Apparently, I'm a great person.

It is very likely that you are attractive and people like to be around you. You are desirable. I can tell you that a million and one times and if you're anything like me, you'll still have a hard time believing it. I have been learning, both vicariously and through personal experience, that it is more difficult to convince yourself of your desirability than it is to convince everyone else.

It is difficult for me to hear people say good things about me. I always feel like I don't deserve it. They say I'm polite, but I know how rude I can be. They say I'm good looking, and I admit, I agree some days, but most days I fail to see it. The one that hits me hardest is when people say I'm a good friend. That one gets me, because more times than I can count, I have decidedly been a bad friend. I've been a horrible friend on purpose, and those people still think I'm a good friend. All this really makes me wonder, what the hell can everyone else see that I can't? It must be magical.

Should I bother with the points? Does it matter anymore? Take 50, you wonderfully beautiful person. You deserve them, even you don't understand why.

JOSH, THE SHERM

So, What Happens Now?

As of that last post (and after seeing it's disappointing statistics), I feel safe to assume that everyone will leave my blog well enough alone as long as I don't post links to it on other sites. That's good. So now I can look at this as more of a journal type of thing. I can go ahead and put the personal stuff up all the time with no filter, because I am the only one that will bother to read it.

It may seem weird that I even put it on the internet at all. I neither have an audience, nor do I want one, so clearly it would be a much better deal to keep this somewhere a little more private, like on actual paper, or at worst, in a file on my computer. But that's not what I want. I want this to be immediately available to as many people as possible, so when something epic happens (good or bad) and my name is in headlines (or in very small print in the obituary section) they can do a simple Google search and get some of the backstory.

Of course, my internet presence does not flatter me, and is not necessarily an accurate depiction of how I live my life in the real world, but if anyone is finding this for the aforementioned reasons, it doesn't matter. They don't need to know the real me, just a mental image of the "real" me, based on what they can gather with what few (though, powerful) resources they have.

From now on, this is no longer a show. I'm am not putting on for an audience. This is for me and for posterity, and for the 7 oddballs that stumble upon this a decade from now via their wi-fi enabled brains and see it on a retina screen, which in their time will involve the actual retina.

Just for the sake of continuity and the small chance the a real, living person actually reads my blogs even when I don't share them on social networks, you can still have the 50 points for reading this. I'm not necessarily sure who you are, but I love you.

JOSH, THE SHERM

Why do I do this?

I have to ask, and I guess I have to ask myself, because only I'll be able to answer. What's the point of these blog posts? Why write them? What benefit do they provide? Clearly, no one is reading them. Do you realize there are empty and abandoned blogs that get more reads than yours?

I guess I figured somewhere down the line the people I shared it with would not only enjoy reading them, but eventually get around to waiting on my next one. It does temporarily satisfy my need to write in lieu of an English class. I do need to write. It makes me happy to arrange words into sentences and paragraphs that I place tentatively on a page (both physical and digital), and even happier when people read them, and happier still when they understand.

So, when I know I'm being ignored it eats me up (which is why I sat on this particular post for over a month, and held back others longer, and still have one that I have titled but am yet to write). I actually spent a couple hours, once, exploring the capabilities of the blogger platform, even taking some time to clean up and snazz up what I already had. All to no avail, apparently. I did manage to get more traffic but mostly from bots and automatic crawlers.

In my last blog, I pretty much laid it out there. It wasn't just my opinion, it was me letting the audience in on real things that were going on in my life. I included a call to action. I asked people to put me in my place. I opened up and made myself vulnerable. You know how many reads that "vulnerability" earned me? Ten. Just ten. And of those ten I can only confirm that one person actually read it. I know this because it contains the only link to an unlisted video on my YouTube channel, which has gone up by 1 view since I posted the blog. I have an idea who it may have been, but whoever it actually was, that person didn't even watch the whole video.

It is what it is. Thanks for reading if you bothered. I really do appreciate it. I would have appreciated it more if you had given me some feedback and played along with my "Existence Points" system, but I digress. I have reason to believe that this will be the last post on this particular blog, unless something epic happens. Though this is clearly a more appropriate format, there are places where I can fling my opinions up and people will not only notice what I've flung, they are more prone to fling theirs up with it (though I must admit that I am beginning to be universally ignored in every internet community I am a part of).

So here's to something, which is more than nothing. It was fun while the optimism lasted.

Usual 50 for reading. +3,000,000 for good measure. I'll give a dollar to anyone I know who can prove that they have legitimately acquired more that 3,000,800 existence points.

JOSH, THE SHERM