britt keeps doling these out at the speed of like one a month i don’t even look like this anymore hahah.
ok here’s a question i’m getting around to answering now.
if the blogger wrote a blog and no one was there to read it, did they actually write anything?
would they continue writing? -billie
ahh what a great question. i love pretentious open-ended ethereal self-ego stroking artistic bombastic questions one can really lunatic out to. woah look at that sentence. anyway, i cherish the days when it was very tree falling in the woods and no one heard me, even though i began day one of blogging already with an audience. raymi the minx was born of the viceland.com wassup forum. i am super sick of typing that but that’s how it all began. i kind of really want to see some of those threads again. i was 17.
anyway, my first roommate when i moved to toronto at 19 pending my five month stint in brooklyn (when i was 18 and sort of interned at vice til they fastly learned how useless i was going to be in the office, and stubborn, and self-entitled so they invented a bartending job for me in their soho store) my toronto roommate was/is a mega tech genius scottish dude. we had our own server and this mentally insane looking computer laboratory in the cellar, and because of that guy i learned about this thing called BLOG STATISTICS or HITS. it was so ghetto, just a white blank page that every few minutes we’d refresh and his mind was blooooooown when he saw how much traffic was being directed to our crawford street ghetto apartment, to my blog. in less than the ten minutes it took for him to connect whatever the fuck to my blog and ping pong something or other, one hundred people had been on my blog and the number kept rising, we blocked our own ip to be sure we weren’t hallucinating these numbers. this is all in that period post the dot com millionaire boom window closing. i was 19 and internet famous in this sort of significant way. it was bizarre. if people wanted to let you know you were a piece of shit they had to write you an email. commenting didn’t really exist. guestbooks did. hahahaha gay.
there was still a lot of distance though, between me, us, and them. more isolating, despite knowing the reader was there, i could live more like they actually weren’t.
but now if every single reader went away would i still blog? yes. i would journal like it was 1998. or 1990 when i bought myself my first journal. i have so much of my life documented and i wonder if any of it is even worthwhile or meaningful, what is the point. why do i write everyday what the fuck do i think i am doing here and who the hell do i think i am?
me at 15. missing my first boyfriend being emo during a family vacation. teenagers are the worst hey, what stupid bunches of drags.
cut off my beautiful hair five days into knightsbridge uk (17). was sent for school for an exchange program in the summer, half in london half in oxford. surrounded by rich rosedale kids. i had five one night stands and kept to myself a lot, separated myself from the pack, venturing out to pubs and bars and cafes drinking my way the whole way through journaling alone at nite, sitting with strangers, typically men. so cliche. one of the teachers in this program lived above me in the crawford ghetto (which was not actually a ghetto, but a house on crawford street in little italy). small world. i was homesick for people i barely knew. raymi wasn’t invented yet but i was poking around viceland, blogger wasn’t invented yet. when i got back to canada i interned at a women’s magazine d/t toronto, while working simultaneously at home hardware, commuting my ass to the bone and working weekends and the one monday we didn’t go to our job placements, this was my last year of highschool. i was pale as a ghost and lonely and had a stupid fucking haircut working in cabbagetown and i had to sign a confidentiality agreement so i can’t write a devil wears prada type memoir about my experience. clearly i wanted to be a writer. or work for a magazine. i’d take vice or toronto star but once i saw the other side of the print world i was kinda like, uhhh fuck that, too much work, too much competition, too much writing about things that AREN’T ME. i wanted to be the star. i still want my own raymi magazine some day.
being somewhat under-challenged and sneaky i spent the majority of my time on viceland writing and talking about myself, my commute into the the city, junkies on parliament, posting photos too from scans i took with film throwaways. i stayed up past midnight habitually hanging with my friend ward who is one part rainman and ten parts loyd christmas (dumb and dumber). insanely intelligent when it comes to computers and OCD about car components. i wrote about him a lot. how he took all the chrome off his parent’s car as a kid. called his own house for his friend shafquat (the other extension). would go to drive thru, order and pay for food then drive away (multiple times) before the food arrived. stupid funny shit like that. he taught me how to drive stick, i didn’t have my g1 (still don’t) i’d drive around meadowvale village back and forth all over most nights with him then go back to his place and geek out online. (nights i wasn’t doing stuff like, dudes, of course).
basically i had an itch to scratch, being nocturnal, constantly on the go. i was ready to take on the fucking world, i had a mentor, a savvy guy in the music industry who thought my writing in the vice forums was good and constant and unique, i drew an audience, loved me, hated me, i had them. he said, take them with you, make a blog. me, what’s a blog? him, go check it out come back to me. i kind of drag my heels a few days on it because i am so addicted to the forums and the instant gratification coming out of there.
a photo from one of ward and i’s drive-thru journies. it went viral, as much as something could go viral in 1999. fuck i just totally remembered the three months i lived in maine in-between brooklyn and toronto. i’m nostalgic for those three months because i truly was isolated in maine yet still had my blog and readership, also a radio show called there’s something about raymi. i had happy moments of isolation alone in the den my boyfriend’s father died in, he too alone, blogging away, alone but not alone. this is kind of all over the place but i feel it’s necessary as in every interview for some reason, they need to know the timeline of my blog, pre-dating it and when it first started blowing up like there is some sort of secret in the makeup of this thing? it’s like when you start out with a new therapist they want to know EVERYTHING going back to birth (everything gets blamed on the mother anyway, don’t bother wasting your time) they also want to know every drug too. like, get over it already why does it matter if i did shrooms once? does it mean i hate my mother?
in the car from the airport from maine i said to my dad i am going to work for three month’s straight, save money then move to toronto and become an internet superstar. he was like, whatever lauren. we drove to the pub below his apartment at the time and i sat there, internally glowing about my new plan. these are rare moments. i always feel them when i come back from somewhere. fresh perspective.
fuck, i blog because i know there are moments of brilliance and moments of insanity and sometimes oh my god shut the fuck up already moments, but still, there are moments period. for me. i write my best when my heart is breaking, when i am hopeful and for some reason i am hopeful. as much of the blatantly cynical idiotic showboat that i am, i think that there is in fact something to all this and documenting everyday is a privilege that ought to be did, whether anyone ever reads it or not. it’s the only way i can like myself anymore. writing. knowing one day it will all form together and make sense to me. that’s basically the first thing i should have said here.
one more thing. i know i’m late on this, but wow, the stupidest thing i have read in a very long time. for so many reasons i don’t have the energy to address it all. two choice quotes, “Men clearly have an urge to blog that women lack.” and “We also tend to lack the public confidence that comes so easily to many men.”
woman, i am ashamed for you. i hope you were on your period when you wrote that.
one major point i forgot to make the other day was, if you want to be famous on the internet right now BE a dude because the blog world is so over-saturated with pussy. take this blog, be a guy, and do as i do. you’d blow the fuck up. there aren’t enough guy ME’s out there. what internet circles is this ignorant woman running in? christ. so stupid. also, WHERE are these alleged male blogs? i can barely count on one hand how many male blogs i read. ps. GUESS WHAT MY GENDER IS!
