internet meetings list.

In July 2006, I started a list of everyone I ever met in person from online. Real name, online name, website we met through, day we met, city and neighborhood where we met, what we did, their age, amount of times we met, what we did sexually if anything. Pretty cold data. I've been meeting people for about a decade, so the list is pretty long. In November I began footnoting the list to write whatever was memorable from each meeting, usually the oddities about these people or how they have a continued although maybe peripheral presence in my life, playing between the factual, emotional, spatial and digressive. The weird neighborhoods I've driven to, the passing of time between encounters with a person (daily for weeks, or once every nine years), physical deformities, odd behavior, the things I put myself through. The kind of information on each person varies widely. For example, one annotation only goes into the way a guy had a clear case of OCD, washing his hands constantly, refusing to hug when we said our goodbyes, making me explore a soap store for an unhealthy hour or so. Usually narrative is backed up with data, but this is the reverse.

So far, the writing is twenty pages in 8-point font single-spaced. I envision the final product being a physical book on 11” by 14” paper, wider than tall, and not in such a tiny font. Each page of the writing is divided between the list and its footnotes, although the footnotes clearly override the list. It doesn't need be read from front to back; it offers the reader a chance to skip around while holding the same meaning. There are no quotes or photos or any research. It's an archive of original material all from memory. I took it to my mentor Matias worrying that it's a bit gossipy, and he said, "Well, isn't that the point? Gossip is a literary form." Talking about a third person enhances the relationship between narrator and reader, bonding over their similar reactions about the weirdnesses of the third person, these reactions being physical in addition to mental. In that regard, gossip is along the lines of porn and horror, using our embodiment as a literary form.

In the three years since my ex-boyfriend, I really haven't had a substantial relationship. But in that time it's not like I was never trying. More than half the guys I met for dates were during this period. This piece of writing is what I got instead, a "he" in every footnote stringing together like one guy with a lot of problems that I can't seem to get rid of. The truth is, the writing is about me. I’m on a trek of trying to understand myself and wanting to find something mostly unattainable, whether I’m aware of either of those or not. This work is a window into my life. I’m better able to explain myself through who I’m not.

Up to age fourteen I spent most of my time outdoors alone, biking to Tijeras, mapping out the systems of walls on my block for "spy" use, smashing rocks apart and organizing their powders by color. And all at once at age fourteen we moved to a bigger house that my parents designed in a not-so-outdoor-friendly neighborhood far from my friends. And I became a sexual being. And we got the internet. Add that to the factors of my conservative ultra-Christian high school and potentially homophobic mother. I'm really not into technology, so it's not about being a nerd, which I wouldn't mind if it were true. I don't even own an iPod. I do mind technological fetishizers, the kind who subscribe to magazines just to cum all over the features of the latest Mazdas, Razr phones, iMacs, innovations in plastic surgery, self-cleaning refrigerators, etc. I've met a few of those types online, in fact, and didn't care much for their interests. I'm currently an avid user of Craigslist, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Gay.com, Amazon and other e-places. This blog itself exists on MySpace (the most readers), BlogSpot (the best design) and Xanga (been using it the longest). I've lived the better half of my life inhabiting the online world as much as the "real" one. I hope this writing will be a legitimate source for how gay internet life has evolved over the past decade, and how a person would evolve alongside it.

Clusters of annotations work together to create their own mini-narratives. A few of the earlier ones at the beginning explain how I entered into the gay online dating world at age fourteen, and what the climate of the gay internet world was like at the time. In other clusters, it becomes clear that I met several people on the same night, or that we all knew each other even if we were never all in the same room at once. A larger narrative gets told through interweaving mini-stories. The piece addresses the “small world” scenario, the way everyone seems to know each other or have little traits in common that turn this mass of random meetings into an archive of a community.

These connections through the internet often led me into parts of cities I would never have otherwise seen. I have a strong awareness of geography / relationship with my location. In one annotation, I’m brought to Happy Valley and contemplate its name while trying to u-turn in a tiny cul-de-sac surrounded by barking dogs and a woman who stares out her window as my car lightly bumps hers. In another, at a time when I had lived in Albuquerque almost my entire life, I’m brought to the South Valley for the first time and am overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of foreignness in my hometown. Those kinds of feelings are expressed in the descriptions of places rather than said outwardly.

Many of the footnotes are excuses to go against the reader’s expectations of a footnote altogether: to say something altogether unrelated, to digress from the original topic (the person I met), to make general observations on life. I hope that sort of freedom works nicely when juxtaposed with the rigid listing of facts on the upper half of the page.

One fellow student observed that since the footnotes below override the staunch list above, and since I play a submissive role both in my meetings and in bed, that it is a memoir of the bottom.

I do my best to stay diplomatic and objective, although the opining and emoting boils through. I’m not afraid to address the horrific and honest details of what I observed. The narrator is stoic and dry, not analyzing the awful things. There’s no psychologizing. This world and this lifestyle are thought of as normal. There’s little anxiety in going through with the meetings. I avoid making judgments; I just observe and know what aspects of the stories are important.

I was worried about how to address the current moment of writing as I talk about the past, since the current moment between annotations isn’t static. My memories now could be completely different than the ones I'll have in a year, when I finish this. Writing this piece will strongly influence those memories, too, although I don’t yet know how. I decided to give the list a cut-off date of March 31, 2008, to honor the decade anniversary of the very first meeting. I could come out with a new version in another decade, and in the meanwhile, I'll feel free to change the things I wrote previously to reflect the way I think of them now (as in then, in the future). I could have an online version that morphs through time as I change my memories to reflect new realizations. Or I could just continue writing in the present and not worry about the way memories shift over time, which is a concern of the current piece. These are all hypothetical “part twos” to this thesis project.

As an only child entering adulthood I already was coerced into becoming particularly aware of my differences with others. Perhaps going through these extra lengths brought me to develop a liking for being around people with whom I would never have one-on-one conversations normally. I've definitely developed a taste for the thrill of having to sit down at a coffee shop with a mostly anonymous unlikely acquaintance to listen to his life story. It's become a kind of social fetish. You never know whom you might have a lot in common with, or whom you might end up forever regretting meeting.

I'm not quite sure what to do about the use of real names. I hate the idea of making up fake names. It would go against the point. I could black out the names with a marker, or cut them out of the page, but that seems like a rather violent turn of events. I could make an impossible effort to know where all the copies of it are going. I've wanted to mentioned these meetings in my blog, to show how strange and fascinating they are, but haven’t mainly out of fear the met people will see it. Not that I'm truly afraid of that, but I really am trying to respect their boundaries just a little. You could say it's a venting of my blog's limitations, not needing to make nice, just showing people for how I remember them.

[This entry was revised and "bettered" on May 6, 2008.]