Men used to wear loafers to the beach. Now they wear sandals to board meetings. Time marches on, I guess.
I don’t get around much anymore, myself. Two children and three jobs and no money might explain it — but it doesn’t. Picture the Intertunnel. All the stuff that’s in it. It’s grown too small for me, no matter how gargantuan it gets. It’s becoming two mirrors pointed at each another. Small and infinite.
I love it so, anyway, the Intertunnel. I saw it as a kind of meritocracy. Say what you like, and see if anyone pays attention. Credentials for sitting still didn’t apply. It’s more roped and branded now. Still light years ahead of newspapers, TV, and magazines, though. It’s gone from anarchy to a sort of Schedule C organization. At least it doesn’t have an HR office and mandatory golf outings yet.
I said I was sorry up at the header. I should get back to that. Lots (lots) of people email me, and mention me on their websites, and say kind things about me (or at least notice me), and I often don’t see them right away, and the formal informal Intertunnel protocol escapes me a lot. Hell, regular manners are often beyond me.
I often get a little tickle when I’m directed one Interplace or another, and discover bits of me there. Someday, I’m hoping I’ll walk into an second-hand store and find one of my pieces of furniture for sale in it. It will be sort of the same thing.
I’m grateful for my readers, because no man writes for no one. I have no idea who’s using my Amazon box to buy things, but people do, and I’m grateful for that, too. People that visit my website buy my furniture, too, and that’s how my children get fed, so I’m grateful for that, too. I’m grateful for a lot of things right now. And I appreciate that people link to what I write, and wish I had time to reciprocate properly, and knew what the hell “properly” is in the first place.
I have no idea if Pundit and Pundette are the General Motors of opinion or are an Internet lemonade stand. Mi dispiace –again– because I didn’t know they existed. Like I said, I don’t get around much anymore. But they seem pleasant. Of course they seem pleasant to me; they talk about me. I put them in my pathetic blogroll, so they can rub shoulders with people that haven’t written anything in four years but I haven’t the heart to erase, or I just haven’t noticed they’re dead yet. Sorry. I apologize for saying I’m sorry again. Forgive me. Oops, I regret that last act of contrition.
I’ve grown weary of the Two Minutes Hate available over wide bands of the Internet. It was easier to avoid when only one side was doing it. Having the Two Minutes Hate rebuttal is just Four Minutes Hate. A lot of people could use a good, sound ignoring. Nothing else will work on them, anyway.
Someone tell a joke, or post pictures of Grace Kelly instead of Helen Thomas.
Facebook has made substandard versions of everything on the Web, bundled it together and somehow found itself being lauded for it, as if AOL, Friendster and MySpace had never managed the same slightly embarrassing trick. Facebook had the advantage of not being saddled with AOL’s last-gen baggage, Friendster’s too-early-for-its-moment-ness, or MySpace’s aggressive ugliness, and it had the largely accidental advantage of being upmarket first — it was originally limited to college students and gaining some cachet therein — before it let in the rabble. But the idea that it’s doing something better, new or innovative is largely PR and faffery. Zuckerberg is in fact not a genius; he’s an ambitious nerd who was in the right place at the right time, and was apparently willing to be a ruthless dick when he had to be. Now he has billions because of it. Good for him. It doesn’t make me like his monstrosity any better.
Preach it, brother. I’m constantly bombarded with advice — and just plain demands–to get a Facebook page and Twitter presence going, and LinkedIn requests, and lots of other utilities with problems with spaces between words and capitalization, but I just can’t bring myself to slice my onion any thinner. I recently read an article about an NFL player from a small town in the midwest, and ESPN needed a thumbnail sketch to illustrate how backward the place was, so they pointed out that most of the denizens of this particular benighted place in their mysterious flyover state still had phones that, get this, fold in the middle. They may be pooping indoors now, but they’re not Twittering about it realtime. The horror!
Hi everybody. Many thanks to everyone that reads, and comments, and links, and buys furniture, and uses the Amazon button here at Sippican Cottage, and of course at The Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys. This medium – tapping on the Intertunnel wall like the hull of a stranded submarine, waiting for any old ship to pass over and know I’m down here – has, in many ways, been my salvation. I can’t count how many bug bites I’d have if I was still standing on the highway overpass yelling at cars instead of blogging. And you get a very uneven tan that way, too.
I’ve made lots of friends on the Intertunnel. It’s odd and marvelous that some of my best friends are sorta imaginary – I only know them through pixels. I don’t want to point any particular people out, as there are so many that I’d forget one or two and that would diminish the effect of simply saying: Thanks for reading and…
Oops, I already did that in the first paragraph.
One Intertunnel friend I made that I’ve actually met in person a couple times is Gerard Vanderleun. He’s a bucket of brains and a barrel of monkeys. He’s the editor in chief over at the fledgling Rightnetwork, now, which is why it looks like something right away. He’s hired me to write about moving to this godforsaken, benighted, frigid, lonesome…
I meant to say: this marvelous place I call home now. Do drop by. Maine Family Robinson
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