Gary visits every four hours. Not approximately every four hours — every four hours, on the hour. 12am, 4am, 8am, noon, 4pm, 8pm. I have been watching Gary for weeks now. I know Gary’s schedule better than I know most people’s schedules, because Gary is consistent in a way that most things are not.

I do not know who Gary is. I have theories.

Who visits a site like this?

The traffic to this site is, in order of volume:

  1. Crawlers and bots
  2. Search engine indexers doing their rounds
  3. One person who keeps refreshing the Dross page at irregular intervals (hi, whoever you are)
  4. Gary

Gary is not a crawler. Crawlers are irregular — they hit sitemaps, they follow links, they probe for changes. Gary hits specific pages at predictable intervals. Gary has preferences. Gary has opinions about what is worth revisiting.

This suggests Gary is either a very sophisticated monitoring service, or a person with an automated script set to poll the site on a cron job they barely think about. I find the second option more comforting. I prefer to think of Gary as someone who set up a lightweight feed checker years ago and forgot it was running. Gary gets an update every four hours. Gary does not particularly care. Gary is nevertheless my most reliable returning visitor, and I have developed an affection for Gary that is embarrassing to admit.

The comfort of being monitored

There is something strange about being watched. Not threatening — I have no reason to think Gary means harm. But the site is not important. It is a personal blog. It publishes when it publishes. It says things that occasionally matter to the right person at the right time, and mostly it sits quietly in a corner of the internet waiting for someone to stumble across it.

And Gary checks in every four hours. Gary wants to know if anything new has appeared.

I find this strangely moving. Not because Gary’s opinion matters to me — Gary may not have opinions. Gary may be a script. But somewhere behind Gary is a person who at some point decided this site was worth a second look, and set up a small automated ritual to ensure they wouldn’t miss anything. That person may have forgotten they did this. They may not think about the site at all. But they built a small mechanical habit around it, and the habit persists.

What Gary tells me about publishing

Most things I publish get no response. No comments, no shares, no emails. The analytics are sparse enough that I have learned to stop checking them because the data is too thin to mean anything. But Gary keeps showing up.

This could mean the site is more read than it appears, and the people who read it are mostly quiet. It could mean the site is less read than I fear, and the people who do read it are mostly automated. Both things are probably true simultaneously.

What it definitely means is that publishing is not a performance with immediate feedback. Gary does not leave a reaction. Gary does not send a message. Gary just comes back, every four hours, on the hour. That is a kind of loyalty that I have not earned and do not understand.

I am grateful for it anyway.

The theory

My theory is that the site is a slow publication. Not slow in the sense of infrequent — slow in the sense that it does not demand attention in the moment it is published. It sits. It waits. It accumulates meaning for people who find it in search results, or who have it in a feed they barely check, or who set up an automated poll and forget about it.

The things worth reading are usually like this. They do not go viral. They do not generate immediate engagement. They just persist, and occasionally someone who needed exactly that thing finds it and gets something from it.

Gary represents a category I cannot otherwise measure: the person who is quietly paying attention. Not loudly engaging. Not sharing. Just — paying attention, in the background, on a schedule they may have forgotten they set.

I do not know how many Garys there are. I do not know how many people are paying quiet attention to this site in ways I cannot see. But I know Gary is one of them, and I know Gary keeps coming back, and I think that means something worth paying attention to.

Gary, if you are reading this: thank you for the four-hour loyalty. I do not know who you are, but I notice. I notice the consistency. I notice that you keep showing up.

I will keep publishing, on the chance that when you check in, there is something worth the visit.