Famous On the Well
Sep. 18th, 2007 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThe Number 1 Son is something of a chef. If Stanford doesn't work out, he intends to run away to New York with his knives and snag a job as a line cook at some expensive restaurant.
"Culinary school is a scam," he tells me.
At Deep Springs he was a butcher and a baker. They don't make their own candles or he would have been a nursery rhyme too.
Anyway he has a good palate so last night we took him out to a farewell dinner at Fresh Cream, the only Zagat-rated restaurant in Monterey County.
He won't be 21 for another five months so we avoided the wine list.
I had an heirloom tomato caprise, veal medallions done in a cabernet reduction and for desert a crème brûlée (because I always eat crème brûlée – really, I should buy myself a blowtorch and make it at home. It's not that hard.)
Ben had a Caesar salad and a salmon dish.
Max had the lobster bisque, a seared tuna sashimi and a Grande Marnier soufflé.
Except for the lobster bisque, I wasn't all that impressed. In fact, I thought the cabernet reduction was a rather heavy sauce for a veal dish and immediately began to make the recipe over in my mind – really you want to make the sauce out of something like a white burgundy, hearty but not overwhelming.
During the meal I caught glimpses of the grown-up Max as he will be in another ten years, and it made me proud and it made me sad. It all goes so quickly, doesn't it? So quickly.
###
All of what I'm about to recount is a lie.
So. The Well.
In this age of Facebook, MySpace, Slashdot et al it is hard to describe how unique the Well was once. But my discovery of it twenty years ago ranks right up there with other experiences that unlocked new worlds for me.
Dropping acid: all perceptual lenses focusing simultaneously.
Giving birth: pain, like a trip to the dark side of the moon where all personality was stripped away; reemergence into full spectrum sunlight with a new companion soul at my side.
Logging on to the Well: an invisible tribe filled with people whose psychological profiles I knew as intimately as though we were connected by a telepathic thread but whom I wouldn't recognize if I passed them on the street. Shades of John Wyndham's Rebirth!
Of course, timing is everything. Had I not had such a powerful need to reinvent myself when I first discovered the Well, it might not have exerted such a pull. I had just divorced my first husband; I was in my last year of graduate school. I had a lot of friends but they knew me too well. I wanted to seduce strangers. And I wanted to do it through writing.
There were some discordant notes, of course.
A few months after I joined, the Well held a party at the Hotel Utah. I put on my red high heels and went. It was like the most boring, awkward college party you can possibly imagine. Everyone was standing around hugging themselves, peering surreptitiously at the other people. Nobody actually talked. And then the next day, there were all these new postings about what a fabulous party it had been and boy, don't you wish you'd been there.
Huh, I thought. Huh.
Of course it could also just as easily be that I only saw what I wanted to see. That my old persona – Perpetual Stranger At the Party – had caught up with me again.
And actually it's not true that I talked to no one.
I talked to one guy. A week later, we were lovers. We had absolutely nothing in common beyond a certain acerbic playfulness with words but the Well provided a kind of matrix and context that I imagine is something like being an actor on a movie set.
I fucked lots of Well notables those first few years.
Which made it all the more striking that when I finally met Tom Mandel, I did not fuck him.
The Well's infrastructure has been imitated by enough content-associated bulletin boards in the years since to be very familiar. There are broad Areas of Interest – on the Well they're called "conferences" – subdivided into topics. My favorite conference was something called "Weird" where the writing was all edgy and freeform, like a pen of stand-up comics trying out new material for one another. It was as close as words could get to being jazz. You riffed, you picked up other people's instruments. You wore porkpie hats.
Weird inevitably was a place that new users gravitated towards. For one thing the Old Timers might actually notice you there. The Well has always been characterized by a deeply entrenched Old Guard with rather stuffy ideas of what makes interesting and acceptable content. In cyberspace, you might think it would be valuable and worthwhile to engage with people whose ideas are the very opposite of your own. After all, it's a safe forum. And simply millions of people in real life don't agree with you about much! Doesn't it behoove you – if nothing else then as an intellectual exercise – to try to understand them? But that's not the way it worked on the Well. You couldn't actually join the conversation until you'd generated some Well cred of your own and interacting in Weird was the fastest way of doing that.
Once they had enough Well cred, most users left Weird. But a few stayed on.
Two of those were Tom and me.
We played. Oh, how we played! The fabulous, perpetual Blowjob Machine! The Yak! (I still think Will Wright modeled the llama after the Yak.) The Scrotal Status Reports! The petitions, the injunctions, the pissing contests, the cheers.
There was a dark side too as related in Katie Hafner's book which is mostly about Tom.
Anyway we became confidantes via sends and phone long before we met.
Tom was always unrequitedly in love with some belle dame sans merci or another. For a while he started hinting broadly that woman could be me. But knew this would never work – I didn't exist in a starlit realm distantly revolving far above his own; I was too accessible. And Tom was pretty nasty to women who were accessible to him.
So when we finally met, I fed him the "Gee, we'd be better off as friends" line.
And it took.
