TO STAY OR TO GO?

TO STAY OR TO GO?

This is me aged 5 or 6 and I uploaded the photo to accompany a post (prompted by the genre shorties group) that I wrote yesterday and that vanished into thin air before I could bless it. So I'm using the photo here, apropos of nothing more than that. I have no intention of rewriting the post.

I suppose that if I live to be a hundred and get asked to what I attribute my advanced age I might reply that it could have something to do with the delight I experience when I write my nonsense. That'll be in a whisker over thirty years, then: not very long in the grand scheme of things, is it? But the casting of my thoughts to the four winds may well be an approximation of what does motivate me to breathe for another day – that and my spectacularly wonderful wife who excites me in so many diverse ways.

The thing is, and here's the kernel of my thoughts this morning, words without readers are like lamb chops without eaters: a waste of life. I don't demand a huge army of people reading my stuff, but I do like to think there might be someone out there.

That's why I moved to gather a few years ago. I'd used Myspace and it turned from a decent blogging site into what it became – a conduit for third-rate musicians to pass their tunes onto the waiting world, and the blogging part got so messed with that it was as good as unusable.

Gather was almost (but not quite) as usable as Myspace had been at its best and I was happy. There were the groups that helped get a newcomer established and inspire him to new and wonderful thoughts. There were, of course weird groups that seem to exist merely to accumulate modest collections of points in order to earn small sums of the folding stuff. I belong to some of them because in the early days I got invites and misunderstood the word “points”. Check the dictionary: it's a word with an eclectic set of definitions. Anyway, I'm not in the USA and the points can only be spent over there. As far as I'm concerned it's liker collecting a huge pile of dead matchsticks and wondering what to do with them. Never mind. I'm here for the writing and not to make a few coppers from it.

Now gather has started playing up. One of my recent posts took an age to leave my computer and an even longer age to get even one reader. If this is a temporary glitch I can live with it, but there are other concerns. An excellent friend of mine invariably finds it very difficult to access my stuff with the end result I've posted one or two of them on Facebook as notes, where they look grossly inferior. I've even shoved one on my old MySpace page where it's gathered no views. I've visited the charming Wordpress and might seek to put down roots there, but the options for editing are inferior to those of gather.

Do you get the message? I'm looking for a new home. Not to rest my weary bones but somewhere I can continue to breathe life into words. Gather has served me well and I've tried to serve it equally well. But if it's going to go all wobbly, lose into the ether hard-worked nonsenses that I happen to treasure, discourage beloved friends from finding me, then it's just got to go. I know it costs me not a penny to be here, but there's so much advertising they must be making quite a killing from my existence. I don't mind that. It's the commercial world and what makes whirligigs go round (or something like that). And I can live with the odd glitch: stuff like that happens and if we worried too much about it we'd become nervous wrecks and have breakdowns, heart attacks, strokes and the common cold.

Of course, the glitches may all go away, in which case I'll probably remain here. I enjoy the atmosphere, the group prompts, the mischievous little elves who comment on my verbal outpourings.

But if it costs me too much perspiration to stay then I'll go. Can't say fairer that that can I, guv?

© Peter Rogerson 05.01.13 (My mother would have been 108 today)