Armistead Maupin's Tales of the Site Meter

Like a lot of bloggers, I am fascinated by my Site Meter. There's the inexplicable numbers fascination part: how many people came by today? It's inexplicable because whether 5 people or 5,000 show up, I am not any richer or wiser or more endowed (could you imagine the traffic stuffing that a Site-Meter-enabled penis enlargement would produce?).

The more fascinating part to me is who stops by. Some I know, some are what Blue Girl calls imaginary friends, but there are also a lot of folks who come by and see the blog who I may never have had any contact with. I especially enjoy the thought of someone I don't know in some far away place reading the blog and laughing (or, if they are from the Vice President's office, preparing to expose my secret identity).

The most amusing entertainment of Site Meter comes from the search results. What are people looking for when they wind up here, a site that is neither about gay sex nor country dancing? As you can probably imagine, when you have a blog with Circle Jerk in the title, you get plenty of amusing hits from search terms like circle jerk, co-ed circle jerk, two males jerking each other (that was one from today), and married guy circle jerk (did I leave a window open?).

Before today, the most odd and unsettling episode of Tales of the Site Meter was "Sammy and Elijah." I wrote a sketch called Jehovah's Witness Protection Program that had two characters with those names. I started getting hits from searches for "Sammy and Elijah." Naïve boy that I am, I assumed there was probably some religious context for those names that I didn't know about. I googled the term, and wound up on a gay sex site dedicated to two young men named Sammy and Elijah. From the 1.7 seconds I spent looking at the site, they also looked like borderline NAMBLA bait. I slammed the browser in reverse and got the hell out of there. The last thing I need is to pull a Pete Townshend and have to explain to the FBI that I was "researching" my Site Meter hits.

But today, I saw the best search term I have seen to date, the (literal) royal flush of search words: peanut looking chunks in my feces.

That's the Site Meter equivalent of Michael Jordan hitting the game-winner over Bryon Russell during the 1998 NBA finals. I almost think I should quit looking at the search hits, because everything else will be like Jordan coming back to play for the Washington Wizards.

The worst part is, I want to know the rest of the story. Was it a hit from sub-fetish too freakish for even Dan Savage? Was it a dire, extra-crunchy-Skippy-related medical emergency? And was "peanut looking" supposed to be hyphenated, or was the Peanut the subject and doing the looking?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the real beauty of Site Meter. You get just enough info to write your own story. It's Mad Libs, Choose Your Own Adventure, and an endless Dickensian serial drama all rolled into one. Only with peanut feces and group groping included.