Many websites ago, I noticed that the number of visits a page had over the previous day or week or month took on quite a different meaning when I considered the average length of each visit: usually in nanoseconds. So, most of those visits that I first thought were people actually considering my words or the books I talked about actually were bots that came and went faster than human fingers could possibly operate a mouse or keyboard, and that when the time-length of each visit finally got long enough to suggest a human saw my page, it was apparent that s/he was only there long enough to give my presentation a momentary glance.

Ah, so that’s why a thousand visits to a page in a website translated into so few clicks on links to other pages, much less to my books sitting there on Amazon waiting to engage you in a conversation. What a humbling epiphany it was, discovering that most of what I perceived as attempts to engage were machines scouring the web for this or that or people in a hurry to go somewhere else when they found nothing to slow them down on my page during their frenetic pace through cyberspace.

To my knowledge, WordPress isn’t telling me how long you are here, much less the impact–if any–upon you from what you see. So, as I sit here at my Dell desktop computer screen with my cat occupying a fair share of my desk chair, I wonder who you are and what you make of this place. If you’re here long enough to grok what I’m saying, you know by now that this blog has no niche. That’s good and bad, depending on what the gurus are saying.

I don’t care what the gurus are saying because if I really listened to their prescriptions about how to manage this weblog, I would become too bored to manage this weblog. Yes, I understand the value of knowing what you’re going to get before you arrive on a page, the certainty that one blogger provides daily writing tips and another provides humorous commentaries on national issues. So, I don’t offer any certainty, because I might talk about anything here from Trump to tadpoles to transformation.

I’m unrepentant about my overt lack of a niche. I thrive on chaos because as a writer (you do know I’m a writer, capeesh!) I think our most creative moments come out of chaos rather than plans and outlines.

So, you’re brave to come here because the whole place probably is about as sane as the movie “Fargo” or some film from Federico Fellini. If you’re a bot, I don’t care why you’re here, and (frankly) I hope the chaos shorts out your circuits. If you’re a person, I appreciate your brief glance at this page and can understand why it may not be your cup of tea. But then, if you’re here long enough to read today’s post and think “well, this is crap” or “hmm, he might have a point,” then thank you for stopping by–you’re the person I’m writing for.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of a chaotic array of books.