mat catastrophe - nihilism for dummies

I always wondered if other people had trouble writing their own little autobiographies for their websites. I always have. It's hard to do, you know, since it assumes a lot about how much people want to know. Too much info and you come off as snotty and pretentious. Too little and you come off sounding aloof and distant.

So, here we go. You decide if I'm snotty or aloof.

I first came online sometime in the fall of 1995. At the time, the web was just coming into the public consciousness. Yahoo was still a good search engine. Free email addresses were unheard of. Free webspace was a myth, at least it was if you were new to the whole thing and didn't have a clue what you were doing. Broadband wasn't even a word. I just happened to be lucky enough to be going to a small community college that had rounded up the funds to put four Macintosh computers online in the library.

It all went south from there.

I was already what some people might call a leftie or even a radical. At least, in my beliefs. My actual practices, perhaps a result of where I was born and lived, were more passive. I was (and am) opinionated, but short on action. That's a criticism that I've lived with for years and it is one that I've only recently become comfortable with accepting (by hiding behind the sort of passive nihilism that has always been a part of me).

You see, when you grow up in a small town, you learn about important things. It isn't as important to you that you attend rallies and demonstrations. It is important that you take care of yourself, your family, and your friends. You don't have the luxury to pick and choose people based on their beliefs, since there aren't that many people around to choose from. You learn to respect differences, in a very true way. Now, this doesn't apply to everyone of course, but it applied to me.

At any rate, my parents were not what you'd call political people. They voted, but they didn't tell us who for or why. They trusted that my sister and I would come up with our own worldviews, and we did. My parents were religious, and we did go to church, but there was never the kind of overbearing pressure that I've seen in other families. We were left to sort things out, even from a very early age.

And (here's where it might get pretentious, hold on), even at an early age, I was thinking and feeling strange things. The eighties were a difficult time to grow up in, I think, especially for a child who knew enough about the world to realize that there was such a thing as The Cold War and more so for a child paranoid enough to realize that there were crazy people in charge. I didn't like Reagan. I didn't trust him. I didn't think he knew what he was doing. Mainly, I didn't like him because he was messing up school lunches to the point where my mother made me a bologna sandwich for lunch. Everyday. For something like five years.

So, I was a paranoid and unhappy little child. But, I was quiet. At least, until I was about 14 or so. Then I got a little more outspoken. Which got me a reputation as a bit of a problem child. What was worse, as far as the schools went, was that they really couldn't do much about it. I knew the rules and knew how they could be bent. Teachers hate that. Remember this, all you youngsters out there.

And that's the start of the story. Maybe if I were one of those full-time web people I could finish, but it's just about time to get ready for work.

mat catast rophe .freeshell.org