So, like many of you, I got the OD lifeboat email. I imagine it’s sort of like the French aristocracy felt when the gates to the Bastille opened. Maybe not. I tried going to take one last look at the old girl, couldn’t get on. Several years ago I thought flying back here to get a brick from Tiger Stadium where they tore her down. I didn’t.
It’s good for the heart to ponder sentimentality and such; it’s also good for the mind to realize it’s more a measure of respect for process than railing against the inevitable; like crying over a casket or laying flowers on a shrine.
As far as websites go OD was alright, it was better than portrayed by the bitch’s masses. I don’t get sentimental about lines of code in the ether. It’s not that I liked the killing floor OD often was or the Kiss and Make Up floor either, it was the things killed and kissed that I was most interested in.
The Box has been different though similar. The lifeboat email suggested a lot of people have gone here and perhaps I should as well. It’s an accident that I was here early. I had a few anonymous invitations, a private invitation and a signed public one --- the latter two being friends. So I came and I stayed. I mean I moved in a toothbrush and a change of clothes, but kept my furniture over at OD. I had too, again, sentiment for a very particular victim of the killing floor, the analog killing floor that is slick with the visceral trappings of this mortal coil and its gristly vale of tears.
Um, I was given a lifetime membership by a dead woman. Do I rant and rave about the reimbursement of my lifetime? Do I insist I am owed money? Willing to bet someone starts a class action suit, I might bow out.
I could say something nice and supportive at this juncture about the Box, and why not? I mean I like it here and all. The whole online journal thing comes in waves, no matter where you are, you feel like taking a break. I try very hard not to do that often. It’s not easy spewing this much nonsense and if I get out of the habit of doing it every day I’d have to come up with a real motivation. I’m just saying I will not sing the Boxes praise and in so doing expect that I will not bitch when I’m moved to lay off the keyboard.
I think of online journals a bit like a Starbucks; I do not love the place, I chose the place because there are people there drinking coffee. In the neighborhood my son was born, the NW quadrant of Portland proper (Portland is laid out on a grid, west of the Willamette river is the west, east the east, North of Burnside is the north, south of Burnside is the south. North of Burnside the streets run alphabetically, Alder, Burnside, Couch, Davis and so on) there was a an all-night coffee house called Quality pie. That’s the sort of place where you love the place. Starbucks you go to for the anonymous sterility, because it’s an easy landmark (well, sort of, you have to pick one out of the several --- Starbucks travel in packs) and if you are fortunate the people watching will yield enough posers to keep you in mean gossip for the length of venti-something-a-chino.
Quality Pie was a well-lit, sort of, back of the bus kind of place, runaways, homeless who really did mean “Whatever you can spare for a cup of coffee and donut?” with sincerity, tattoos and metal pieces and scared people trying to look tough which is hard to do with meringue on your lip. I just mean that’s the sort of place where I get sentimental about the place, where the place creates its denizens, a very particular port in a very particular storm. I didn’t come to the Box because people like you were here, I came because you are here or will be.
Quality pie is gone, I think, or it was the last time I wasn’t there. There is a quality pie everywhere, a place where the locals go, and whether they cotton to strangers or not, the vibe is almost certainly ‘Have your pie and walk away, you don’t belong here’. Starbucks isn’t much different except that no one really belongs there; probably a good public place to exchange ransom or hush money, not a good place to sell drugs.
For my practical purposes all of Portland is gone. I’m sentimental about my city sinking in the sea of my memory. OD? It’s a movable feast not a place. The time I spent there I wasn’t there at all, I was at my desk, just outside Portland proper, in the rain forest, in the shadow of the magnolia tree, my warm hounds at my feet, chain smoking and listening to the patter of rain on my roof.
How will the history of the World Wide Web play out? Will single websites be remarked upon in twenty years or will it always be whatever the current fashion is? The few movies about the industry itself have been scandals; Jobs vs. Gates, What’s-his-face (book) vs. that other guy. The rest of them webpages are like guns; the tools of the deed, the backdoor to evil and redemption (catching the guy). The patriot act didn’t name, for instance, MySpace or Yahoo, and yet if you went to Adam and Eve dot com and looked at one dildo, every time the ads scroll some dildo will be on your margin.
I can’t go anywhere to grab a brick of OD and keep it next to brick of tiger stadium I never grabbed. Though I probably wouldn’t. OD was Starbucks, tiger stadium was quality pie. And yes amazing things happened over time at OD, but they happened by the people or too the people, not the site, the site itself didn’t encourage much but it did try discouraging. I mean I certainly got complaint/warnings --- not as many as genuinely reflected my violation of OD rules, but enough to let me know I wasn’t beneath contempt. Yep. That’s me, Haredawg-On-Eye-Level-with-Contempt.
Maybe I’m minimalizing on purpose, trying to make it sound like nothing but a chicken wing. What I liked best about OD was the sawdust and oyster shells and blood and stale beer; that sort of thing was discouraged, unless, of course, it was a religious ceremony. I just mean I could always find a fight on OD if I wanted one, even get to pick my opponent. In general I’d rather lose a good game of chess than win a bad one, but it wasn’t always easy to find opponents better than I, I mean it was more like fishing; you had to wait until something challenged the fifteen pound test line.
I haven’t been moved to argue here. Though the individuals aren’t fragile, the community is. I also rarely have a real axe to grind and so my arguments are borrowed sturm and drang, a puffing of the chest feathers, sharpening of talons, with no real intent to mate or fight. Why? Because the uses of the web are endless, so better a digital gestalt than an analog freak out. I haven’t needed or wanted a digital catharsis of late, I’m getting damn near lethal doses of real life, but, if that wild hair grows twixt my rosy cheeks, I’m thinking I’ll take it elsewhere, for the time being, and then I might shed a digital tear for OD, my favorite killing floor.
And I’m spent.
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