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In July 2006, I started a list of
everyone I ever met in person from online.
Real name, online name, website we met through, day we met, city and
neighborhood where we met, what we did, their age, amount of times we met, what
we did sexually if anything. Pretty cold
data. I've been meeting people for about
a decade, so the list is pretty long. In
November I began footnoting the list to write whatever was memorable from each
meeting, usually the oddities about these people or how they have a continued
although maybe peripheral presence in my life, playing between the factual,
emotional, spatial and digressive. The
weird neighborhoods I've driven to, the passing of time between encounters with
a person (daily for weeks, or once every nine years), physical deformities, odd
behavior, the things I put myself through.
The kind of information on each person varies widely. For example, one annotation only goes into
the way a guy had a clear case of OCD, washing his hands constantly, refusing
to hug when we said our goodbyes, making me explore a soap store for an
unhealthy hour or so. Usually narrative
is backed up with data, but this is the reverse.
So far, the writing is twenty pages
in 8-point font single-spaced. I
envision the final product being a physical book on 11” by 14” paper, wider
than tall, and not in such a tiny font.
Each page of the writing is divided between the list and its footnotes,
although the footnotes clearly override the list. It doesn't need be read from front to back;
it offers the reader a chance to skip around while holding the same
meaning. There are no quotes or photos
or any research. It's an archive of
original material all from memory. I
took it to my mentor Matias worrying that it's a bit gossipy, and he said,
"Well, isn't that the point? Gossip
is a literary form." Talking about
a third person enhances the relationship between narrator and reader, bonding
over their similar reactions about the weirdnesses of the third person, these
reactions being physical in addition to mental.
In that regard, gossip is along the lines of porn and horror, using our
embodiment as a literary form.
In the three years since my
ex-boyfriend, I really haven't had a substantial relationship. But in that time it's not like I was never
trying. More than half the guys I met
for dates were during this period. This
piece of writing is what I got instead, a "he" in every footnote
stringing together like one guy with a lot of problems that I can't seem to get
rid of. The truth is, the writing is
about me. I’m on a trek of trying to
understand myself and wanting to find something mostly unattainable, whether
I’m aware of either of those or not. This
work is a window into my life. I’m
better able to explain myself through who I’m not.
Up to age fourteen I spent most of
my time outdoors alone, biking to Tijeras, mapping out the systems of walls on
my block for "spy" use, smashing rocks apart and organizing their
powders by color. And all at once at age
fourteen we moved to a bigger house that my parents designed in a
not-so-outdoor-friendly neighborhood far from my friends. And I became a sexual being. And we got the internet. Add that to the factors of my conservative
ultra-Christian high school and potentially homophobic mother. I'm really not into technology, so it's not
about being a nerd, which I wouldn't mind if it were true. I don't even own an iPod. I do mind technological fetishizers, the kind
who subscribe to magazines just to cum all over the features of the latest
Mazdas, Razr phones, iMacs, innovations in plastic surgery, self-cleaning
refrigerators, etc. I've met a few of
those types online, in fact, and didn't care much for their interests. I'm currently an avid user of Craigslist,
eBay, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Gay.com, Amazon and other e-places. This
blog itself exists on MySpace (the most readers), BlogSpot (the best
design) and Xanga (been
using it the longest). I've lived the
better half of my life inhabiting the online world as much as the
"real" one. I hope this
writing will be a legitimate source for how gay internet life has evolved over
the past decade, and how a person would evolve alongside it.
Clusters of annotations work
together to create their own mini-narratives.
A few of the earlier ones at the beginning explain how I entered into
the gay online dating world at age fourteen, and what the climate of the gay
internet world was like at the time. In
other clusters, it becomes clear that I met several people on the same night,
or that we all knew each other even if we were never all in the same room at
once. A larger narrative gets told
through interweaving mini-stories. The
piece addresses the “small world” scenario, the way everyone seems to know each
other or have little traits in common that turn this mass of random meetings
into an archive of a community.
These connections through the
internet often led me into parts of cities I would never have otherwise
seen. I have a strong awareness of
geography / relationship with my location.
In one annotation, I’m brought to Happy
Valley and contemplate its name
while trying to u-turn in a tiny cul-de-sac surrounded by barking dogs and a
woman who stares out her window as my car lightly bumps hers. In another, at a time when I had lived in Albuquerque
almost my entire life, I’m brought to the South
Valley for the first time and am
overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of foreignness in my hometown. Those kinds of feelings are expressed in the
descriptions of places rather than said outwardly.
Many of the footnotes are excuses
to go against the reader’s expectations of a footnote altogether: to say
something altogether unrelated, to digress from the original topic (the person
I met), to make general observations on life.
I hope that sort of freedom works nicely when juxtaposed with the rigid
listing of facts on the upper half of the page.
One fellow student observed that
since the footnotes below override the staunch list above, and since I play a
submissive role both in my meetings and in bed, that it is a memoir of the
bottom.
I do my best to stay diplomatic and
objective, although the opining and emoting boils through. I’m not afraid to address the horrific and
honest details of what I observed. The
narrator is stoic and dry, not analyzing the awful things. There’s no psychologizing. This world and this lifestyle are thought of
as normal. There’s little anxiety in
going through with the meetings. I avoid
making judgments; I just observe and know what aspects of the stories are
important.
I was worried about how to address
the current moment of writing as I talk about the past, since the current
moment between annotations isn’t static. My memories now could be
completely different than the ones I'll have in a year, when I finish
this. Writing this piece will strongly influence those memories, too,
although I don’t yet know how. I decided to give the list a cut-off date
of March 31, 2008, to honor
the decade anniversary of the very first meeting. I could come out with a
new version in another decade, and in the meanwhile, I'll feel free to change
the things I wrote previously to reflect the way I think of them now (as in
then, in the future). I could have an
online version that morphs through time as I change my memories to reflect new
realizations. Or I could just continue
writing in the present and not worry about the way memories shift over time,
which is a concern of the current piece.
These are all hypothetical “part twos” to this thesis project.
As an only child entering adulthood
I already was coerced into becoming particularly aware of my differences with
others. Perhaps going through these
extra lengths brought me to develop a liking for being around people with whom
I would never have one-on-one conversations normally. I've definitely developed a taste for the
thrill of having to sit down at a coffee shop with a mostly anonymous unlikely
acquaintance to listen to his life story.
It's become a kind of social fetish.
You never know whom you might have a lot in common with, or whom you
might end up forever regretting meeting.
I'm not quite sure what to do about
the use of real names. I hate the idea
of making up fake names. It would go
against the point. I could black out the
names with a marker, or cut them out of the page, but that seems like a rather
violent turn of events. I could make an
impossible effort to know where all the copies of it are going. I've wanted to mentioned these meetings in my
blog, to show how strange and fascinating they are, but haven’t mainly out of
fear the met people will see it. Not that
I'm truly afraid of that, but I really am trying to respect their boundaries
just a little. You could say it's a
venting of my blog's limitations, not needing to make nice, just showing people
for how I remember them. [This entry was revised and "bettered" on May 6, 2008.]
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