This is something I never foresaw. That my blog, that started out so little and unknown, would one day become so popular. But, for better or worse, it's true. I have it from a reliable source -- a dream I had last night -- that I'm somewhere in the Top 100 of visited sites. About ready to pass even Wikipedia! Which I've done without a single fund-drive.
I have to be honest about it. I never asked for this kind of scrutiny, and, in fact, it's not really welcome. I've always been a private individual, content to hide in closets, picking my nose and wiping it on the sleeves of suits I'll never wear, mostly Grandpa's old ones. The idea that now, suddenly, everyone wants a piece of me can only have a bad ending.
How all this anxiety came about is when I chose to Google myself one day. I wish I hadn't. Because I came across the above graphics, apparently websites based on grandmaslump.com that are now available for copycats, read likely scam artists.
One way I thought to address this was to buy up all the domains myself. But how am I to know they won't think of others? Frankly, though, I don't have the kind of money we're talking. The $10.99 ones would be easy enough, maybe, at least for a while. But if I suddenly needed to get my car fixed next year when they come due again, then what? I will have staved off the copycats for only a year, making it all in vain.
Obviously I'm not going to be able to snap up the higher end domains, however much I'd love to. The highest one, at $2,695, grandmalinda.com, would be damned nice to have. Not that I know any Grandma Lindas, but I'd like to have any possible buffer against the outside world. If the money's right. Which I'm not so sure it is.
I added up the premium domains alone, and it comes to $13,444. Sounds pretty bad, I know, till you factor in they wouldn't be that much next year. At that point they'd be mine and it'd only be the normal yearly rate of around $10.95, unless it goes up a dollar. But then my car breaks down, as I said, and I can't afford to fix it, especially with the front end expense of $13,444 that I'd be down at the outset.
The more I think about it the less I think I can do. Except to just throw my hands up and say, "Breathe in, breathe out, don't worry, somehow the Lord will see me through." He was there that time I got full disability for my game toe, and that time I learned to make apple pie from scratch, He'll be with me now. Just embrace the competition, maybe that's the answer; there's room in this big fish pond we call the internet for a big fish like me as well as all the little fish.
But I see a couple domains that'd be great, GrandmaSlouch and OldSlouch. You'd think those would already be taken. With the popularity of going ultra-casual that began subtly encroaching on propriety a few years ago -- when teachers quit making boys tuck their shirts in -- and quickly took over the world. Even me. I'm sitting here in blue jeans I've been wearing three weeks, socks that don't match, and a shirt with a big stain from food that fell on it last week when I was watching TV, eating but not at the table. My mom's ashes are spinning in her unburied urn even now that I'm in the same undies two days in a row. God forbid I might need an ambulance.
GrandmaSink sounds like an interesting domain. This brings up a funny point about my grandma. She could never say the word "sink," for reasons I don't know. Both she and Grandpa pronounced it with a Z, "zinc." That's not funny, perhaps, but it's true.
As far as "GrandmaGoes," now there's a cheaper one on the premium list, only $577. I could probably talk them down to $576; anything's possible. They'd be like, "What the hell, what's a dollar between friends?" The idea of Grandma "going" is likely a knock against anyone wanting this one. Because you should see some of the referring searches I get, every filthy thing that perverts can think of when it comes to Grandmas. Basically, every Google search that has "Grandma" -- sexual, scatological, or pertaining to animals -- I get.
No comments:
Post a Comment