My Life in the Ether

On Monday, my blog turned one year old and although this is one grain of sand in the hour glass that is the blogosphere, it feels like a million.

A virtual rookie, I seem to have more friends in the ether than I have in my real life. New Yorkers are an incredibly busy bunch and even the most intimate, beloved friendships are stretched thinly by huge distances when New Yorkers disperse to the far reaches of the globe.

When I first arrived in New York from London, it was possible to buy a dime bag in a sweet shop on the corner, smoke in a bar, find an illegal rave somewhere, have a party in a disused Chelsea warehouse and set fire to cars with impunity on the unpoliced streets in Williamsburg. (Now the street kids have been replaced with students who wear Care Bear backpacks and gold stilettos with socks and I've developed post-ironic stress disorder.) I made disparate friends and acquaintances: all real, fleshy people whom I could touch and smell. I wrote and was rejected on real paper; featured on an album cover and in a book; went on tour across Europe with a band; wrote for a magazine; interviewed subjects in person with a dictaphone; took pictures with real film; drank too much and smoked late into the night with strangers.

Now every day I go to work in a parallel universe where I engage with people I've never met. I can write blog posts, email strangers at all times of the day and I receive comments in return. Kim sends me links to jobs. Consciously Frugal lends interminable encouragement and Fiona in Minnesota offers words of writerly wisdom. I met Casual Kitchen, who corrected the mainstream media reports on the Chilean earthquake, through the Frugal Bachelor who has completely disappeared; did he get a real life? More recently, The Lean Times, Oil & Garlic and Paranoid Asteroid (excellent name) have commented and offered words of support. Liquid Artsy Stuff, who "loves jumping" thanked me for posting the letter from my mother about the British health system; Simple Life in France thanked me for my open rant to the republican who threw me off her blog for my liberal views, which was my high point. Only the other day, one of my followers told me that there's no such thing as organic. Sandy Apuzzo won the t-shirt competition then didn't claim it.

I have other followers, whom I used to know in the real world, but with whom I now convene online.

How did this happen? How am I now virtual? Do I exist in the real world? I wonder if I'm fading from existence like that photo of Michael J Fox and his siblings that's stuck into his guitar at the end of Back To The Future.

A year ago, it was just my hard drive and me in a corner of my house writing furiously. Now I have Russian and Australian followers; French socialists read my blog. There are exceedingly clever marketing people in Boston - Economist readers no less - who have labelled me a protectionist and dumped me in disgust for promoting American products. They sternly stated that people in China need jobs too, as if I had no idea. I can imagine the latest edition of the Economist's annual summary mounted, with hallowed reverence, behind glass in their office; their business is the free market after all. I mentioned that we should only fit our oxygen mask before helping others economically, but it fell on stubbornly deaf ears.

Bostongate was swiftly forgotten after C-span started following me on Twitter and companies began to approach me and ask me to advertise their products. Through Google Analytics I noticed that most readers don't feel like commenting.

Americans are intrigued that I come to this country and tell them to buy American. "I" don't live here, though. I live in the ether.