How to Tattoo Your Dog

I'm not much for looking at blog stats, because by and large they're depressing. Readership is falling off for most everyone, even the most persistant and skilled bloggers, and it's easy to see why, when there are so many other Netty things vying for attention. Like Kim Kardashian's butt. I mean, really. Why would you want to read about owl angels, abandoned churches and one-legged bluejays (coming soon) when you can be aghast and amazed at that? That is something special.

If I've figured out one thing, it's that Liam, Phoebe and Chet Baker save my blog. I can be puttering along with my flars and my abandoned church and my hayrolls and deliquescing barns and my dearly beloved regular readers are happy enough with that, but deploy the redhead or the towhead and interest spikes. Looking at them, I can't imagine why. Not much charisma there.

Load both barrels with, say, the redhead and the dog, and Nelly bar the door. We blow up the Internet like Kim Kardashian's butt. Well, OK, we're still counting our hits in the hundreds, not the millions, but it beats toddling off into the Internet sunset sucking our thumbs.

Am I pandering for blog hits? You bet your bippy I am. I will do about anything to save this blog. I've been posting for nine years now--practically Chet Baker's whole life--and I'm highly invested in keeping this blog going.  Rather than allow Facebook to suck its will to live, I have forced Facebook to support my blog. Facebook has given me a way to spoon-feed my posts to a large audience, and when people share those posts, good things happen here on JZ on Blogspot. The key has been not to allow myself to fall into the lassitude of, "Ehh, I'm putting out entertaining content on Facebook, why should I blog any more?" If I've got something good, I save it for the blog, make people come here for it.

As I see it, all I'm doing is recording life as it goes on here on Indigo Hill, and if I have the ability to figure out how to turn that into an amateurish video and share it, and if that humble product can charm and amuse a thousand people, that's a beautiful thing. More beautiful, IMHO, than a steatopygic protuberance on a person with nothing better to offer. I can't change the collective appetite for junk food and junk content. I know that. But I can make a video of my daughter and her boyfriend tattooing the dog.

  Happy New Year!!