I am become Jer

Funkmaster G-Force pointed it out recently, and you can check for yourself. From Lindsay Wagner to Renee Zellwiger, chicks dig me.

Well, not me, per se, but some idea of me expressed in these pages. It is a carefully crafted and sloppily maintained me, an idea that’s got out of hand and is running amok through the blogosphere. It is, perhaps, slightly less artificial than the me you would meet if you were to stumble into the Cheap Beer Place right now, but only just.

This particular me, the one you know, is defined by words. Strings of symbols strung together to form ideas. And all of those smaller ideas coalesce into the grand idea of whoever it is I am. Though, maybe it’s not as grand as all that.

There have always been pen pals and others who come to know each other through words, but now we’re looking at something on a whole new scale. One of my NaNoWriMo ideas involves creating a completely artificial person online. But if that person is consistent and compelling, is there really any difference between that and who you’ve come to know here at Muddled Ramblings?

On a smaller scale, in the comments there are also new people – personalities that did not exist before but are just as real in this context. People with no birth certificates, no social security numbers, but in this place they exist and are known.

Of course, some of you have met me in the flesh, so you have two versions of me to compare. Perhaps there is some overlap, the intersection of the two Jerrys that can give some footing on who I really am. Whatever that means.

6 thoughts on “I am become Jer

  1. The current MOH wishes to make an announcement.

    For those of you who prefer a benign MOH, he cordially invites you to his home page (link below) and visit the updated site, with pages just added describing the Sherwood family’s activities in June, July, and August, including our summer vacation and bother’s wedding.

    For those of you who prefer an authoritarian MOH, you will click the link below, now. Or you will be punished. You’d liked to be spanked, wouldn’t you?

    In either case, you will find both characters strung together and pixels arranged in images to give a grand idea of the who the Sherwoods are. Mostly we try to stick to the facts, but occasionally the inner writer in Keith does escape, with mixed results (e.g. Expectorating minds want to know).

    Two fair warnings: it probably does help to have met the Sherwoods (or at least one of them) in flesh rather than to try to get to know them initially through the Internet, and this is not a blog. The conversation here is unabashedly one-sided.

  2. Creation of artificial personalities:

    Ah, that brings back the memories of days of yore. Campus legend at Rice had it that the students there created a fictitious student, “Halsey Taylor” (named after the brand of water fountains), registered him for classes, took exams and turned in homework for him, and nearly got him to graduate.

  3. Keith
    I checked out your vacation home page. I hadn’t realized that Kristi grew up a wholesome midwestern farmgirl. How did she end up the spikey San Diego punk you first met?

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