If I had another appendage I could manifest the significance of this date in person. As it is I have online sharing PTSD. Each thing I write online I question who am I serving? Am I violating someone else's privacy? Am I punching up or down? Am I going to be harassed by people with too much time feeding on my personal details? Would I rather be spending time with my kid or pleasuring myself elsewhere?
So I'm constipated for online sharing. Plenty of buildup - scores of photos I take each month. Gigabytes of unshared media. I check Instagram and I think oh man my friends are doing great things and taking wonderful trips and asking good questions. Shouldn't I demonstrate my standing as a photogenic human with the means to participate in mediated life demonstration? Ahhh it's just too much to think about. Only good girls keep diaries, the bad girls never have time - thank you Tallulah.
But I still serve my celebrity, such as it is. THIS MY SITE FIRST HAD EXTERNAL VISITORS 25 YEARS AGO TODAY. There, I'm marking the occasion. Not with a staggered poem about my desire meeting someone aligned with it, or a story about ingesting psychedelics just before an upright meeting. I now work in the legal cannabis business after my work in video games, so I've already passed through the ceiling of my teenage career fantasies. It was never my career fantasy to suffer in public. I love being of nearby service; now I make breakfast for my partner and child just about every day.
I agreed to show up to a few screenings of an old film in which I appeared. Doug Block made a documentary Home Page, which is personal media writ into a sort of permanence. Permanence served by re-mastering, re-screening. So I shall likely stand before small groups in New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco to say "yes I survived" and "now I sell cannabis" and "sharing on the internet is complicated"
I could write here on links.net all kinds of opinions on the web-that-was. But that would be like spraypainting dust and spider webs on this already-dilapidated art objet. Better to ramble on them in person at some venue, where I can grab free drink in a plastic cup bound for an ocean gyre, while I eye some attractive sort in the front row and imagine how old I must seem to them, and yet how immature. I like to imagine that if I offend with commentary on a revitalized 480p documentary, I am not famous enough for my remarks to be newsworthy.
