It’s amazing what a difference even a smattering of contact with a new-to-me human being has on my disposition. A couple of YT comments had me bounding from this place, facing the world like a conqueror.
Just as abruptly reason returned, and I found nothing to encourage me to do anything but wait for another day to pass.
I’m e-mailing this in, even though I could just as easily peck these words into WordPress. I like the feeling of immediacy, and the seemingly contradictory intimacy, that comes from e-mailing it in.
I say immediacy even though posting this way takes longer, though not by much.
But there is something about e-mail that makes it feel I cannot take it back, even though that is exactly what I could do should I have instant regrets.
I am writing these sentences during the otherwise idle moments spent waiting for edits to process in the always-glacial WordPress interface. I’ve been cleaning up the acres and acres of broken images that occurred, seemingly inevitably, when migrating content from one WordPress theme to another. This being a personal website, a CMS playground if you will, with no intended demonstrations of professional acumen, all these changes are needless, and none but I shall be improved upon or edified by this task.
But I do it anyway.
Unlike most endeavors like this I cannot seem to find any route to efficiencies other than re-uploading the damn images. Usually I can summon from the command line some magical search and replace that cuts out all the dead images like a Swiss Army Knife. Not this time. One by monotonous one.
But it’s good to see some of the old stuff again, from the golden days of the .MOBI. Good to see but also kind of saddening. Such silence, from a time when I don’t think anyone was reading or seeing anything on my websites. I wanted to be left alone by the accidental waste of misdirected search queries. I blocked all search engines and found ways to make the site essentially invisible to the searchies, which has become the only way people find anything in this ever-expanding Sea Of Shit. People could find me if they wanted to, and I know exactly who did.
Searchies tried finding ways to gobble up my content and slap revenue-making ads (revenue for them) on the SERPs. But I managed to foil them for a number of years. The HTTP status code 410 will always be a favorite: GONE. That needs an exclamation point. GONE!
Now everything is indexable again and all the world can see my sad, depressing, wallowing, pathetic excuses for going through some rough times, and be improved upon because of it. Improved, right? Maybe not. Who cares if I posted pictures of my feet 10 years ago? Who needs to see images of midtown graffiti?
More importantly, who needs pictures of my morning wood? I have gone through piques of exuberance where I feel the world, or whatever fleck of it still reads this stuff, will feel the same joy as I in the pulsing, throbbing stiffness of an uncontrollably hard cock first thing in the morning. I trumpet its trumpeting across the globe, frightening the women I’ve known from Egypt to Australia to Canada and to Brazil no less than those right here in Astoria.
Just as quickly I remove these images. I know where this goes. Ritual emasculation, misandrist cackles, ridicule and discomfort across the planet as it becomes known that some dude in the United States of America has a big fat hardon that simply will not quit, and he wants the whole fucking world to know about it.
I leave those cockshots on porn and swinger websites, in ways no one would ever connect to me. I’ve done that for as long as it’s been possible, and have done the rapid-fire post-and-delete from my personal websites for as long as there’s been an internet.
In the 1990s I used to masturbate with a woman who said she lived in New York but I always suspected otherwise. She didn’t know I could see her IP address (didn’t know what an IP address was), which resolved to netcom.com.
Like a lot of ISPs today Netcom revealed, in abbreviated and sometimes cryptic form, the city or region from which its dialup users called. This woman, Susan, said she was calling from Manhattan. But her Netcom fully-qualified hostname revealed she was calling from Providence, Rhode Island. I further comfirmed this via what was then a magical-seeming tool: traceroute.
But guess what? It didn’t matter. I never challenged her on her location, which I think she lied about to lure me into the prospect of a real-world encounter. She made it sound simple, like she was just down the street, but that I couldn’t have her. Or could I? She was a little crazy-seeming like that, saying she wanted me to come give her a bath, then abruptly making herself impossible, unreachable.
She was hardly my first online-only lover and far from my last. But in 1996 and 1997 she was the most enduring, lasting several months before vanishing into her imagined anonymity.
I never knew what she looked like, nor she I (as far as I know), but per her persistent requests I sent over abundant cockshots. That took time to even figure out how to do over those BBSes, but somehow I found the magical command-line formula to uuencode what I guess were JPG images but maybe it was still GIF. I don’t remember the file format but it didn’t matter, and I presently ask myself what spelling out that insignificant detail adds to this account.
I dialed in to an NYC BBS from local 212 numbers. She telneted from Providence. For her that manner of connecting was, given her complete lack of technical savvy, not just an accomplishment but a statement, a trophy-worthy breakthrough of determination to connect, to communicate and, when she found me, to masturbate and overshare.
The same trophy-worthy grit and determination went into uudecoding those images I sent her from my Connectix webcam. With my cock still hard in one hand I pecked out on the keyboard instructions for how to view the big blob of text I’d just sent.
She went silent for several minutes before blasting up her signature orgasm, a screen of gibberish text splattered by her left hand and forehead while her right hand worked herself beyond joy and into what she described as “A special room in Heaven.”
She was quite religious, occasionally suggesting God would disapprove of our nights together. That notion that ignited my senses and began the years-long work of burning away lingering notions that masturbation was a shameful sin.
She was exhilarating and even exhausting but she never reciprocated with the photos. She had no digital camera and probably would have found the whole process of sending photos this way too daunting to maintain any desire to do so.
As for the seemingly one-sided nature of this part of our connection I never thought twice about it. I had no reason to fear she would blackmail me or do anything with those photos besides look at them. I hope she still has them, in all their grainy, postage-stamp-sized, 320×240 pixel glory.
A couple of years after her vanishment, when access to the open internet started catching on, she found me on IRC. In that instant, a flashbulb moment, I learned her last name, and the truth of her location in Providence was revealed such that she knew I knew. I gently added that I had known her location all along, and that she was never waiting for me just a few blocks away.
With these seemingly seemingly fundamental bits of information our earlier connection, whatever we had in the vacuum of consequence at that telnetable BBS, all that was gone. Gone was the hypothetical precipice of emotional danger should our real selves step out from behind the computer screen. Gone was the lack of consequence, the joy of articulating every movement our fingers made across our bodies, and where each other’s fingers would travel on hers, and on mine.
Instead we just became fobs in a chatroom, blobs on IRC. After our lifeless exchange that day she moved on, again.