###
TBC if I ever have the time. Now I gotta scuttle to do the Stanford convoy thang with a van full of Max possessions.
"Culinary school is a scam," he tells me.
At Deep Springs he was a butcher and a baker. They don't make their own candles or he would have been a nursery rhyme too.
Anyway he has a good palate so last night we took him out to a farewell dinner at Fresh Cream, the only Zagat-rated restaurant in Monterey County.
He won't be 21 for another five months so we avoided the wine list.
I had an heirloom tomato caprise, veal medallions done in a cabernet reduction and for desert a crème brûlée (because I always eat crème brûlée – really, I should buy myself a blowtorch and make it at home. It's not that hard.)
Ben had a Caesar salad and a salmon dish.
Max had the lobster bisque, a seared tuna sashimi and a Grande Marnier soufflé.
Except for the lobster bisque, I wasn't all that impressed. In fact, I thought the cabernet reduction was a rather heavy sauce for a veal dish and immediately began to make the recipe over in my mind – really you want to make the sauce out of something like a white burgundy, hearty but not overwhelming.
During the meal I caught glimpses of the grown-up Max as he will be in another ten years, and it made me proud and it made me sad. It all goes so quickly, doesn't it? So quickly.
All of what I'm about to recount is a lie.
So. The Well.
In this age of Facebook, MySpace, Slashdot et al it is hard to describe how unique the Well was once. But my discovery of it twenty years ago ranks right up there with other experiences that unlocked new worlds for me.
Dropping acid: all perceptual lenses focusing simultaneously.
Giving birth: pain, like a trip to the dark side of the moon where all personality was stripped away; reemergence into full spectrum sunlight with a new companion soul at my side.
Logging on to the Well: an invisible tribe filled with people whose psychological profiles I knew as intimately as though we were connected by a telepathic thread but whom I wouldn't recognize if I passed them on the street. Shades of John Wyndham's Rebirth!
Of course, timing is everything. Had I not had such a powerful need to reinvent myself when I first discovered the Well, it might not have exerted such a pull. I had just divorced my first husband; I was in my last year of graduate school. I had a lot of friends but they knew me too well. I wanted to seduce strangers. And I wanted to do it through writing.
There were some discordant notes, of course.
A few months after I joined, the Well held a party at the Hotel Utah. I put on my red high heels and went. It was like the most boring, awkward college party you can possibly imagine. Everyone was standing around hugging themselves, peering surreptitiously at the other people. Nobody actually talked. And then the next day, there were all these new postings about what a fabulous party it had been and boy, don't you wish you'd been there.
Huh, I thought. Huh.
Of course it could also just as easily be that I only saw what I wanted to see. That my old persona – Perpetual Stranger At the Party – had caught up with me again.
And actually it's not true that I talked to no one.
I talked to one guy. A week later, we were lovers. We had absolutely nothing in common beyond a certain acerbic playfulness with words but the Well provided a kind of matrix and context that I imagine is something like being an actor on a movie set.
I fucked lots of Well notables those first few years.
Which made it all the more striking that when I finally met Tom Mandel, I did not fuck him.
The Well's infrastructure has been imitated by enough content-associated bulletin boards in the years since to be very familiar. There are broad Areas of Interest – on the Well they're called "conferences" – subdivided into topics. My favorite conference was something called "Weird" where the writing was all edgy and freeform, like a pen of stand-up comics trying out new material for one another. It was as close as words could get to being jazz. You riffed, you picked up other people's instruments. You wore porkpie hats.
Weird inevitably was a place that new users gravitated towards. For one thing the Old Timers might actually notice you there. The Well has always been characterized by a deeply entrenched Old Guard with rather stuffy ideas of what makes interesting and acceptable content. In cyberspace, you might think it would be valuable and worthwhile to engage with people whose ideas are the very opposite of your own. After all, it's a safe forum. And simply millions of people in real life don't agree with you about much! Doesn't it behoove you – if nothing else then as an intellectual exercise – to try to understand them? But that's not the way it worked on the Well. You couldn't actually join the conversation until you'd generated some Well cred of your own and interacting in Weird was the fastest way of doing that.
Once they had enough Well cred, most users left Weird. But a few stayed on.
Two of those were Tom and me.
We played. Oh, how we played! The fabulous, perpetual Blowjob Machine! The Yak! (I still think Will Wright modeled the llama after the Yak.) The Scrotal Status Reports! The petitions, the injunctions, the pissing contests, the cheers.
There was a dark side too as related in Katie Hafner's book which is mostly about Tom.
Anyway we became confidantes via sends and phone long before we met.
Tom was always unrequitedly in love with some belle dame sans merci or another. For a while he started hinting broadly that woman could be me. But knew this would never work – I didn't exist in a starlit realm distantly revolving far above his own; I was too accessible. And Tom was pretty nasty to women who were accessible to him.
So when we finally met, I fed him the "Gee, we'd be better off as friends" line.
And it took.
TBC if I ever have the time. Now I gotta scuttle to do the Stanford convoy thang with a van full of Max possessions.
