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Me?. Oh. Hi.
Last updated: Sunday Aug 4 2002 2:12am.
Monthly visitors: Cannot read propertycountof undefined.
So yeah okay let me get in front of this one. I don’t have a security certificate … per se … but I’m not insecure! I’m just from a time where notarized certificates weren’t important because we were a goddam community.
I’m just a really old webpage, five hundred clicks outside the limits of whatever normal people care about these days.
I like to think of myself as aloof and a bit above all of the rest of it, but who am I kidding? Even if the rest of the internet is drowning in grifters and profiteers and circling toward the drain… I’m honestly kinda lonely.
While most of the others (the sites in my blogroll) were living in Blogspot or Geocities, I was settled somewhere much less findable — and that’s probably why I’m still here. I could not be acquired, forgotten and then deleted as corporatization moved across the net. Happy for me, though, my homemade platform remains online and the server fees continue to be covered (and I haven’t been able to figure out how).
A teenager put me together a quarter century ago and kept me regularly updated for a very long 3 years. Three years doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s most of high school. It’s a lot. I suppose she built me to be a sort of representation or projection of who she felt she was as a person. Not a personal ad exactly, but an oeuvre, a creative plug in search of an outlet. She set me out, and I sat there waiting, in case the theoretical like-minded weirdo found me and switched on like a light bulb. No stated goal of meeting a best friend — just: light up some bulbs. You know?
Formally, I’m not quite a public diary in the manner typical of my contemporaries. Instead I’m a catalogue of imaginary found objects. Each is a post, presented as an inventory slip from some kind of surreal library. A list for a listless traveller. My entries vary in length and style in a way that’s only possible with no editor. Each imagining reflects the certain moment of developing adolescence the author inhabited and her surroundings when she wrote it. The books and shows she was watching at the time colour each entry. And of course the colours from her developing inner world and her coalescing state of teenage mind—classic outcast story. The entries get better and better as she develops her voice — less obnoxiously weird, subtler. Then they stop.
That teenager, my ex-webmaster, is almost 40 now. A lot more confident. Working hard and earning a steady paycheque. Not flirting with becoming an artist. Not sitting by herself up on the third floor during period four, far outside the limits of whatever normal people care about these days.
These days the times she thinks of me are rare because it requires a moment with enough space. Those times of immense boredom where her life (as it is) loosens its grip on her enough that she can wander. Those ones, where she brushes against me and remembers a generalized outline, are just medium rare. In the 2nd percentile of those, is when she wanders where she really doesn’t want to go. Those are blue; so rare they are bloody. During trance-like states that invade particularly long showers as the water turns tepid. Or particularly bad traffic jams on drug trips. Or in the waiting room of funeral homes. That’s when she remembers me in too much detail and winces; and feels something big and blurry swimming inside her.
How can I know all that? To be honest, this is all conjecture. But it’s a guess educated on a pretty close relationship with at least part of her inner world. She hasn’t really touched me since typing “Excited for New York. I think it can do it. I believe in it. It has so much potential.” at the end of an entry titled Receipt for new life, and hitting publish.
My last contact, and what a way to end it. Satisfying as a culmination, but with an open thread of “what if?”. I love set ups; closure — less so. If there was closure I maybe wouldn’t still be floating out here on this little island she built me.
Whether she meant it as the last entry or not I’m not totally sure. She wavered I think because, well — Ok — I haven’t been totally forthcoming. I do have this Drafts folder in here. You can’t see it, but It’s got the beginnings of some really good stuff in it; and some… other stuff. One about a four dimensional statue of an unborn bird. “The omelette that the oracle forsooth”. Some she started but never had time for after “Receipt for new life”. I think I’ll keep those to myself unless she comes back for them — for me. It makes me feel a bit uncomfortable to be in Drafts. Gives me the shivers ya know? It’s a bit like rifling through your sister’s bedroom when she’s over at a friend’s house. But it’s worth going in there. I don’t have much else to keep me busy.
And it’s food. I mean all I’ve got to make me who I am are all these posts. They form the essence of my everything. And the unfinished ones—the lines she typed, hesitated and then deleted, the ones not quite ready for human consumption—those often tell me more than the ones on display. I really get this person. And that’s why even though there’s no way my conjectures about what she’s up to now could be right, well, they just might be.
Hopefully that’s not too off-putting. I’m just happy to finally have someone to talk to.
Anyway, even if you’re a little unsure, why not proceed? It’s good to be careful and it’s good to not know what to expect. So, here: Read more about Internet security, accept risk, and continue. I’m not gonna harvest any of your data. I’m old school. I just am what I am.