With a fair number of exceptions to the rule, my videos have been dependably getting a whole five views. The channel as of today has eight subscribers. It’s a good bet that I have personally hugged most of them.

After I posted my latest one, a weird brilliant little thing that I was far too proud of, and after I’d had a bit of a nap, and watched it a few more times, and turned my attention to cooking, I was pouting in perfect silence inside, about the single-digit view counts, like a butthurt little wallflower, my delicate petals all ruffled. It would have been a disgusting display, if it had been a display at all.

Eventually I tired of listening to my own brilliance over and over and started craving a different quality voice. And I found more than one, at a place called Due Dissidence, while spending my five minutes a day at Twitter in the interests of self-promotion.

After I’d seen enough of their stuff to be personally hooked hard, I got interested in what their story was.

It turns out that two friends from the Hudson Valley in New York just decided to go for it (podcasting) one day, no website, apparently not even a camera. They put out their first show on March 21, 2019–three and a half years ago.

To this day, their earliest videos still only have like five and nine and four and three views, for quality stuff with at least two people making it happen, sometimes with a guest. And these gents are far more amiable and accessible than I’ll ever be.

Their view counts slowly started to climb, but it wasn’t until a year and a half after launch that they had a breakthrough vid that got over 700 views, and a few months after that, another that brought in 4000. It wasn’t until three years after their first show that they cracked 6000 this past April, and then in June: one with over 18K.

Today their subscriber count sits at 2.6K, and their videos are watched by between a few hundred and a few thousand people. They honestly don’t seem to give much of a shit about the numbers, either.

For that reason among others it was a humbling little bit of research for me. The humbling, paradoxically, made me feel better too, over the fact that I’m not an overnight sensation, but … I’m doing pretty okay, really, with only a month under my belt.

Here’s one thing that the crafty side of me noticed.

Every time their view count had a big spike, at least one person’s name was found in the title of that video. Sometimes the name was nationally famous, like Bill Maher or Tulsi Gabbard or Tucker Carlson. Other times the names were more conditionally well known, like “Jimmy Dore”, or even just “Cenk”.

The name is no guarantee of a big view count. They put one up with “Elon Musk” in the title two weeks ago, and it’s still sitting at 255 views today … but it’s a general clue, anyway … can you smell the acrid odor of my greed wheel spinning!?

It’s a little after eight on Monday evening. I’m putting up tomorrow’s scribble early, and I’m trying to love myself without trying, in blissful paradox and jangled truth, eh. The right thing to do from any standpoint now is to bed down and dream at length. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Let’s touch base again on the other side of that, my darlings.