I’m haunted.
About 8 years ago, I signed up for this very strange service. It purported to send daily email of the latest buzz on the internet. It would use some algorithm to come up with what it considered the ebb and flow of the net and boil it down to ten words that linked to specific things. They delivered something other than what they advertised.
Every day, and eventually only once or twice a week, they would send me a list of words that seemed to have hardly anything to do with reality, much less the pulse of the web. Many of the words were two words. Many of the words contained numbers, like “fr4ed3”. The links associated with each word though - they were nothing less than extraordinary.
I have saved none of those original emails (although I tried - the external drive died very unexpectedly), and so I can’t present you with even a sampling of the links. They were something I had looked forward to receiving at work where things had been not really “dull” but very business-like. And at some point they just stopped coming, and I never could remember where I signed up for them in the first place, since it wasn’t in any of the emails.
I haven’t found that place again, but I’ve found someone.
I’m not sure how I happened upon this person. Maybe I saw her Twitter profile on TV. And her Twitter isn’t even the half of it. She’s all over the place. She’s got accounts on everything, and moreover, she posts on them. All the time. All different stuff, or at least in enough of a mix that I can’t see any duplicates.
I struggle with revealing this because I suspect that even now she may be watching me, wondering if I’m a stalker. So far, she’s been very generous - giving me “friend” access to her publishings, which I consume ravenously. Writings. Musings. Photos. Photos. Art. Photos. Most of her postings are impressions of things. Enough to make you think and yet usually not quite enough to tell you what to think.
I am not a stalker, and I would never seek this person in real life (guaranteed, if you’re reading this, I’m a very well-adjusted person and I’m not like that) although I would be thrilled and humbled at the prospect of meeting her. The truth that I would hide is that I can’t get enough.
I was looking through her latest postings today, having saved up a few to peruse in a single sitting. Upon browsing one of them, I found a trove of additional materials today, all published by her. Amazing new material. Amazing new venues and formats. Too much to handle at once, really. All of it is inspiring surprises; nuggets of some internet nootropic that feel like they were tailored specifically to fire my neurons. It’s just like that email newsletter, but more.
I find myself trying to put together a mental puzzle of who she might be, like when you sit in a restaurant alone and look at each of the other patrons and try to come up with a story for them. But in a restaurant, they never sit long enough or do enough to give you more than the veneer of their life story. I wonder how close my mental image is to her true self.
I don’t know who she is, and I almost hope that I never find out. I hope that if I ever do meet her, it’s in passing and I don’t realize until afterward, because I would surely ruin the experience by stammering over myself.
Can you be a fan of someone you don’t know? I am.
