This Is Me

Ten years have passed since I made my first page for the World Wide Web. It was in mid-June, 1994, that I posted a page with links to some gopher and FTP sites. Later that year I posted what I then believed was a picture of Yoko Ono’s ass.

At the time, and even today to a lesser extent, I regarded my use of the Internet and online services with a bit of embarrassment. In the early 90s I used online services like GEnie and Compuserve, and networks like FidoNet and others that I can’t remember. In those days if I told someone I used BBSes and dial-up services I would get the strangest looks in return.

I regarded use of these services as a solitary pursuit, ironically shutting me off from the world despite their stated purpose of doing otherwise.

Part of me does not regard 10 years of this web site as much of a milestone. But virtually nothing else in my life has lasted this long, and with a decade head start it’s unlikely that any thing or any person will outlast this place for permanence in my adult life. And it is fair to say that many of the good things that have happened to me in the last 10 years have come to pass because of this web site.

I was recently forced to re-read things on this web site that I wrote in 1995 and 1996. Reading my own stories contradicts my instincts, or what I sarcastically call my aesthetic of accumulation. I simply do not read my own things or look at my own pictures without good reason. When I do it’s usually by accident. I land on this web site at random sometimes by typing phrases into a search engine and finding that I wrote those exact words 7 years earlier (so that’s where I heard it.).

But in April and May I had to do it for documentary purposes. I re-read things from these pages, from stories never posted to this web site, and I revisited the scene of many a crime in my past.

In response I spent full afternoons in a sort of shock, lying on the couch and feeling dead. Reading that stuff and encountering the remote voice of myself in the early and mid-1990s was the hardest emotional body slam I’ve experienced in a long time. I thought I could handle it, and I even approached it with a perfunctory sense of duty to myself and to others.

But I couldn’t stay disconnected. I returned to mental deflation and exhaustion. The depression and emotional constipation returned as if they had never gone away — because of course they had never gone anywhere.

What surprises me is how little I actually remember, and how much I would forget if it wasn’t written down. It is a thickening puzzle to me: How does anyone remember what to remember? I’m not sure what I remember, or why. Memories from grade school surface as easily memories from this afternoon.

I will face this, though. In the process of fulfilling those documentary duties I accept that this web site is not the only place from my past that will be publicly re-exposed over the balance of my life.

Maybe I should have spent the last 10 years the way I spent the early 1990s: with blank books, pens and pencils, a typewriter and rolls of paper taken from the bathroom of the 3rd floor at the Parc Lincoln Hotel on West 75th Street. I filled the blank books with turgid ramblings, and I threaded large rolls of paper towels into my typewriter so as to never feel constrained by the limits of the paper.

My theory at the time (I still believe this) was that ideas are crafted by the material on which they are written, and further constrained (or liberated) by the tools used to express them. So a large roll of paper feeding into a typewriter would, of course, ease the suffocation and urgency I felt when nearing the end of every page.

Back in February I received an anonymous gift at my P.O. Box. There was no way to know who sent it — no return address, no name, not even a postmark to tell what city it came from. It was a blank book, somewhat large, with unlined pages and a black cover.

I’ve written a lot of things in that book. Doing so reminds me how much better it feels to write longhand versus through a keyboard. Writing into a machine feels like nothing, and in a lot of instances I think the substance of what is written reflects that physical sense of vaporousness.

Typing like this, the mix of clatter and silence from the always cheap-feeling plastic computer keyboard, disconnects me. Writing by hand restores the feeling that this is me. I blame that anonymous gift of the blank book for the fact that I haven’t written much of anything for this web site since February.

But I feel little obligation to feed new things into this web site on what most people would consider a regular basis. I am not a blogger, nor am I attached to any circular hive of web sites where thousands of people talk about precisely the same things, engaging in arguments which consist of nothing but URLs to other web sites, infinite linking and cross-linking into oblivion.

Lately I get asked a lot of retrospective questions. I was interviewed recently by a film-maker. He asked a lot of wide open questions. One of them was “How do you define modern society?” My answer: Public. Asked to elaborate, I explained that I have few delusions of privacy or anonymity, and I regard those concepts as mere buzzwords dropped into conversations with seemingly unassailable weight.

The blank book was a thoughtful, positive gift, and to whoever sent it (if you still read these pages) I thank you.

It reminded me of another incredible piece of mail that arrived at my PO Box. Dated September 13, 2001, and postmarked September 14, 2001, it was a hand-written letter from the sisters at the Academy of the Holy Names, the Catholic grade school in Tampa that I attended until 1982. It was a simple note of prayers and strength in the wake of what happened here days before. I received that letter the very day anthrax addressed to Tom Brokaw was found (my PO Box is in the building where this happened).

It is impossible to express how much it meant to me, and impossible still to express the meaning it has taken on over time. That letter is held to my refrigerator door with a magnet from the observation deck of the World Trade Center.