Abandoned House

I once stepped into an old, abandoned house. It was a southern style house in rural Tennessee. This house had sweeping staircases, 12-foot-high windows and even higher squinches and ceilings.

My entrance to the old house was almost magical, like something from a children’s novel. The door through which I entered was in a well-lit building. It should have been locked but someone had propped the door slightly open with a jamb. I stuck my face into the narrow opening and smelled darkness. I opened the door, slowly. The mildewy smell of a lonely house rushed out. I stepped in.

Musty and silent, this old house was deserted long before. In the foyer I looked up and around at the hoary gloom. I stood still, amazed at the silence. I heard creaks in the structure, those crackling mysteries of architectural noise that punctuate our world’s paranoid, sleepless nights.

Some furniture (tables and chairs) remained. Tables and chairs.

I walked half-way down a curved hallway before turning back, nervous at this act of trespassing but ready with a stream of lies to explain myself should authorities appear.

I walked further down another hallway, finding no sign of life. All doors closed, all lights out, the light bulbs and door knobs were covered with soot and grime. Entrails of spider webs and God-knows-what dangled from the ceilings.

After a few minutes I felt emboldened to walk up the staircase. Visions of southern belles in curtain dresses gliding up and down these steps skated through my mind as I swiftly reached the top of the staircase.

There were no southern belles up there. At the top of the staircase was a dog. An angry, mean, slobbering, teeny-tiny dog. It might have been a Chihuahua but to me it was satan — a barking, yapping, terroristic demon. The dog yawped at me and in response I screamed with full throat. My hands and arms extended straight, my nervous system wrenched asunder by what felt like an electrocution. Blood rushed to the farthest of my body’s extremities. My perineum gasped. This was a bug-eyed eructation of terror as I had never felt or imagined. I screamed for several seconds, seconds which passed like minutes. I would remember this scream for all my times. I feel it today.

Whilst still screaming I fell backwards, landing on my ass. Using hands, knees, and feet I wrestled with the panic, turning over as I helplessly slid head-first down the stairs. For a moment I imagined this was an abandoned water theme park and that I was sliding down a moldy old water slide. Then I imagined myself as a giant egg that Someone had cracked open and dropped onto the staircase, mistaking the stairs for a frying pan.

Back on my feet I retraced my steps and started running. The magical door was still propped open with the doorjamb. I re-entered the brightly-lit room and kept running. Still panicked my arms flailed and I nearly fell on my face from running faster than these once-scrawny legs could move.

The escape door was around a curve in the hall. I could not see that door at first. I thought to myself, if the escape door is closed then I will break it down by hurling my pencil-thin body at it.

I did not have to bust through the next door. It was, conveniently, wide open.

I ran through the lobby of the building, looking behind to see if the dog was in pursuit. No demon beast came after me, and I triumphantly escaped the building into the sunshine of the parking lot. Arms raised in victory I gasped for air.

I was 17 years old and had never felt anything like that before. All internal organs participated in full-body remonstrance. Everything from heart to hands to throat to ankles responded to this attack on my nervous system.

I liked it. I liked it a lot. I wanted to do it over and over again, but I felt dismay knowing that these spontaneous ejaculations of fear cannot be planned.

I lay my suddenly exhausted body on a bench outside the building. I turned on my side and commenced laughing. For 20 minutes I lay there in the Tennessee sun, laughing, laughing, laughing. I have laughed harder since then, but never has laughter provided such cleansing as on that day.

For a full week my innards were sore from the laughter.

That little dog threw instant terror into my life. After running away I found that the tiny animal’s stunning power over me was ludicrous.

This web site feels like that old abandoned house to me. There are no satanic dogs patrolling this plantation but another type of beast, almost as scary, found its ways inside. Something happened over a year ago, again about 6 months ago, and again more recently. In November, 2010, a server blowout erased millions of my web pages, a year of e-mail, and infinite little technical doo-hickeys that I never backed up or copied. Nothing has been the same for me since. Over a year later I still find myself hunting for pieces of content apparently swallowed whole by the blowout.

It took me this long to connect the dots, and to realize that the blowout was not a random instance of gremlins in the machine, or a specific (if conveniently inexplicable) hardware failure. No, the server was attacked, and breached by the bad guys, and that’s all I should say about it. What comfort I take in the matter is that the breach was nothing personal, no nothing more than a drive-by opportunity that any competent botnet could not pass up. Once I discovered the code they had dropped into my /tmp and the streamlined efficiency of their operation it was strangely awesome to see them in action, to see “for reals” and up close how dangerous it really is out here on the public network.

After I understood what happened here I zipped it up, confirmed the attack was nothing personal, and that’s the end of that.

Otherwise I have, happily, had no reason to scream in pulverized panic at anything I’ve encountered since re-discovering this web site, though the dismay and annoyance that has dogged me is its own form of fright.

