Do you know what a website is? I bet you don’t. Worry not – a few weeks ago I didn’t know either.
It’s so very easy to become locked down in your own safe narrow view of a thing, secure in the knowledge that it remains eternal and unchanging. So often it can be tied into our childhood reality, a more simple view of the world. I guess I was guilty of the same thing when viewing the early years of my marriage, filled with hope and love and a closeness that would last forever. With age comes realisation. With realisation, truth. In some ways that is what I thought that a website, particularly this website is. As with my marriage I couldn’t have been less right.
What actually happened with the website was this: I met a few friends over a mug or two of cheap beer. You may call them pints or whatever you like, but to me they will remain mugs. Frank – whose real name is Arthur – told me we should set up this thing called a website. I said I didn’t know what a website was, and he told me that it is a virtual thing that consists of currents of electricity in cyberspace. I told him it sounded like a difficult idea, but then he told me there would be porn in it.
We skirt around the edges of things. Everything feels exciting and charged with energy, much like the sexual tension between Frank, who I sometimes call Bernard, and I. From the seed of a thought grows something of substance, firm and erect in the warming light. We plough on. Nurturing and feeding. Something wonderful is happening, a flowering.
Then Eddie barges in and warns us against homosexual practices. We are both a bit annoyed, because with all the metaphor around we haven’t had time to get physical at all. In any case, the tension is now gone and there’s nothing left to do but actually start setting up the website, whatever that is.
There is a sense of malaise and a sickly decadence to the room. Something has changed. Somehow our beautiful vision has become corrupted. We work on feverishly in an attempt to return the project to our original ideals, but the thing has taken on a form of its own, our energies are depleting and yet we find ourselves driven. Give more. Work harder. Offer every drop of our toil! The form is terrifying now, part porn site, part social commentary, part news, part dark ramblings. Frank and I no longer recognise the thing we brought into the world, Eddie offers scant comfort in his luscious thighs. We plough on.
Suzie is the first to realize the end is near. Her fire very near extinguished, she screams in agony and releases the ocular of her telescope from its bearings. We watch silently as it falls onto the floor and, with a terrifying rending sound, falls through the cheap fabric and crashes silently two thousand feet below. “It’s time to find a job, boys.”
The beast lumbers on. Eddie checks the classified section for a position in the logging trade.