Tag: wordpress

Not Okay

Pavowski2 Comments

WordPress is loaded with nifty little features. I can sort my posts by subject or keyword, I can see which posts get the most traffic, I can see who leaves the most comments, I can see who’s binge-eating ice cream while they read. Okay, maybe not — but the technology must be in the works.

I can also see the search terms people enter to end up at the site.

Some of them make good sense and tell me I’ve written posts that may actually have been useful to people: “how to write a graduation speech”, for example. Or posts which might have provided some advice or peace of mind: “vasectomy” or “should adults read YA lit”. Then there are the searches that just make me scratch my head: “dead bird on porch meaning” (I had just written a nifty short story about birds dropping out of the sky), for example, or “time drowning a groundhog” (seriously, what the fargo), or, my personal favorite, “I’m talking and I can’t shut up” (methinks the blarg might have a new tagline). Lots of searches related to writing — getting started writing, writing a first novel, etc.; and toddlers, naturally.

But by far the most searched family of terms that lands people on my site is enema-related.

Let’s start off very clear. The post that gathers all this traffic is this one, in which I talked about how I wasn’t going to talk about the time I gave my son an enema, because some things are best left unimagined. It’s one of my shortest because, unlike some times when I say I’m not going to talk about things as a springboard to talking about those very things, I really didn’t say anything about it, except perhaps to mention the amount of poop involved, which was extensive. But seeing the searches accumulate made me chuckle, because I pictured poor terrified parents — much like I was — faced with the prospect of giving their son or daughter an enema and searching in a cold, nervous sweat through the internet for guidance that wouldn’t make them vomit.

But I saw another search today which has thrown those other searches into another, darker, altogether more sinister light: “stories 10 year old boy enema stories.” And I read it, and I leaned my head to the side in thought, and I read it again, and then I wanted to throw up, because I can’t imagine a scenario where it’s not a pedophile on the other end of the wire, fantasizing about doing some really weird really sicko sharknado to a kid to get his jollies. I was really upset. Almost took down that post because I don’t even want a whisper of a hint of the foul odor of a degenerate like that fogging up the air around here.

But then it occurred to me that maybe I got in the way of said pedophile, and maybe I ruined his, uh, browsing with my drivel. And that made me happy. Still disgusted, but somewhat happy (we need a word for that. Something like “disgustiflappied”).

I still don’t know quite what to make of it. I’m still really uncomfortable with the thought that a search like that could land you at my site, even though all I post here is harmless diversion, and the closest thing to pornography at this site is a post about the time I ate a steak in the bathroom (life gets weird when you have a toddler, okay?).

I guess I can’t control what people search for or what the internet gods serve up when you search for it. But if you’re here for stories about kids getting enemas… well… I don’t know what to say. They’re here, but they’re not what you’re looking for.

Ew.

And if that other filth is what you’re here looking for, I hope an avalanche of toddler poop washes over you. Unless that’s what you’re into, in which case I hope you get stung in the face by legions of bees.

Don’t Fargo with Nature

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Here’s a little something different.

I usually don’t do these, but saw this one and thought it’d be fun.  Wordpress’s daily prompt is here: Change One Law of Nature.  I saw that and I went into high gear, because boy howdy, I love a good thought experiment.

My first thought was: gravity.  Lower the force of gravity by a factor of, oh, I dunno, maybe five or six.  Give us moon gravity, basically, and turn the whole earth into a giant bouncy house.  Whee, fun!  But you change the law for earth, you change it for the rest of the universe.  The sun loses its gravity, too.  Earth goes spiraling, screaming, into the void of deep space and humanity is wiped out in a matter of years if not days.  Whoops.

Then, okay, how about friction?  (Is friction a natural law?  On a molecular level I know it’s not, but I’m pretending it is.)  Friction sucks.  It ruins the gas mileage on my new minivan, it slows me down when I’m running, it’s a major party pooper.  Scale it down, or get rid of it.  Whoops, now you can’t use the brakes in your car.  Nor can you accelerate for that matter, in a car or otherwise.  The only method of propulsion that’s left is to spring away from things at high angles of incidence, and soon everything in creation is sailing around with no chance of stopping, just careening off other maddeningly unidirectional objects — some of which are achieving breakneck speeds because they got pushed by things like jumbo jets for example — until you achieve an escape vector and, again, go spiraling off into the void of deep space.  So yeah, maybe keep friction.

What’s left?  One of my favorite words-of-the-day, Entropy, or the tendency of energy to leave a system (yeah, I know, that’s wickedly oversimplified, but I’m not a rocket scientist; I took creative writing in college, okay?)  Yeah, that one’s a bummer.  It’s why we die, it’s why stars burn out, it’s why your pizza left on the countertop gets cold and then your dog eats it.  The cold.  Not the dog.  The dog behaves according to her own laws, most of which involve acting like a fool all the dharma time.  So get rid of entropy.  But then we live forever, until we get ourselves killed.  There is no “natural causes”.  (Don’t tell me that “is” should be “are” there.  It shouldn’t.)  So we begin to overpopulate.  And because the energy doesn’t dissipate, the sun doesn’t cool.  In fact, it never cools.  In fact, it never cooled, nor did the Earth, so life on our planet would never have existed in the first place.

It’s all well and good to think of these things in the pocket of our own experience, but the Laws of Nature are laws for a goldfinger good reason.  If nature didn’t follow them, then the Nature we know would not exist, it would be something else entirely.

Don’t Fargo with Nature.  Don’t do drugs.  Stay in school.