2015: What am I missing to get a simple hit counter block by page?
I couldn't figure out how to do it with contextual filters, so I guess I still don't understand things on that front. However, a custom block with just a couple lines of PHP did the trick. All directions from:

How to get visitors count of a page created using views

As per that post, custom code was:

&lt;?php
$path = $_GET['q'];
drupal_set_message($path);
$visits = db_query("SELECT count(*) FROM {accesslog} where path = :path", array(':path' =&gt; $path))-&gt;fetchField();
echo "Views: " . $visits;
?&gt;