). But it was the first thing I did with my tea in the morning, before I'd even sat down properly. Open the laptop. Click into the analytics. Watch the little number. Then again at the bus stop on my phone. Then at lunch. Then on the way home. Then in bed, the screen lighting up my face like some sort of holy relic, except the relic was a graph and the graph mostly went sideways.
And here's the thing nobody tells you. It never feels like enough. Three hundred visitors yesterday? Why not four. Four hundred? The day before was four-fifty, what went WRONG. There's no number that lands you safely. The number is a hole and you keep pouring yourself into it.
I started taking it personal. A flat day felt like the world had quietly decided the bog was finished. A spike felt like a verdict in my favour, like I'd been let off some charge I didn't know I was facing. And the worst of it, lads, the truly mortifying part, is that I started thinking about what to WRITE based on what the number wanted. I'd a half-finished post about my nan and the way she sang the flea verse with her eyes shut, and I shelved it. Shelved it. Because a listicle about the best Irish drinking songs would do better numbers and I knew it.
That's the day I caught myself. Mick rang to ask was I coming to the session and I said I'd be a few minutes, I just wanted to check something, and I heard the lie in my own voice. I wasn't checking something. I was feeding the hole.
So I quit. Cold. I put a thing on the laptop that blocks the analytics page for thirty days. (I'd tell you the name of it but I genuinely can't remember, that's how little I want to go back near it.) One month. No counter. No graph. No little number with my mood tied to its ankle.
The first three days were AWFUL. I'm not going to dress it up. I had a physical itch in my thumb. I'd pick up the phone to check and remember I'd blocked it and just sit there holding the phone like a man who's forgotten why he came into the room. There's a word for what that is and I think the word is "addiction," said quietly, and I'd thank you not to make a big deal of it.
But then. The fourth day, the fifth day, something loosened.
I wrote the post about my nan. The real one. Took me an evening and a half and I cried a small bit doing it, the good kind, and I didn't think ONCE about how it would perform. I just told the truth about a woman who's gone and a song that isn't. And do you know, I have no idea how many people read it. None. Couldn't tell you. And that not-knowing turned out to be the most peaceful thing that's happened to me in about a year.
Because here's what I'd forgotten. I didn't build this shrine in 2002 for a number. There WAS no number worth chasing in 2002, the internet was four lads and a fax machine. I built it because I loved a daft cumulative song about a hole in a bog and a tree in the hole and a branch on the tree, and I wanted somewhere on God's green internet where that love had a home. That's it. That's the whole entire reason. A man and a song and a yellow webpage.
Somewhere along the way the song became a job I was failing at. And the song never asked me to. The song doesn't care how it's performing. The song just goes round again, bog to tree to branch to twig to nest to egg to bird to feather to FLEA (the climax, obviously, I've said my piece on this elsewhere), and round again, forever, the same daft beautiful loop, indifferent to your analytics. There's a lesson in the shape of it. The Rattlin' Bog doesn't accumulate to arrive anywhere. It just keeps adding and singing. The point is the singing.
I sang more this month. Did I mention that? I went to the sessions and actually WAS at them, in my body, not half-checking my phone under the table like a teenager. I learned two verses of a song off Fiona I'd never bothered with. I read the lyrics back to myself one slow morning just for the pleasure of it, off the lyrics page, the page I built and barely look at anymore because I'm always staring at the engine room instead of the actual house.
The month's up in a few days. I'll probably turn the stats back on. I'm not a saint and I'm curious, I won't pretend otherwise. But I'm going to look at it once a week. Sunday evening, tea in hand, like checking the weather. A number is a fine thing to glance at. It's a terrible thing to live inside.
If you run a little site, or a page, or a thing you made because you loved it and now you're checking how it's doing more than you're enjoying that you made it at all, this is me, hand on the shoulder. Cover the counter. Just for a bit. See do you remember why you started.
I did. It was the song. It was always the song.
Slán go fóill,
BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' has no concept of metrics. Rattlin' checks one stat only, which is "is there food in the bowl," and on that one he refreshes the page approximately four hundred times a day. I'm learning from the cat. Mostly.