Roadside Distractions

“I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere. . . . And it’s that willingness to slow down and examine the mysterious bits of fluff in our lives that is the poet’s interest.”  - William Collins

There are mysterious bits of fluff that are available to bloggers that tell us something about the people we are reaching and how we are reaching them, bits of fluff that I find endlessly entertaining. For example, yesterday Google directed someone here who was searching using the phrase “I just want to have sex,” thus diminishing my faith in the omniscience of the Uber-Search giant. I have been ‘Stumbled’ as a site on the topic of petroleum and I am currently listed on some Russian search aggregator under the term ‘ass.’ Individually these amuse me. Taken together (”I just want to have sex” with “petroleum” in my “ass.”) I find them screamingly funny.

I know that people have reached this site while searching the terms “understanding AA step 1″, “last chance for addicts”, “trust God clean house” and “I’ve given God a chance and look at my life”. In the last search I was, sadly, the number one returned result. My old blog, Methed Up, still gets more traffic than this one. Search terms resulting visits to that site in the last month include “God gave up on us”, “crystal meth gay blogs”, “crystal meth stories” and “life after crystal”. Even though I’m not writing there anymore, Methed Up is still visited by an average of 800 people a month who together read over 2000 pages of that blog. LCT has regular readers on every continent (except Antarctica) and receives 38 unique visitors who read 80 pages a day. Each of these blogs is regularly listed among the top 10 of the Top 100 Sober Blogs and each of them has spent brief periods in the number 1 position, a little bit of limelight that I can only begrudgingly admit that I enjoy. I am and addict, therefor I am an egomaniac.

I didn’t start this project because I’m competative or because I wanted attention. I started this project because on my 5th day clean, when I had removed myself from the situation I was in to somewhere more supportive of my recovery, I crawled out of bed and fired up my friend’s computer and began hunting for someone, anyone, out there telling their personal story of recovery from crystal meth addiction. I didn’t personally know anyone who had gotten clean and stayed clean and sober for any length of time. Part of that is probably simply a function of demographics. I wanted, if I were going to make a serious attempt at recovery, to know that recovery was possible. I wanted to know that the pain I was in was temporary and that enduring it would be worthwhile. When I was unable to find the voice I was looking for, a personal voice, a real voice and not the voice of a treatment facility or support group or religious organization, the voice of a real, living, breathing, feeling, thinking human being brave enough to describe exactly what it was like, I decided that I would have to become that voice myself. I couldn’t, after all, be the only one out there looking for that voice and recovery had worked for other people addicted to other things so why not this.

In the process of writing about what is going on with me, about what life was like and what it’s like now, I found that the act of writing itself was amazingly helpful to me. It gave me a chance to look at my experience a little differently. It made me slow down. It made me think, or at least try to think clearly. Because I wrote with the intent of being read by someone like me I regularly wanted to find something hopeful, something worth hanging in there for, and in so doing I helped myself hang in there.

So here’s the question. Among the bits of fluff I have been watching is a gradual decline in my Google page ranking on Methed Up. I still know when I have really reached someone because they will spend 5 hours reading everything I’ve written. They normally find me through Google. Since part of maintaining page rank is related to the freshness of content I have been considering republishing Methed Up, post by post, day by day, adding better meta tags so that I bump my ranking up. I’d like to think that my desire to do this is entirely because I know that I’ll reach more people like me who are looking for help and hope and support. I’d like to think that but the truth is that some of my ego and some of my pride is involved in the equation now. Some part of me (fine, maybe a big part of me) likes the attention - even if I am just a first name and an initial with an e-mail address.

Do I republish because it might help someone or do I sit on my hands because my motivation might be wrong? What would God have me do?