They don't know they know me

i feel like it's at least a million at this point. Maybe more.

i'm just doing basic math in my head here. You get your first publication at 22 or 23. Fast forward a decade, and here you are with a decade's worth of writing out there. Probably 95-98 percent of that is only online. i keep the paper copies of the magazines i'm in. i think there's three of them at this point. Maybe four? i don't know they're somewhere around here.

But it has to be a million people who have read something i wrote, maybe more. Probably more, actually. There was a moment in my mid-20s that i churned shit out for an aggregate Comic Book Culture type of website. It started at something $10 per 300-word post, but then they changed it to a Pay-Per-View scale to save them money. But it was one of those websites with the articles that plastered Facebook feeds – a low number post got a few hundred clicks, so you assume about as many people. Better posts, a few 1000. Viral ones you get the idea.

And i did a fair amount of those for a while, and then eventually i published in some bigger places, and eventually some of those published things went viral, too. Then i quit my job and tried to write for a living and now most days of the week can count me as content.

content like 'product' not content like 'happy' or whatever.

So yeah, a million people. Maybe two million but could even be more. That many individual lives have seen a part of me

and they don't know they know me. but they do in a way, i think

*

And sometimes you have a nice interaction with a stranger when you're on a trip out of town. You're in their shitty car that they probably tried to make feel less shitty in the hopes of another couple dollars of tips. You're in your stranger's shitty car for a few miles, and the weather is shitty, and at one point you hear a nearby car losing control on the highway. And your driver stranger does a great job of switching lanes to make sure he's out of the way, and you hear another stranger's car crunch into at least one more stranger's car as you continue on your route. No additional time added to the trip. Get there on schedule.

But before you arrive where you're going, you make a joke or two with the stranger in his shitty car, and you both smile. And then you say thanks and close the door and you get sad because you know you will never see that stranger again. He will have an entire life out there that does not need your existence in it.

and this happens almost every single day of your life. again and again and again. so much of your life is spent with strangers you will never see again. It's a neutral, factual statement

and Why does that make me so sad every time i think about it?

*

A couple weeks ago we went to a covered bridge festival. County fair sort of thing, minus the rides, plus pretty old bridges. But the festival is held across multiple participating towns' Main Street areas, so you have to drive a few minutes out to see any of the actual covered bridges. And we'd never seen any in real life so let's do it.

And they are really, really, really pretty. Look exactly like the picture you assemble in a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. But what they don't show in the jigsaw puzzles are the 100 years — literally 100 years — of graffiti accumulated on them. you would think there would be more graffiti after all that time, but really it isn't too bad. A normal amount, i would say, for a public transit structure. Maybe they repaint them every so often.

There are all the names and the dates and scribbles on the beams and boards. All the asymmetrical hearts with crooked initials inside. But then there are some that feel anachronistic for a covered bridge. Stuff like ACAB. A pretty standard graffiti variant most places, but not really for the inside of a jigsaw puzzle bridge. And then you see

MAKE ______ AFRAID AGAIN

but the second word is so thoroughly blacked out that you really can't get any sense of what it said. It could have been anything. i know after Trump, you'd see a lot of spins like 'MAKE RACISTS AFRAID AGAIN.' and i don't want to jump to conclusions but that sort of strikes me as unlikely in rural Indiana. but then again, ACAB so maybe not

So we have two likely options:

1. MAKE RACISTS AFRAID AGAIN, blacked out by racists
2. MAKE [PLURAL SLUR] AFRAID AGAIN, blacked out by ACAB tagger or likeminded person

Either way, someone wrote something into the world, and the world responded accordingly. And i doubt either author knew each other, and i doubt they ever will. And maybe one day that one stranger who avoided our car crash will read me somewhere, and he won't even realize it

(((EC)))