Uncanny what a fantastic phone call with a buddy on the other side of the country can do for the soul. I've kicked back this evening after hanging up; a little bit of (re)mixing, some blogskirting and now - to the soothing Eighties throb of A-ha's Hunting High and Low - I'm crooning pseudo-countertenor while engaging in my occasional inspection of site visitors.
A really interesting activity: my server logs various IP addresses and, when curiousity gets the best of me, I slip them into the Visual Route Server tracker, release the dogs and discover the origin. My friends and I are the easiest to spot: we've hit the site in double digits over the course of a week.
But there are literally hundreds more addresses. Now, I realize that quite a few are webcrawlers and spiders, though certainly not all of them.
Which piques my curiousity even more, tweaking it like the wine-wet rim of a crystal goblet and setting off a sonorant ringing. Yes, indeed - as poetic as it is incessant.
Who's from Dallas? Or Japan? New York City? The City of Angels besides the two friends I have accounted for? I don't deserve a prize for guessing which blips are from Mount Holyoke - but what about the ones from Syracuse? Rochester? Or Egypt? What appears to be a barracks in D.C.? D.C. proper?
One of my favorite pastimes during senior year of college was to perch in a window of my fourth-floor, rotunda painting studio and face the quad - a huge, grass-and-sidewalk courtyard surrounded by Syracuse's finest architecture. When class changes between the various disciplines coincided, a mass of students would walk hither and thither, to and fro. I'd people-watch for a bit, then hop back down and dip my brush for another round of impasto or glazing.
People are watching - reading - me, now. And I'm curious. Very curious. Ahoy! Ahoy - who's out there?