I have barely glanced at this web site in over a year. Last week, though, I looked up a certain phrase that was in my mind. I recognized the phrase from somewhere, but could not remember from where, so I went to my nearest neighborhood street-corner search engine and typed it in. I was chagrinned to find that I had written those words, and that the only place on the World Wide Web whence they occurred was on this web site. (The phrase must have been quite impressive, for I cannot remember it now.)

Curious about this unfamiliar web place I clicked around for a while with glimmers of recognition but little sense of identification. I was embarrassed at what a train wreck some parts of this place have become. It really is an abandoned house.

I read words and saw pictures, amazed that they came from me, that amazement rising not out of self-admiration or self-effacement but because I had no memory of having created them. That should not surprise me. I am an accumulator, plagued since birth by a horror vacui of the mind, my jumbled and still-unindexable space where memories from 30 years ago climb over the conversation at hand only to make way for a seemingly random association that pushes its elbows forward through the overpopulated space.

If I turned my back on sorabji.com that is not to say that I’ve done nothing else. I’ve spun off new sites, closed some others, experimented with ideas big and small, old and new. What made the blowout of November, 2010, traumatic for me was that no one in my immediate world understood why I cared. Friendly advice ranged from “Get a job” to “Get a Mac” to “Get a life.” This, for better or worse, is my job, and to a large extent this is my life. I like it like that. The blowout reminded me (not that I needed the reminder) of how over-extended I am, how alone I am in this business, and how precarious is this matter of relying on technology and a public communications network for one’s livelihood.

Most of my WWW text exertions of late have been sent to Sorabji.MOBI. I draw no attention to it. I do not know if anybody reads it. I do more than draw no attention to it. I take that oxymoron to another level by fully blocking the site from legitimate search engines and, as with most of my text products, I rarely look at it myself.

I block Sorabji.MOBI from the commercial searchies for a number of reasons, not least of which that I don’t think the content has any business littering search indexes and drawing in misguided keyword hunters.

Another reason I do not make Sorabji.MOBI visible to the passing public is because the site contains typos and spelling errors. I do not expect casual visitors to understand this, but I leave the typos where they lay in the spirit of .MOBI. All content at Sorabji.MOBI comes from a mobile phone device or non-computer type of machine. Some of the content is essentially a lengthy text-message. The smartphone has a small screen that is usable for typing text but horrible on my eyes when it comes to editing and reviewing.

I like .MOBI, though, that feeling of casting text into an abyss. With no spell check or bloated text editor I feel free.

If you don’t know what a .MOBI is then you are not alone. Most U.S.-based web sites you encounter have addresses that end with .COM, .ORG or .NET. You probably also encounter a .US or .INFO web address on occasion.

The .MOBI top-level-domain (TLD) was (and apparently still is) intended to be reserved for web sites that serve content formatted for mobile devices.

But the .MOBI charter has been a bit of a bust. Technologies advanced and lines quickly blurred between what type of content a mobile web browsing device can deal with versus what a typical desktop computer can render. Many modern smartphones of today can display web pages more or less as they would appear on a desktop PC (just a lot smaller).

I originally used Sorabji.MOBI as a repository for mobile-formatted versions of some of my sites. Here is how the May, 1902, issue of “The Etude” magazine looks in a version for handheld devices, versus a desktop-formatted version of the same content.

I saw no need for juggling the logistics of a separate domain name and file system. The dedicated .MOBI TLD made less sense as it became obvious that templating systems and browser-recognition widgets could do the job of handling mobile-formatted content perfectly well without the added bureaucratic layer of a needless TLD.

But I had the domain name and I kinda like the way it looked. So instead of using Sorabji.MOBI for mobile-specific designs I turned it around, choosing instead to make Sorabji.MOBI a site where all content originates> from mobile devices, e-mail, and other non-computer sources.

Then I spun off two new payphone sites, this after a genuine and altogether entertaining revival of my interest in the subject. Mine, as I am wont to say, is the house that payphones built – and that house is not abandoned (yet). I must pay maximum respect to the subject once in a while, though my interest never waned.

The two new sites are PayphonePictures.com and PayphoneNews.com, each site bringing me the advantages of modernized publishing systems without having to rebuild the whole entire Payphone Project monstrosity-of-a-web-site.

Most recently I spun off the Sepulchral Portraits Collection that used to be on this domain. I’ve begun to have doubts about the ethical questions that lurk around that project. I may give it up altogether.

And dot dot dot, lots of other things I do and think about. I don’t mind talking about myself sometimes, just so long as I don’t think anyone is listening.

I am just checking in on this old place.

The years pass like strangers, the months pass like inconveniences, the days pass like nothing. And to paraphrase Annie Dillard: “The way we pass our days is, of course, the way we pass our lives.”

I am growing older and I hope you are, too.