The homeless payphonista had to cancel, or postpone our meetup. He said he got tied up waiting at a temp agency in Brooklyn. I did not want to be negative so I did not reply that temp and employment  agency’s job is to waste your time. It’s cool, I wasn’t annoyed, even though I was most of the way to Woodside before getting his message. There are so many ways to communicate these days that it becomes hard to predict which means someone will use. And getting email on my phone is a bit of a hassle on account of a recent spam problem i have been unable to address. I cut down on a lot of it after discovering what I should have noticed right away: much of it was coming from .XYZ and .EU TLDs. That was easy to filter but I still cannot understand wtf went wrong with Spamassassin.

A lengthy e-mail from a forever-ago ex got my day off to a strange, thought provoking start. She is 50 now, to my 47. I have known her, at widely varying depths of intimacy, for something like 20 years. We are from the forgotten legion of personal web site creators who did our thing out here in the early to mid 1990s. My first web page was probably posted in 1993, though I made creative use of my .plan file in 1992. Some have said that the .plan was the first blogging platform, others suggest the .sig. I don’t fucking care because I don’t think there is any prestige attached to being an early adopter of the WWW’s self-publishing platform.  It was a lonely time but sure as there are sharks in the ocean a number of “scenes” developed, small networks of confessional writers who laid everything short of full frontal nudity out to dry.

Wait, what am I saying, the JenniCam was, on account of her guilelessness (and hot ass), the poster child for individuals like us who bared ourselves through the medium of text matter.

Actually I did show my cock on my webcam once, by mistake. Whoops. I’m pretty certain no one saw it but who the hell cares if they did. I’m reminded of the Wikipedia entry for “Penis”, which at one point was illustrated with dozens of user contributed photos. That always makes me laugh.

On the mid ’90s I think the public perception of the Internet was that it was a sea of pornography. Dumbass stories like a Time Magazine cover story which used patently bogus data to support its claims that Usenet was something like 80% porn, did little to reverse this thinking. I gotta find that quote, it was so bare (huh huh). The quote was something like “80% of images found on Usenet are pornographic”, or some nonsense statistic that was completely indefensible.

I was considered for a spot on the Letterman Show but they went with Jenni instead. I can’t say I blame them. They were looking for someone who represented this newfangled Internet thing and who was doing what with it. It wouldn’t have mattered if any of us were writing like Ernest Hemingway (and I am not saying that any of us were), they would have gone with the cute girl who gets naked in a second.

I remember watching Letterman’s Jenni interview but that’s all i remember of it.

This long-ago ex and I mostly distanced ourselves from any “scene” of early personal web site creators, she far more than I. I slept with one woman and met most of her circle of online friends who probably to this day consider themselves the only coherent troupe of creators that were out there in those days. They were not.

I am at the ghetto coffee shop, which has suddenly become quite crowded. I have to go anyway. Want to talk about this more, though. Was reminded of a woman, I’ll call her LH, since those were her initials. She was one of the early WWW stars who died some years ago, and I always wondered about the circumstances.