All Along

In the early 1990's I had a 3 railroad-room apartment about twenty minutes into New Jersey from Manhattan. 15 years ago. Old fashioned answering machine. No cell phone back then, kids. Not even voicemail. I mean, a real tangible answering machine. Like the one Bridget Fonda had in Singles. Every morning I would record a new outgoing message. It was always just a quote, the "Quote of the Day." If you called my number and got my machine, you didn't get some contrived "This is me, wait for the beep," bullshit. Instead you’d hear:

I became a fabulous opera. I saw that everyone in the world was doomed to happiness. Action isn't life; it's merely a way of ruining a kind of strength, a means of destroying nerves. Morality is water on the brain. - Arthur Rimbaud.

Or

Levon is a doo doo head. - Thomas Harris

Or

Down in the pleasure center, hell bent or heaven sent. Listen to the propaganda, listen to the latest slander. There's nothing underhand that she wouldn't understand. - Elvis Costello

Beep. That was it. Sometimes it was a lyric, sometimes a famous quote. Sometimes it was graffitti, or something I wrote, or something a passer-by said that I overheard. Words are everywhere. And I wanted to know them. I wanted to share them.

And every day people would call my machine just to hear the quote of the day. Sometimes people would leave messages. Some would ask if I took requests and could we hear something from The Beatles. Some would say they liked the quote or that they had never understood the lyrics until now. And some would simply ask if I wanted to change my long distance carrier.

I did Spoken Word performances. Long before Slam, long before everyone did it, long before there would be a line up of people. There would be venues, clubs in the city, that were dark and cracked, and I would be one of only maybe 3 Spoken Word artists booked for a single night. All content original. All applause, and all jeers, very clear.

I also had a fax machine: an old - thermal paper - chirping like a wounded seagull - Office Space - fax machine. When the New York Rangers played, I would type up a thing I called “Game Night” and fax it to everyone who’d submitted fax numbers to me to receive this game night flyer. On it I’d have all the details. +/-, points, and penalty stats. The roster for the Rangers: who was playing, who was injured. Who was up from the farm. Same for the other team. Who the refs would be. Place and time of face off. And I’d always put a few little notes of interest like –

Tonight we’ll see cheap-shot king Dale Hunter for the first time since the Turgeon incident.

Or

Ron Hextall in net, a player so fierce he actually won the Conn Smythe in ’87, even though his team lost The Cup to the Oilers. Now that’s impressive.

I would get a fax back sometimes asking for additional stats or why someone wasn't on the second line anymore. There was communication. It was begging to happen.

The answering machine, the microphone, and the fax machine were all we really had back then. This was before everyone had a webpage. This was before email and cell phones. Before weblogs and texting. Before Myspace and Fuckfacebook and Twitter and podcasts. This was before everything.

In a way, wasn't I blogging? In a way, in another dimension, I think I've been blogging for 17 years at least. I was getting it out there. And some people even responded. I just didn't have the internet. I couldn't moderate comments, and update feeds. But I was blogging, wasn't I?

Were we all natural born bloggers? Even the most over sensitive and protective writers among us, were we all finding ways to get Words of some sort out there, all this time? Have we all changed as writers because of it?

Did we invent the blog? Or did it invent us?




“And I do believe in ghosts. I do believe in ghosts.”
- The Cowardly Lion, The Wizard of Oz

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