Wednesday, July 31, 2002 6:59 PM

Joe Goes to Cyberland or The False Recognition of the Camino Real.

This Monday I set myself the onerous task of exploring cyberspace. It turns out, after a quick search in my soul and a perusal of my spirit, that I have to look at me first. What else is new?

I find it a sad thing that the advertisers have taken over the World Wide Web. (Need I say gentle folk that I do recognize the advertiser in me?)Most web pages that you go to are either trying (some terrifying attempts) or succeeding (I haven't decided which is worse) at looking like whiskey adverts in a slick magazine. Plenty of content all of it wrong headed all of it for ill use. We are told and trained at an exceedingly young age that to succeed we need to sell ourselves. Those web pages are the far reaches of that childhood instruction. It’s a hard world and we have to sell not only ourselves, but our football team our college our family our home our company and now our web page or NO ONE WILL PAY ATTENTION TO US! Or perhaps worse give us a pat on the back and introduce us into their club.

I think that eventually we can get to this place of people visiting us, applauding the magnificent work that we have placed before them, showering us in vague phrases of dubious praise. I am, in short, not entirely opposed to the notion. I just truly really and in all sincerity with all the veracity I can muster, straight forward and frankly, honest injun, don't believe it is a place to start. It is a shaky platform. It is going over to the "dark side" (Look what the hell happened to Anakin Skywalker, no, not when he makes it to the dark side, when he shifted back to defend his equally left handed son and choose to look like a pale worm instead of a splendid tyrant. Bête Bête where is my beautiful Bête!)

I spend my life in preparation. I practice the guitar each morning with fumble fingers and a groggy head. I then electronically scribble in my journal hoping that some wonderful nugget will be mind from the massive store of fact and feeling that influences my muddled thinking. I dig at ill formed and less that lucid (illucid? A new word for the growing grants of geekdom) computer programming, mathematical, musical and foreign languages. I read incessantly and obsessively. Eventually I became deeply troubled by my apparent lack of achievement. What was the purpose of all this preparation? Whither goest thou, my fragile psyche?

Then in a Zen hissed fit it occurred to me. Preparation is life. At least it is my life. The preparation seems progressive although it may not be. The preparation seems like a path though it well may not be. The preparation seems like that which comes before, but it is not. It is instead, the goal. I know that this mystical kind of ritual stuff has been thought and said before, but that didn't make it any less startling to me. The Gospel formulated according to the cup of Joe.

And so I begin to glimmer the gleam of my approach to cyberspace, www, internet, technological nightmare, whatever we decide collectively to call it. Start the process. It is all preparation. The produce of this procedure will grow, shrink, look better, look worse, hold your interest, bore you to tears, displease, please, gain your admiration, gather your disgust. But it is important that it is there, bare, with all the cracks, fissures and disjoints evident. Throbbing, potential. It will be the Lackzoom Web with all our hopes and aspirations and foolishness and wisdom. What I hope you never see is a little icon of a construction worker with a jack hammer and a sign over a wooden carpenters horse close at hand that proclaims "Pardon our dust this page is under construction." I hope that our site will be under constant deconstruction. Constant reconstruction.

I guess I'd like to make it hard on those damned advertisers.