I Am Just Going Outside
[These handwritten notes, scrawled on the back of a crumpled JS notification email, were found inside the comments box of an abandoned journal this morning.]
It is strange to think it was only yesterday that I stood outside my journal in the pre-dawn light, watching the distant herds of googlebots grazing on the vast plains of Jayesse. I admit a tear crept into the corner of one eye as I realised I would probably never see these magnificent creatures again, or at least not in this life.
As the sun rose, the irregularly-shaped blocks of the journals themselves became outlined with golden light, and their immensely long shadows striped the land with black. It is a sight that every man should see before he dies.
I remembered how, when I had first visited this land, I had wandered among the journals, staring with wonder at their apparently infinite variety: some gleaming new, fabricated from standard patterns; some assembled lovingly by their owners from scraps of code they had put together themselves, ramshackle and sprawling, but engaging in their individuality and eccentricity. Even in those early days some were derelict and empty, clearly having been unoccupied for some time, while others, deleted by their owners, were mere outlines in the ground, soon to return to nature.
In the open areas between the journals, the landscape was dotted with clumps of aichteayemel that was growing wild, evidence of the careless work of journal-builders which had seeded itself and spread. Tall stands of seaessesse, swaying gently in the breeze, bore similar testimony. Things had seemed so peaceful then. I could lie outside my journal for hours, undisturbed by anything other than the occasional AV sent from an IP address in some US government department, trying to retrieve an image of Kelly Brook’s breasts. Other visitors were more welcome; a message from a friend, or even from an enemy, brought cheer to me.
Of course there were still hazards. One day I had been wandering among a group of derelict journals and had incautiously clicked on the Please Comment button of one of them; I had stumbled and fallen into the yawning mouth of a particularly deep comments box and had soon realised I was trapped. The background colour was black, and the text colour dark purple: how would I be able to see what I was doing? I eventually managed to type I HAVE BEEN TRAPPED INSIDE THIS COMMENTS BOX FOR THREE DAYS. PLEASE HELP ME. Luckily the owner, summoned by a notification email, came to my rescue; it would have gone badly with me otherwise.
That was before the spambots came, ravenous creatures, devouring the valuable bandwidth that meant life to Jayesse and its inhabitants. How vainly we fought them. Those were the days before CAPTCHA – terrible times. I remember clearly my first encounter with one; an entire herd of them had just emerged from a newly-erected journal and were eagerly seeking vulnerable, unprotected comments boxes to penetrate and to pump full of spam with their long, stiff proboscises. Each one could impregnate hundreds of journals if not stopped. One had headed straight towards me, scuttling along, its belly sleek and swollen with links to sites for porn and Viagra, blind to my presence in its greedy haste. Luckily it was as weak as it was fat; a single click on the right link brought it down.
Spambots taste just like chicken: cooked in butter and lightly seasoned they are delicious.
In the midst of all this came the most terrible event of all: the crash of May 2006, in which all my comments were lost. I wept for those lost comments as if they had been my own children. I recovered the bodies of some of them from Google’s cache, and buried them in a folder on my hard drive. I still visit it occasionally and weep. It was something that would scar me mentally forever. My mind, already frail, was broken that day.
But there is something about the strength of human spirit that drove me on. New journals continued to spring up; I added fresh entries to my own, increasing its size until it was a sprawl of anecdotes and short stories. My journal started to feature in the top ten increasingly often: I regained my sense of self-esteem, despite false rumours spread by people that I had only got there due to the popularity of my entries.
It could not last, however. Google is a fickle thing; it would occasionally purge its image cache, and without any searches for women’s breasts arriving at my journal, my daily number of hits would plummet. For weeks I would languish at the lower end of the rankings, despairing that anyone would ever make sarcastic remarks about my being in the number one spot again. I realised I could no longer stay, or face utter shame. I had to leave, and not come back. It was over.
With one last, sorrowful glance around the journal that had been my home for four years, I hit the Delete button and departed, heading out to the edge of Journalspace. In three days it would cease to exist, and I would be gone.
NOTES
It was supposed to be the end. I’d become exasperated by the insinuations from a handful of people that my friendship with a number of teenagers on Journalspace – most obviously Emily – was not acceptable in a man of my age, which was 49 by this time; soon to be 50. I could understand that people should be suspicions, of course. What was frustrating was the nebulous nature of the rumours. You can’t address an allegation if no one says anything specific. Looking back two decades later I can afford to make a rueful smile and wonder why I didn’t just ignore them, but at the time I felt differently. By March 2008 I’d had enough. So I quit.
In the event it wasn’t the end. I received such support from so many people who took my side that it would have felt like betrayal to depart without acknowledging their friendship. So I created another journal and made no further entries and left no more comments in other people’s journals. Towards the end of the year I allowed myself to be persuaded to resurrect my old ‘Simon’ journal, which Dylan Rhodes had left available… only for the rumours to emerge again. But that was shortly before Journalspace met its own dreadful end, on the last day of 2008, and I was spared the ignominy of deleting my journal once again.
I kept the many expressions of support, naturally. It would seem both vain and ridiculously defensive to post them here, so I shall just quote the closing lines of one of them, which, for some reason, stuck in my mind.
We have a saying here in Jamaica, "walk good" which translates to "walk with God and walk well".
I wish I had gotten to interact with you more on this site.
Thank you for the hours of entertainment, and witty comments left in my own journal.
Walk good,
Ally.
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