Postmodern Angst

TO BE ON THE WIRE IS LIFE. THE REST IS WAITING. I’ve been on the wire since 1984, before it was the Internet. My first email address was horton@cs.nmt.edu, in reference to an imaginary childhood companion, an invisible elephant named Horton (yes, as in Horton Hears a Who). The elephant had grown up and become a very strange four-foot tall man with large ears and a red bowler hat who called himself Philip. We spent many late nights in the Tech Unix lab, hunched over terminals playing endless games of Rogue and wandering through MUDs of our own and others devising. Most of the time I trolled Usenet and posted my own movie reviews. I remember an intense flame war over the relative merits of The Goonies. Somehow I managed to keep myself online after I left Tech. In California I first finagled a job in media arts at a college library and then later an internship at an engineering think tank; at each job I was accorded Internet access. Universities were always good for user accounts – free if you signed up for a class or two. Some BBS accounts came with Internet access as well. And there was always dialup of some kind, if you were in a big enough city. I don’t remember the various online aliases I’ve used over the years – a lot of Dr. Seuss characters, I can tell you that. //This page will grow and grow and grow.//