The Past is not dead. In fact, it isn't even past.

What I've been thinking about when I should be trying to line up my next freelance gig: the scattered history of my words the internet. Well, the unsolicited ones.

1997 - My first website. It may still exist, somewhere in the miasma, buried in digital rubble under Geocties. It was a class assignment. Hartwell was the instructor, if I remember correctly. He must have been 25 when he taught that class - my age. I believe the site was about the Knights Templar -- cannily, I just posted the text of some research paper I did in Social Sciences -- that instructor was also the faculty advisor of the middle school drama club, of which I was a charter member. I got perfect marks in his Social Studies class, if I remember correctly. I definately remember shotguning cans of Budweiser with a kid named... Justin I think? -- quite a number of times before attending his class.

I am willing to bet my first webpage had an animated .gif of Gokou doing a kamahamaha.

1998/1999 - I certainly continued to goof around with HTML during this time, but the only site that ever went live was a very 1998 "fansite" regarding Dan Simmons' Hugo award winning "Hyperion." The internet not being what it is today - my intelligence was equally primitive, at the time - I was oblivious to most of the allusions to classical and Romantic literature and philosophy. I just thought Keats was a cool name for a cyborg, and Hyperion an awesome name for a crazy science fiction planet.

I wish I still had those books.

2003-2007: Ah, the livejournal. It was everything a livejournal is known to be: angsty, hormonal, embarrassing in the earliest entries (must have been before spell check was standard in every browser), quaint, occastionally revelatory. Over four years, I posted nearly 700,000 words before nuking it. All saved on my hard drive, thank God.

2007+: Who knows? There's this thing, the videogame thing, the fiction thing, quite a few myspace blog posts of substance... it's a mess. And it's almost universally terrible writing, lazy and sloppy, usually written after drinking a little too much coffee or alchohol. If there is a hell, I imagine my punishment will involve hearing the innumerable message board posts I've stupidly made recited to me forevermore.

It's ninteen miles to the coast.