Another Milestone

To the unknown person in Atlanta, GA, who dropped by at 2:58:12 yesterday...

...and to the other 29,999 people who've stumbled in before them, and the 23 who've come through since...

Thank you. All of you.

It's really weird to think of how long this blog has been running; in the grand scheme of bloghood, it's about middle-aged, I would guess. I wasn't on the cutting-edge--I consider those to be the people who had a blog before there was a word for them, when it was called "a website" or "an online journal" and was seen as a daring, faintly-dangerous thing to do--but three years, three months, and twelve days is still a long time to stick with anything, particularly a lot of rambling, disconnected thoughts and whining. I would say that this blog probably represents most of what people who hate blogs hate them for; it's entirely personal; full of Too Much Info-type details; alternately whiny, over-confessional, and self-congratulatory. It's not political, it doesn't involve celebs, and it will never be quoted on any cable-news program. And I'll never be up at the tip-top of the Technorati hierarchy, which is fine with me, I guess.

Online relationships are very strange things. I was on Prodigy back in 1992, as part of a message board called "Words Together", and in early 1993 I flew out to Berkeley for a meet-up. Most of my friends, family, and acquaintances were sure that I'd be hacked into my component parts and mailed to a bus locker in North Dakota; instead, I met some very nice people and went to a Grateful Dead concert. In 1993, just before I got married, I started talking to a guy on AOL; I didn't meet him til years later, but we stayed in touch for a long while. When I was seeing JP, before I left Dave, I spent time IMing a couple of guys, just as friends; then, after JP died, when I was in North Carolina, I used to hang out in a chatroom on AOL. This was in 1996, when the Internet was just gathering steam; at that time, you could actually chat in a chatroom, and if you were very lucky, you could find intelligent conversation mixed in with the constant requests for "age/sex/location" and "ne1 wanna cyber?" The chatroom I was part of had many incarnations--"Sensual Intelligence" and "Men With Minds" were two of the names I recall--and a cast of regulars, with all the drama and intrigue of a junior-high cheerleading squad. I met quite a few people from that room, actually--there were various meet-ups, and one guy who came to North Carolina against my better judgement, because he really liked me and thought we were meant for each other; that weekend ended with a kiss on the forehead and a statement that still rings true: "You live too much in the past," he said, and he was right. A few months later he was engaged to another one of the "regulars".

Then there have been my many correspondents; people from newsgroups, from message-boards, from methadone forums and grief-support websites and Layne Staley memorial pages; a couple of guys who answered my personal ad but decided I had more potential as a pen-pal than as a love interest. Most of my correspondences have been lost, though I was more-scrupulous than most in saving them--I have disks filled with IM conversations from the early and mid-1990's. Yahoo purged my main e-mail account once, without my knowledge, and claimed they couldn't restore what was lost; I lost about five years of messages that way. Most of them probably weren't worth the bytes they were written on, I guess, but together they formed a picture of that part of my life. I think about that a lot--not just for my life, but on a grand scale. I wonder how many geniuses there are out there, people who will one day be famous, but there will be nothing left of their correspondences and daily minutiae for future generations to pore over because it was all stored on hard-drives and keychain disks and floppies. I wonder what will go in the Smithsonian a hundred years from now.

Mostly I wonder what happened to those people I used to talk to--to Laz and Cally and Zrst and Kiwi and Melly and RNA, to JNabis and AuroraDwn and Abbbycatt and Dross and Scorp and MGFP04C and "Kim" who was really Josh, who was only 16 and hadn't come out to his parents yet. I wonder what happened to all these people I knew by nicknames--8 letters or less and no special characters--and by the personas they created for themselves, out here where "no one can tell you're a dog". Some of them were pretty much just as they represented, and some of them recreated themselves completely--wedged their mousy lives and uninspired days into red corsets and high heels, and became the persons they always imagined themselves to be. I tried to be more my real self than any witty, dangerous fantasy-woman, and if I wasn't the most sparkling, in-demand conversationalist in the chat-rooms, I was at least recognized for being real. I think about all those people sometimes; I wonder if they ever think of me, if they ever think "Hmmm...I wonder whatever happened to __________."

As I wrote in a letter to Lou, in jail in Ohio, "the Internet is a hell of a thing." There are a lot of people in my life I'd like to find, people who live below the radar and who are thus impervious to Google, who can't be found through People Search; generally these are the ones I miss the most. (Then again, if I find them, I wouldn't have to miss them, I guess--so that makes sense.) Between the constantly-shifting identities and the vagaries of persistence on the Internet, I've begun to wonder if it's not a better tool for losing people than for finding them, sometimes.

I guess what I'm saying, in a roundabout, verbose way, is this: Thank you for being a part of my life, even if it's "just" through words on a screen...because even if it is, it really isn't "just" anything. There's no such thing as "just" a part of someone's life.