Everybody Hurts...sometimes

(To be read while "Everybody Hurts" by REM plays automatically in the embedded jukebox at the bottom of the blog).

Originally, I was planning on beginning this post with the question, "Is there anybody out there?" It would have been a little Pink Floyd for your day, and who doesn't need a little Floyd?

In the end, however, I decided to go with the feelings that had been driving me to address this topic in the first place, and that was a little bit of frustration, melancholy and the "blues". It certainly wasn't depression or anything like that. Let's be clear. However, ever since I was a teenager, I have handled these types of situations the same; bottle them up and turn on the music! I used to sit in my bedroom and listen to songs just like "Everybody Hurts" for hours. One would have thought that I might have made myself worse with depressing songs like that, but somehow I felt better afterward. Maybe I felt like others were sad or lonely just like I was, and that we were all "suffering" together. I don't know.

I have been blogging since January, learning on the fly much of the way. Now I am on three different blogs. On this one, I have 70 followers. On my Facebook author's page, I have 156 followers. Lastly, on Twitter, I have 56 followers. Certainly some of those are repeats, but in all of those wonderful possibilities, I very often receive few comments. Each time I post, be it Wicked Writers, Something Wicked This Way Comes or Dance on Fire, I post a note and link on Facebook and Twitter. If it is one of the other two blogs, I always come back here and post a note and a link.

Does anyone else go through periods where you wonder whether anyone is paying attention? You spend a great deal of time writing a post, polishing it and double-checking that everything is perfect, only to have one or two people leave a note. How do you deal with it?

Perhaps many of you out there have so many followers now that this never happens to you anymore. Can you recall the early days of blogging when the feedback was pretty non-existent. Would your advice simply be to keep at it and trust that the folks will be attracted to what you're doing eventually?

Lately, I have been busy. I lost my pc for a week when it got hit by a virus. It's okay now, but I did buy myself a laptop before that happened. However, between nearly 11 hours a day at my day-job, three blogs and an on-line magazine that I write for, I have spent very little time following my favorite blogs. Is that the key? The fact that everyone else is in much the same boat? Reading, reviewing, writing, working day-jobs, too?

There were two reasons, I think, for sitting down to write this post. First, to feel sorry for myself for a moment and then to get rid of the useless emotion that it is! Secondly, to write something constructive and real. Perhaps other bloggers might be feeling some of the same things and are struggling with it like I was, albeit briefly.

Actually, I'm sounding quiet cavalier about the subject, when in fact it bothered me this weekend more than I'm letting on. I had a post for Wicked on Friday, a restaurant review for Kings River Life Magazine and another post for Something Wicked, but heard very little back. I'm better now, but it did bother me.

How many of you have gone through the same thing? How did you get over it? Maybe you are going through much the same right now. I hope not.

Unfortunately, a fellow supervisor at my workplace was found dead of an apparent heart attack Monday morning by his 14 year old son. He was 51. That may have had something to do with getting me through the "woe is me" period that had taken hold during the weekend. If we could ask him, I bet he wouldn't be too worried about posting something that very few, if any, had read.

Perspective. That was what I had needed after feeling sorry for myself. I hope I don't soon forget it.

If any of you have felt the same, I hope to hear from you. If not, good; but say hello anyway. If you end up being too busy to stop by and never know that this post was written, I promise to hold my head up and not let it get me down.

And I certainly hope that you weren't able to stop by because you had way too much on your plate, and unable to enjoy the day. I would think that my departed friend, Russ Garcia (God rest his soul and bless those young children that he left behind), would have much to say about that.

We'll talk soon.

Postscript: If you are new to this song and have never seen the video, you should. I tried to post it here, but Warner Bros. records would have none of that. Follow the link to YouTube and check it out here. I've watched it twice these past few days, myself.
In about a week, I'll add some new tunes...