The Sincam has suddenly taken off -- after a couple weeks of low double-digit daily visitorship, the daily tally has suddenly shot up to nearly 200 viewers. With a couple key listings in webcam indexes, I too am an unexpected online low-tier celebrity. Or rather, my feet are famous, as I tend to leave the little all-seeing camera orb on the floor under my desk, or aim it at the wall where daylight casts my shadow as I work at the computer. When I am feeling wild, I bring it up on the desk with me, but keep its cycloptic lens aimed modestly at my hands while I type.

Unfortunately, the world's window on sinland is on a short tether, and it's hooked up in the portion of the house where I do the least visually interesting things. I can't even get the camera over to the window, where I might aim it at the police station and call it the "police cruiser illegally parked in front of fire hydrant cam." Yet with a new potential audience, I suddenly find myself feeling like I should be doing something to justify the viewers' time. I would guess that few people are going to bookmark a live image of my fiddling bare feet on two-minute refresh cycle. Even if they are remarkably handsome feet, quite well formed, and worthy of a little fame.

Two hundred daily visitors is chump stats to many webcams, of course. I know the score: if I had breasts, it could easily be ten times that. Supply and demand. Most of my visitors are merely curious passersby. If I'm lucky, they hang out long enough to fall into the Tales. The Sincam was intended to be little more than mild satire and a pandering lure to bring in some more readers. But once again, I now feel a growing desire to be entertainment.

Sitting on the New York subway last weekend, I considered the Tales. I was away from my computer for the weekend and unable to post new material, and this gave me a necessary sense of dislocation. The curtain parted: the Tales were boring. This desire to produce something entertaining had, body-snatcher-like, insinuated itself into a more legitimate need to make and remake something personal. Clarity of motive was degenerating. I earnestly wanted the Tales to be engaging, readable, fascinating, and important to the people who read them. Maybe they were, but the desire itself was sucking the unselfconscious joy out of writing. I had to make some changes or just bag the whole project.

The Sincam is not one of these new changes -- it's just another test. There is a camera pointed at my feet -- my feet -- and I'm feeling some of the same performance anxiety, a desire to really make a show of it. I'm getting worried because it looks (from my computer screen) like it might be time to clip my toenails. For a short while, I tried aiming the camera at my bellybutton -- a little dose of online navel-gazing. I thought this was a brilliant idea, both watchable and appropriately self mocking. But it floundered in content and delivery. I quickly grew concerned that the sight of a somewhat hairy bellybutton would trump uncut toenails five times over in the nauseating department. In addition, I don't tend to sit up straight enough to continuously expose my bellybutton to the world. My slouching kept causing it to wink a bit like some kind of bearded chakran third eye. So it was a big break for the feet, the understudies of my online show. The fidget and feint under the desk. Maybe, to foot lovers, they put on a reasonable show. As they do their thing, I quickly forget about them, and that is just the sense I want.