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Subject: Re: One thing led to another...and to your site/s

> As for the postcard, I meant the design. I wasn't reading your mail.
> You can also elaborate on the text, if you want. As I have not seen it
> myself.

if you click on that image, it takes you to a page where i've scanned and hand-typed out the postcard message. that goes for all the postcards in the postcard collection.

> Has this web thing become so knee-jerk that you think you've become a
> prisoner to it? I mean that you have to continue, as
> you've done this for so long?

i think that i just don't know any other way. does that make sense?
there's a saying that writers live twice -- once when it happens to them and once when they write about it later. most of the significant events of my life have been recorded, in one way or another, on the web.
i don't consider myself a prisoner to anything but the other night, someone tried to get me to admit that my website was a huge part of who i am, and i became ENRAGED by this.
because it's true and it's not true: my websites document most of what has happened to me but those are just events, stories, datum. filler.

> What was your original motivation for the site? Was it to be an expression
> of you? If so, then by it becoming
> "knee jerk" (or reflex/second nature), I would think that the site had
> brought your self expression to the point
> where it wouldn't be filtered and more "true".

the opposite is the case.

the longer i have been writing on the web, the less of myself is actually tangible in what i write. i have filtered more and more of myself out of my writing.

art and lies.

my friend stefan wrote about this a few years ago:
http://mr.unpopular.com/~szajic/www/

> Or, am I reading into this so much that you'd rather post photos? Back in
> '94 we were all cave-people anyway. So
> photography on the Net was not as common. Was it that you were comfortable
> with writing first? Or was it photography,
> and all that could be done on the Net at that time was post text---out of
> necessity?

i started writing about my life because i, like many people my age who had websites in 1994, wanted to be more like justin hall. it's that simple. i envisioned the web as the new medium that would CHANGE EVERYONE'S LIFE. i never once thought there would be consequences to living my life like an open book.