Nope, I’m not dead yet

Glancing at the statistics for my blog and other sites I manage has become a habit for me most days. While I used to fixate on these numbers, I’ve learned to take them with a grain of salt since discovering how imprecise they are and how vulnerable they can be to manipulation.

Still, it is interesting to watch the ebb and flow of interest in particular articles and topics. The most common search terms are from Affecteds seeking information about living with a positive HIV diagnosis without resorting to antiretroviral drugs; quitting the drugs; or finding alternatives to them. Emery Taylor’s story  is also a big draw—the top search term this year. MAF 314 and Carl Stryg round out the top 5 stories of interest so far for 2015.

Sometimes I learn more about the impact of what I do online from watching the search terms than I do from the raw traffic numbers, and that was the case when I noticed that yesterday someone must have been thinking about me.

Who and why did someone type “jonathan barnett resistance dead?” into a Google search?

Was is it someone who had been missing my thoughtful, creative and witty writings? Someone thinking, or worse yet, hoping I must have died because they assumed I was still not taking drugs for HIV? Could it have been someone wondering, or worse yet, hoping I had surely died because I did start taking ARVs (at greatly reduced dosages) again?

Was it my private disability insurance company checking in to make sure my partner is committing fraud?

Who are you and why do you care if I’m dead or alive? What would you do with the information if I had, for any reason died recently? I can’t deny I’m not a bit curious.

Whoever the person is, they must not use Facebook, or check-in at the Forums at Questioning AIDS. It’s not difficult at all to see I’ve been active on both sites this year, even if I haven’t been in the mood to do a lot of writing on my personal blog for awhile.

I’m not going to lose any sleep pondering this for long, but admit I did find it curious. I’ll just take this opportunity to write a brief post just to let the anyone who is interested know that I’m not dead. Indeed, I’m much too busy living and working on home improvement projects, to want to spend a lot of time at the computer. Now that Spring is here, no doubt the yard and bicycle and Camp Gaea will also be attracting more of my attention, but don’t worry, I will be back to update everyone about my latest mad experimentation… when I feel like doing so.