RE-ENTERING THE STEAM ROOM

Oh no, I wasn't talking about the steam room at the baths. I was talking about sitting on this hot seat, the editor's perch. My month-old jump from old-fashioned newspaper editing to cyberspace, has damn-well left my best old tree-hugging buddy, Steve, happy. Yup, he's a guy who's always hated newspapers because trees, he says, must die en masse for their "paper" parts, giving space to mostly nonsense. When I did newspapers, Steve hurled thinly-veiled accusations at my "crime against nature": my tree-genocide, he called it, and he made this offense punishable by a constant silliness and a forgivable resistance to taking anything in any print newspaper, particularly mine, seriously. He did pose, however, in Issue #4, standing in front of the gayest downtown bars so that our bars-are-here story would show bar-fronts with at least one patron, even if only the same one.

But in today's cyberspace, exults Steve, he can actually even respect me for giving space to mostly nonsense. Now he rejoices with me as I fritter my time away.

That's what we have to do, you know, seize our own time and fritter it away, filling it with our own best-loved nonsense, all the while feeling at our best. That way, our-best---as-whatever-we conceive-it-to-be goes, not just to our jobs, but to folks standing on the corners of our lives, even those we inadvertently cruise, does it not? It doesn't? Well, if not, it just shows to go you that lots of folks haven't the foggiest which way they're headed once they've arrived on your special corner. But you, you devil, reading cyberspace news, you can twiddle their time away with chats about the clonish arrival of the sweet-natured Dolly, as well a greedy market's rise and fall, both teaching, of course, the ever-impressionable this same exact lesson: Don't worry if nobody else much knows what is going down. Everythings reshuffling. Do a little shuffle dance in some queer spot. And take hold of your own hand. Only you--not somebody else-- can steady you as you become your real self. And whatever the self is, a gay witch once told me this, it--the self-- responds to the following curse or blessing, depending on which way is up. The blessing/curse reads: "I wish you upon your self."

Its hard to find one's "real" self, isn't it? It appears little by little with time, while others just go on gettin' awful weary-boned, as they say in the hollers of Appalachia. It might be easier to locate one's self if it weren't for so many brassy interruptions. An elder told me that the invention of the radio--its effects on self-reflection-- had bothered her bigtime. You know, bothered like Steve was, only about another living waste. But like Steve, this elder, now deceased, would probably delight in the Internet, with Badpuppy's-newsy-nosed-fine-featured face, GayToday. First she'd notice, relieved, that a lot of we computer-folks enjoy quiet communion with our own thoughts. She'd certainly expect some decent effects, results of quiet personal reflections. And, she'd probably like cyberspace's promise to give up old nasty news habits, especially tree-genocide.

There'll always be Newspapers. OK. OK. Radios? Perhaps. But now, persons aplenty are abuzz about the Internet's effects on human consciousness that quietly faces the nonsense it expels and finds, finally, true calm in that dizzying moment before pushing "Send."