| No one has ever read anything I write. Sure in highschool english a few pieces were seen by my fellow inmates, but nothing that ever meant anything to me. Now I find myself swimming in the technology I have shyed away from for so many years and having to put myself out there, to become part of some kind of community, even if it is a community of screen names and reputations.
This community, a group of dissimilar people in similar circumstances brought together to communicate the whole of their existence onto a digital database and then to be judged. How did an antisocial carpenter with technophobia end up here?
I'll tell you how, my mother bought me the "Lord of the Rings" boxed set when I was 9. After that I was lost to the world of people. I fell in love with paper, with the power and enthrallment it held in a visceral physical way. The sound of sheets rubbing together, the skritch of a pencil feeding itself to the page. And so i wrote off and on for years, just to keep semi-sane, just for me.
The computer was my brothers domain, I held the paper, and refused to let go. When I got out of school I stuck to the physical, got a job in construction and have built a semblance of a life on it. I work with tape measures, not binary code. I did well, I am a really good carpenter, I understand the world form that point of view, where I call the shots, where the world flexes to my will. Then a friend, who knew I wrote and was pirating music on my brothers hand me down computer showed me E2. A brave new world. A place for information, for technology and luddites, for personal rants and silly stories, a place for everthing that made us human, that made us a society, in short everthing I had been writing/ dreaming/ thinking. A place for everyone and everyone in the place.
I started posting things and suddenly I was confronted with the judgement of my peers. Not only were my words available to anyone, but I was forced to see their reactions, their feelings or lack there of about my talent, my relevency to the world. This I was wholey unprepared for. My obsessive nature was entirely subsumed by the idea of a writers community but now I as an individual had to suffer the distant criticism of my peers or abandon the computer for ever.
I have learned how to use my computer reticently at best, and somewhere between Napster and AIM I actually learned to enjoy it. Only now, with the birth of the Cools, I have discovered that more and more of my feeling of worth as a writer (and patheticaly enough, a person)is determined by the warm reception of my E2 contemporaries.
I node when I should eat, I node when I should sleep, I node when I should go to work, I node when I should be with a friend, now I node at 4am, all in search of the elusive Cool, that grand symbol bestowed by those who sit higher on the food chain, those people I respect, but must destroy.
It is a quest for fire, the ancient quest for dominance over the forces beyond my control.
I wrote this just to get some silly self-defeaing shit out of my system. I feel better now. | 
