... though I suppose you could consider this writing. I don't. Writing is something done late at night, with a glass of cognac by one's side, using pencil or fountain pen to scribble onto sheets of paper, or at a sunlight-dappled table in a cafe, nursing a cold espresso so they don't kick you out, pausing occasionally to eavesdrop on the conversations of those around you. In contrast, all of this has been composed while staring at a screen, in an environment which completely deadens the vestiges of creativity remaining in me.

I stopped writing because everything I wrote was about me. I know, writers are all like that, but my writing lacked universality. Here, there's no pretense of that, and more importantly, there isn't even a shred of pressure for you to look at any of my work.

I have no idea who you are, and you'll have to resort to external means to tell me, should you care to do so. You'll have to leave the system. I can tell after the fact, by looking at statistics my computer keeps, which files have been read and how many times, but I don't know, when I write something here, if anyone will ever bother to look at it. When writing for newspapers, even obscure student papers, I could be guaranteed a certain audience, though I could never be sure of their identity, their commitment to read past the first paragraph, or whether any of it was retained. When lecturing to a classroom, I at least have the privilege of a captive audience, though at any given point most of them may not be listening.

Here, you're clicking away, going through things I haven't spoken of (I mean literally spoken of) to anyone, using the world's most distracting medium, with millions of options a few clicks or keystrokes away. If I were sitting in front of you, you might feel a twinge or two of reluctance to probe so deeply. But, protected by the layers of software protocol between us, you feel no such compunction now. You can leave any time, after all.

This must be frustrating for you, if you've gotten this far. No dancing images, no buttons for you to push or forms to fill out, no links to information providers in Peru. I might as well save you the trouble: There aren't going to be any links out of here. You're going to have to back up all the way.

In fact, when you think about it, this experience isn't much different for you than browsing Tristam Shandy might have been, when it came out in the eighteenth century. Except that I'm not Laurence Sterne, this isn't fiction, and you're more disposed to wander through here at your terminal than to wander through Tristam Shandy. Or is that not fair? It might be presumptuous of me to say "Get thee to a library," when you might have just come from one. In fact, given what many libraries see as their new mandate, you might be in a library at this very moment, and see nothing wrong with letting the books upstairs accumulate a few more microns of dust. You can access them any time, after all.