mallorys_camera | Scraps (Reply)

Scraps had a huge influence on my life.

I knew him (kinda, sorta) from the Well. He is a man of very precise opinions. I admire this about him because my opinions are a fluctuating index. I have no certainty about anything, not even aesthetics. I suppose this is because there are no magnetic poles on my home planet, no fixed stars in my native firmament.

Scraps also made the journey to hell and back. A lot of people make that trip of course, but most of us are constantly sneaking back and forth over the border. Not Scraps. He journeyed south, far south. And then he came back, and that was the end of it.

Scraps is the person who turned me on to LiveJournal.

I've always had this need to lay all my secrets bare. I don't think it's exhibitionism: one of the great joys of middle age has been that every day in every way I grow more and more invisible. No, it's some wordless drive best articulated in that D.H. Lawrence poem: Not me, but the wind that blows through me.

In 2001 my mother was dying, I had an impossible job, my cracked heart was disintegrating a little bit more every day and the Well wasn't really working for me anymore. I had this ghoulish obsession with the Well, particularly with its social processing aspects but I knew I had to make a jump. Something in one of Scraps' postings made me curious one day so I followed the link to his bio and voila! it linked to his LiveJournal. This looks interesting, thought I to myself – I was talking about the software, not the substance of his journal – and the very next day I signed up for one of my own. Called it "Mallory's Camera" after the mountain climber George Mallory who – legend has it – made it to the top of Everest decades before Edmund Hillary. Unfortunately the camera Mallory used to document his ascent fell off the mountain when he did on his way back down. It has never been recovered.

LiveJournal has helped me keep my sanity these past seven years.

I will always be karmically indebted to