Jeffy's trip to Fun IslandIn October 1994, I attended the Second International Conference on the World Wide Web, in Chicago. This conference took place just as the Web was starting to explode. There were about 1500 people packed into an old hotel conference area designed to fit only about 800. We were all tripping over each other, sitting on the floor during the presentations, and generally packed into the place like sardines. I loved every minute of it. One of the keynote speakers referred to the gathering as the "Woodstock of the digital age." For me, it was a religious experience. While wandering around the display area, my eye caught a flyer sitting on a table with lots of other literature. The flyer promoted a new magazine called Infobahn. Infobahn called itself "The Magazine of Internet Culture." This really drew me to it. Infobahn was going to write about where I was coming from. After getting back to Ann Arbor, I checked out their web site. It was under construction, but would be on-line in a few weeks. I checked back a few weeks later...same thing. After a couple months, I gave up. A few months later... By February 1995, the Web was growing faster than anyone could imagine. I was busy getting together the group that provided web services for my department. At the time, I didn't make a habit of checking out the Cool Site of the Day every day, but one day I happened to take a peek. It was a site called Cybergrrl, and it featured a page called Web Grrls. Web Grrls was a page full of links to women on the web. It was a great resource for women who work on the net. Of course, I had other motives... An unusual name caught my eye: Muffy Barkocy. I clicked on her name, and was linked to her page at fish.com. Muffy is a computer programmer from San Francisco, and fish.com is a site she ran with her s.o., Dan. Women with pretty advanced technical skills like Muffy's aren't too common in Michigan, even in Ann Arbor, so I was immediately impressed. Reading on, I found a link to Muffy's On-line photo album... Muffy's photo album... It's not that I was totally oblivious to things like this in life, but this was on the net for the whole world to see, and it was pretty amazing stuff for a Dutch boy from Grand Rapids. What effected me the most was my own reaction to it. None of this stuff seemed seedy to me. I didn't really understand it, but that didn't matter. Muffy had put up an honest rendition of a portion of her life, and did so without fear of what people might think, and that was cool. I clicked on one page called "Muffy and Dan on Fun Island". It was one of the weirdest pictures I've ever seen. Muffy and Dan were on top of one of those floating kids' islands in a pool, and standing next to it was this big bald guy who was just standing there looking at the camera. Totally bizarre...like something out of a Fellini movie. In my head, I renamed this one, "Muffy and Dan have sex, while Uncle Fred poses for a family photo." Being in the midst of quite a personal transformation, it was pretty inspiring to see someone expressing the kind of freedom that I was just beginning to understand in my own quest... About six weeks later... I was cleaning off my desk one afternoon, and ran across the Infobahn flyer I had gotten many months back. Before I threw it out, I tried the site one more time...and stuff was happening. It wasn't quite ready yet, but within a few days, they were open for business. I quickly filled out the form to get the premiere issue, and then I checked out the "The Infobahn Team" page. On the top of the page, was a link to Editor and Publisher Michael C. Berch, and from it, I followed the link to his personal home page... All I could do was sit and stare at the screen for five minutes. I couldn't talk for about half an hour, until Heather finally asked why I was being so quiet. When I told some friends the whole story, many of them told me to go rent "Six Degrees of Separation." It was a cool flick, but I thought there might be something different going on in my head... Six more weeks later... I got home one evening and found the latest copy of Wired sitting in my mailbox. I sat down in my chair, and opened it up to the front section, saw this article called Raising Satan, and got another surprise. The focus of this article was Dan Farmer...the same Dan I had been looking at for quite a while... February, 1996 I had authored the first version of this story a couple months before, and sent a message to Mr. Berch with the URL. It took only about half an hour to get a nice note from Muffy. I found out that Muffy and Dan are not in fact having sex in the Fun Island picture (although it sure makes it more interesting to think that they are, eh?). Now I was in California, and I got a chance to meet both of them. While we were having lunch at this place in Haight-Ashbury, Muffy told me that there was someone who had discovered this story and discovered that she too had a relationship with Muffy and Dan. This page was authored by this wonderful woman named Maggy. The record of those coincidinks belongs to the ages now - every once in a while, we bump into each other on the net, and when we do, Maggy always helps me learn something about myself. Is this story at an end? I don't know. Some people who have read this have suggested that there's some kind of cosmic drama to be played out:
or, my personal favorite:
A "resolution" to all these links isn't what I look for. What I've learned from these experiences never came as a result of reaching a destination. It came from searching. |