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Long, Strange Trip

What a long, strange trip it has all been….

Okay, a bit cryptic. But today I’ve been thinking about the past (near past) and the way things stand today with regards to me and my web life.

See, back in the day (say 1997, 1998), I was “online friends” with many of the digirati (and some wannabes) out there. Well, as much as email friends could be. But I kind of got fed up with about 95% of them and I’m sure my displayed ‘tude in convos with them made them just as fed up with me. Some of them are still cool beyond measure in their own special way (love ya, you pinko commie, Derek!) but I dunno, there was a sense of elitism that just kind of pissed me off.

So for a year or two, I floated in the ether, without many “online friends”… or at least people I could call friends. I severed most of my e-relationships with these folks. With some of them, it was easy… personal issues like infidelity somehow got involved, and it was easy for me to end my relationship with. For others, it was harder – some I wanted to maintain a smidgen of relationship with, but they drifted.

I focused on real things – my real life friends and family, my job, my business, etc etc.

But today, it’s like I’ve come full circle, of sorts. But I’m not back with the digirati… instead, I have some pretty damned fine relationships with *real* people online. There are the folks who know me through the www.coffeekid.com site who have become pretty good friends, and the stuff we talk about is the stuff average people talk about – family, life, weird stuff, trends, etc etc. There’s the people who have been reading Yet Another Web Thing (and now Spiffle) for eons who maintain contact with me, and we even hook up in real time once in a while if they visit my city, or I’m in their vicinity. And I do have a good, closed circle of “web buddies”, peers in my industry who share an interest in many of the things I’m into – web technologies, flash work, photoshoppin’, and yes, I admit, high tech gizmos (sidenote: my recent iPaq aquisition has really pissed off one of them – Gary… heh heh heh).

What makes things so cool these days though is the people who just seem to know how to “make my day” without even knowing me. These are the folks who, day in, day out, email me through the CoffeeKid site saying thanks for the effort, thanks for the cool resource, thanks for the time and passion put into the project.

Let me tell you. That stuff makes my day. Big time. It’s beyond stroking ego here. What it does is it lifts me from my everyday concerns – paying the bills, meeting my company’s salary every 2 weeks, finding new clients, working on my relationship with Jeanette, etc etc etc. Those emails are like little lifesavers thrown into my otherwise huge imposing sea I tend to float in.

I suppose in a way I haven’t gone full circle, I’ve gone beyond. Though I still miss some of the folks I used to regularly chat with, I’ve also moved beyond that and found something really much better.

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