Rising Fortunes

Barely a week ago (49 dog-days, in case Lassie is reading - good girl!) I pulled down the Google bar that lives among the soon-to-be plethora of toolbars at the top of my browser...

and, to my most excellent surprise, my homepage has taken a giant leap to Google pagerank 4. My little heart skipped a beat - after all the long days and nights of apparently fruitless homegrown search engine optimization - I mysteriously made the leap up one level. The meaning? More traffic to my website. More status and importance.

How this happened I was none too sure, but my mind began to spin reasons. Blah blah blah went the little brain engine that could. Six months before, I said, "To the anti-Disneyland with this!" I took a much needed break from the tedious work of feeding my lovely beast and obsessed about meaning in the non-virtual world.

But, the little green gas gauge on the Google toolbar was now showing a bit more gas in the tank of importance, so I felt new energy of desire...a renewed will to continue on. The web design 'n optimize carrot was again dangling in front of me.

Now...the holy grail of level 5 beckoned...and still beckons. The e-sirens are calling to me...come! Add more links, add more content. Expand your website, add more...more...more...it's worth it...you will rise in the rankings...you will get more "hits."

That means...more web surfers who are hunting for your keywords will find you. They will find you. Yes, YOU!

The website world is another dimension labyrinth calling to me; telling me to commit more profoundly, come deeper into the maze, become more involved. Be more of a player. Don't struggle. It's worth the time and effort. The rewards are great.

Always the same arguments appear. Come on in. You will enjoy yourself. It's worth the ride. The "process." The game. The ride is the thing. The end is the thing. You can't drop out. It's the only game in town. You will go to hell if you don't play. Quit fighting this. To surrender is the way.

Do I read too much into a simple website rating I just received from Google, Mother of All Search Engines? I take a tiny, rather meaningless thing like a website, and apparently generalize it too far, perhaps.

But I tend to hear the same things, the same arguments, about most everything. Or, rather than using that ridiculous over generalization I could say, "Nothing new under the sun." Just do it, just go with it. Do your job. Don't drop out. Drop out. The democrats are the way to go. The republicans are the way to go. It's random and came about by chance. It's designed by the Hand of God. It's this...It's that...It's neither...It's both...If a tree falls in the forest, it makes me tired of hearing this.

The Labyrinth keeps talking to me, through my ears (I think) I hear so many things, from so many sources. Through my eyes, (they say) I see so many things. I interpret them through my brain (I believe). I've been told it works like this.

But I am thinking, that the mental things are not the "out there" things. And the science religion says that the things aren't really things. They are whirling and twirling "something" or other. Spinning and whirling and twirling...I should have emailed Fred Astaire before he died and went to the Emerald City. Or am I getting it all mixed up? Did he go to the North Pole?

No, wait, that's where Superman lives...uhhh Santa lives there, too, with Fred Astaire. When we die, if we're good, Santa gives us a ride in his sleigh to uhhhh Epcot Center? There's something about a lump of coal, Donner Pass, Blitzen, uhhh, hmmm...oh yeah...

God...Golden Streets, Right Hand, Federation of Planets, It's getting clear to me now...all the public education, TV, Google searching for those values in life that really connect to something well, of value. The list of the things of "value" will now commence...

1. compassion is better than anger

Never said it was a long list!

Some of my earliest artworks were mazes. I drew one after the other. I didn't even bother to see if they worked or not. Just drew them on notebook paper. Were they artworks? I didn't really call them such. I just filled page after page.

Just amazing. What was I talking about at the beginning of this post? I used the Google toolbar on the abstract art websites that are at the top of the heap. (That changed the whirling and twirling in my head. Didn't stop it, just changed it.) They moved up from pagerank 4 to 5! (Not all did, I later found out)

So Mother Google decided to move the big abstract art web up a notch, I guess. And I looked at a friend's site, too (art but not abstract art). He also moved up to pagerank 4. He hasn't done too much work on his site, yet he still moved up to 4. So what was all my hard work about?

I created a much nicer website with far better content, but as far as the overall web structure? It's as if Google took most of the overall art website web chunk network and put bigger numbers on it.

Remember the film mock-rockumentary, This Was Spinal Tap?

"My website goes up to a 4!" HAHAHAHAHA

Amazing. Confounding. Labyrinth. If I had done no work on my website, would I have moved up to a 4? I doubt it, in spite of my deep ruminations.

"p.s." I have added this later, March 28, 2008. My site has since fallen in the eyes of Google. It was a while back. But before they stopped the pagerank thing (I think they did) I fell back to a pagerank 3. Well, I thought my days were numbered! hahahaha But I still seem to be holding on, somehow.