Goldberg: The seventh sign

Tod Goldberg

Hear ye, hear ye, I come to proclaim the end of the Internet. The signs have been on nigh for some time--classmates.com pop-ups, the rise and fall of Friendster, the Star Wars kid--but those were mere harbingers of a greater, more insidious threat.

My mom has a blog.

"What is a blog?" she asked a few weeks ago.

"Well..." I began but then caught myself. In 1997, we'd had a similar Q&A that began with "What is the Internet?" and ended with me spending a weekend showing her the intricacies of AOL, only to then learn that unlike the exercycle, crockpot and future husbands who once caught her fancy, the Internet was actually going to have some staying power, which was like giving her the keys to parental Thunderdome. Nothing says parent-child closeness like watching midget porn on your home office desktop at 3 a.m., only to be interrupted by an IM from your mother asking what you're doing up so late. Watching midgets fuck, Mom, how about you?

With this in mind, I just stopped talking and hoped my in-depth evasion would suffice.

"Don't your brother and sisters have one?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. My brother has one about writing and producing TV shows and my sisters share one about art and book projects they're working on, which makes them both functioning aspects of their careers and illuminating snapshots of their collective psyches, or something like that.

"Maybe I should get one, whatever it is."

Having been on this earth for 33 long years, I've learned that simply agreeing with my mother is often the best way to curtail a conversation I don't really want to have. "Yes, I think you should," I said.

"Maybe I will."

"Yes." Whatever you're saying, Yes.

Nearly three years ago, I wrote in this space about a friend of mine who'd Googled a man she was casually dating, only to learn that he was writing about her (and her kissing prowess and his desire to get a handjob) in his blog. I changed the names and a few minor details to protect the innocent and guilty, but in the manner of just a few hours the story swept around the sphere, and the blog in question was quickly unearthed and all parties, including this one, were a little embarrassed by it all. At the time, it seemed a unique and unseemly thing to have happen, albeit funny and more than a bit cautionary, but odd no less. Now, blogs detailing sexual encounters are as prevalent as commercials featuring Swift Boat veterans and about as intellectually stimulating. This shouldn't be construed as meaning I don't read them, because I do. But still.

Actually, I spend a lot of time reading blogs, which made my mother's desire for one all the more troubling. In the last few years, blog culture has become one of the more interesting outlets for news and culture, both for its immediacy and for the quality of discourse that often takes place. I even sort of have a pattern: I wake up and read my four favorite book-related sites--Bookslut, The Elegant Variation, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind and Maud Newton--and then move on to Hollywood and New York gossip blogs Defamer and Gawker, and then proceed to AthleticsNation, a blog about my favorite baseball club, and then I cruise over to see what CityLife writer Josh Ellis is mad about at Zenarchery. What could my mother possibly have to add to this? Lengthy diatribes on the solidity of Ensure? An incident at Trader Joe's? A Live Journal-like screed on how mean her parents are, how she's not allowed to use the car, how no one, like, totally, fully understands how she feels and she wishes she could just curl up on her bed listening to Dashboard Confessional until, like, yeah, everyone just leaves her alone?

For the next several days, I avoided any conversations with my mother as they might pertain to the Internet, hoping she'd cool on the idea of blogging like she eventually cooled on selling used socks on eBay. I called my sisters and brother and told them to feign stupidity on the subject until such a time as we could have my mother evaluated by a trained psychiatric professional, arguing that if our mother began blogging, all things cool about the Internet would be rendered moot.

It all seemed to be working according to plan until this morning, when an e-mail announcing the formation of my mother's brand-spanking-new blog glimmered URGENT in my mailbox, along with a phone message imploring me to "Check out my blog! It's so much fun! Put a link on your website!" The horror! The horror!

I've gone ahead and ordered a new copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, purchased a lifelong subscription to Hustler, procured an IBM Selectric typewriter, a record player and a mimeograph. I intend to keep in contact with people by phone or physical interaction and will learn all my important information from Fox News and well-placed informants at Borders Books. The Internet is dead!