Confessions of a Webmaster

To the fine folks at McSweeney's :

I run a small website that a narrow sampling of the American population (And sometimes the Netherlands) actually reads. It's usually my parents, their friends, and some of my friends. I have access to a device that allows me to track the rare breed of man that visits my site. I can deduce by IP address and Internet service provider, who is reading my site. So I play games with the people visit my site, I pretend I am in control of some perverse world no matter how small. Below is an example.

Appeared on www.kronski.com on a misty Portland morning, 12/21/03:

I like WordPad.


That tiny little accessory, sometimes I'll just pop it open for the thrill of watching everything come together in just a few seconds. Its white screen is warmly inviting and strangely intoxicating. I do my best work hung over, when the rain is misty outside my window. I have all of these unreleased snippets of dialogue, fragments of stories. Their relevance lost long ago, they clog up my folder on the network of the business I am writing this from. I was at a party last night, two of them actually. The second party steamed the walls and windows of the house. It was smoldering in its hip ness, its acuteness of attire. Everything oddly shaped, evenly distributed but oddly shaped. Everything broke the paradigm but fit anyway, because they were all rebelling in the same way.

When the mist enters my mind connected to the reflection of dark street signs, green on black, the drama of the whirr, the depth in the reverberations, at some ungodly hour of the morning, we live in darkness. I am beginning to ramble.

Don't you love it when you log on to this site, and can look directly into the back of my brain, and see the tired old tinkerer at play? Doesn't it give you some sort of voyeuristic thrill, just to watch me squirm, to log on to this site as a participation point in my life?

Click on it again and we'll be better friends. No, I mean it this time.

I'm not trying to put you down, I'm trying to find my way through this cosmodemonic hedge maze. I'm not patronizing you, I'm just trying to sell you this big fucking thing you don't really need. I don't have the qualifications to write a proper treatise, to construct an actual manifesto that would be printed anywhere prominent, I cant even hold the scissors straight when I call you at 3am, just to hear you breathing at the other end of the line.

I'm not even drunk when I stare at the phone swinging to and fro from the base in the booth outside the bar, crouched down on the ground. It's a heart-swelling finish to this symphony. I am the drama queen, I live for fights, for misfits, for the alienating feeling of a camera pulling back from it's subject while simultaneously moving forward.

I am not here to tell you how to live your life. I have not found religion. I am not doing this to get laid. I do this because something inside is fulfilled, or at least the image is fulfilled. I don't need to sit down, I don't need a nice cup of cocoa. What I need is understanding, the kind of understanding that WordPad gives me when I log on to the network in the morning, when I drink my conglomerate latte'. I am a new sentence-constructing machine. I am a psychopath talking wannabe. I soak up the writers then regurgitate what they took years to master. I am a charlatan, a fake, a philistine, you would turn up your waxed moustache to my very gaudy public display of affection.

Reading this will not make you politically aware, reading this will not keep your finger on the pulse of young people. I am not young people. I am not one of those giggly young people that cavort on cell phone ads that always look like they are having the time of their lives. I like the ocean. Reading this will not make the bad people go away. It will stop clowns from laughing at you. But its still you fault, its always your fault.

If this entry does not make any sense, if my ramblings continue onward, inward, then good, fine, I'm glad. May this inspire you to do nothing, I don't want the burden of inspiration. I couldn't handle it. Everything is mirrors, mirrors and notepad, sweet delicious fabricating notepad. With your simplicity I can smash the world into smithereens.