So here's the thing: I know my cousin Angela and my friend Jim read the last blog post, in which I discussed baking cookies with your children. I figured I'd hit a pretty large demographic with that one, because a lot of people bake cookies with their children.
Or, maybe, actually, outside of my cousin and Jim, I hit a different demographic: the people who don't bake cookies with their children at all. Maybe there's someone out there I don't even know, someone who spends so much time at work that they have no time for their children.
Maybe, yesterday, they were sitting there, glass of wine in their hand, reading my essay and crying while Harry Chapin's "Cats in the Cradle" played for the twenty-fifth time.
(I realize this begs the question: if said parent had time to drink wine and listen to "Cats in the Cradle" twenty-five times, couldn't they have found some time to bake cookies with their children?)
The point I'm making here is that I just checked the analytics of yesterday's blog post, and in addition to my cousin and Jim, there are three other people who read what I wrote yesterday. I wonder who they are.
I've actually had a few posts in which my readership has drifted into the hundreds. Some time ago, I wrote an essay about Phineas Gage, the guy who lived on after a pole went through his head (it's actually on my website's essay collection, and you can find it here). That one actually got hundreds of readers, and is probably my most-read piece of writing ever.
And yesterday, besides Jim and Angela, there were those other three people. As I sit here at the beginning of the day, cup of coffee by my side, I think of how grateful I am to all these people.
I look at it this way: we're not on the planet for a whole lot of time. In fact, when you think about the age of the universe, it gets kind of depressing. Time is a precious thing.
And yesterday, five people devoted some of that time to reading what I wrote.
It probably takes something in the order of ten minutes to read these blog posts. That means that if a person who reads my blog posts lives to the average age of life expectancy in the United States, they gave up ten minutes out of the seventy-eight years that they will be on this planet. That means that they devoted 1/4,099,680th of their lives to my writing.
This is a lot, relatively speaking. If the universe--which is about about 13.7 billion years old--devoted the same proportional amount of time to reading my writing, it would be giving up 3,341.7 years of its life, or 5.56 years for every second it spends reading my blog post.
And I tell you, if I were a universe and a parallel universe read my blog posts--let alone five parallel universes--I'd be grateful. Furthermore, I'd want to tell those other parallel universes that often things that seem trivial to them might be interesting to me.
24 hours is the same proportional chunk of our lives as 481,208 years is to the universe. If the universe had a blog, it could conceivably have thought that yesterday just wasn't all that exciting.
I could see the universe saying to me "man...I have nothing to write about. I mean, I'd like to go back to the old days, back to the Big Bang, when things were really happening. Yesterday was so lame. All that happened yesterday was that Homo Erectus evolved into Modern Humans."
"Of course, at the beginning of the day, humans didn't have a name for them or anything, but now they do. Of course, if I told you about yesterday in detail, it would probably bore you. I'm sure you don't want to hear anything about Neanderthals; they got there at, like, 8AM, and were gone a few hours later."
"You know," I'd say, "instead of drinking wine and listening to 'Cat's Cradle' like, two billion, six hundred and thirty four million, six hundred and fifteen thousand, three hundred and eighty four times, you could have devoted 20,0050 years (one hour, proportionally speaking) to baking cookies with your kid. I mean, Crikey, man, don't tell me that, when you look at all those stars, you don't see a little bit of yourself in them."
Anyway, if you've gotten this far, thanks for staying with me. It was, like, The Bronze Age when you started reading this (and I'm sure it felt that way).
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