I am somewhat of an Internet celebrity.
No, you may not have heard of me. I don’t have a website as popular as Boing Boing or Drudge but I’ve tasted the fruits of Internet Fame. I’ve actually been linked to sites such as Wonkette, Boing Boing and Defamer long ago. Go ahead, Google me. But, more importantly, I was there in the early days of blogging and some of the things I wrote were made into “quotes” on another well-known website. These fragments of what I’d written were then carried across the wires and now, if you Google me, you’ll see that I’m refrenced on tons of links. Here’s one slice of what I wrote :
“I have you and even if we never meet or ever see each other, we have left our thumbprints in the thick, moist clay of each other's lives.”
That’s all. No biggy in my view. And yet, this small sample of my writing was used in over 50 personal and even business blogs. When I die, the one lasting reminder of my life may be this and the short blurbs I’ve written on the internet. These quick writings will be my ghost on the Earth I leave behind.
It’s an odd history for me. I’m not a professional writer nor an avid or extreme blogger. I now have 2 blogs under my name but I’m lazy about updating them for personal reasons. Still, this legacy lives on. I can Google my name and see several blogs that consider my words worthy.
Why? I wonder myself. I live with AIDS in LA and have no personal vendetta. In fact, this trail may be all I leave on the world. In the future, I can imagine people reading these quotes and thinking “Who is this?”. They will never know.
But it’s something. It’s more than most people could hope for. It’s part of the legacy the internet has perhaps unexpectadly provided. I never wrote the “Great American Novel” one might have wished or pressed my fingerprint into the clay of literature but I will survive, If not in some library where people can check out my books, I’ve survived in an electronic mode I could never have hoped for when I was young.
In this way, I live on and carry the words of those of my friends who have died before me. I am immortal for this reason alone. In this electronic world, I have conquored the virus. This is a victory of how far we’ve come.
5 comments:
and we are all quite grateful.
As a matter of fact, I am working on something at my school...putting kid art and famous quotes together and displaying them in the hallways.
I thought how cool it would be to put up a Hugh quote on our walls for all teachers and parents to read.
:)
...and I'm one of the ones lucky enough to have met you IRL. :)
-spidey
I wish you *were* immortal for reals, Hugh -- I really truly do!
Happy day after Halloween :-)
How is it possible that we live in a state whose voters are sufficiently enlightened to elect the current president-to-be, yet so reprehensibly small-minded to have passed proposition 8?
Sigh :-(
Hope you are hanging' in there, Hugh.
Hugs from up here in Cupertino!
Carroll
Yeah, who can understand all of this social media stuff. We're all on for the ride.
Yeah, you are one of the really early ones man. How did you find the salon blogs back in the day? Not sure I've ever heard you tell us.
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