Calif

You know, I've been doing this Internet thing for a while now. I was in on the first wave, when news stations were still saying "http://www" like it was a mantra. Pages had blinky things on them. Pages were white type on black or purple backgrounds, just because they could be.

I was actually tasked to make the Montreal Symphony Orchestra's first-ever website. Me. Just me, no team of designers. I had to do the code by hand, literally write all the
tags and then import the file into Netscape to see how it looked.

I know. It sounds like the old "I walked twelve miles to school every day" rant.

But the wondrous thing is how it all seems now. It's like starting up a remote country store and running it mom and pop, and that was all there was, and only you, Elmer, had the connections to get the provisions. There was no competition because you were the only thing around.

Even I was completely new to the whole thing. I won't belabor the point, but it was a complete wasteland. The "Internet" was the "Information Superhighway" and hey, I was one of those few who could actually create pages from raw html. Hey look, YOU probably can't even do it now, but trust me, I was one of a very prized breed. It was arcane, like the shit they do now; the language was incomprehensible, yet suddenly, after fucking around with a few tags, a web page could emerge.

So what was my first instinct? To write an online diary. Huh? Why? Why would I write the first thing that came into my head whenever I wanted, and who the hell would ever read it? Well that didn't concern me too much at the time. But in 1995 I just started writing about something close to my heart and it just became a diary. I thought, what the fuck, let's do something so Montrealers will know where to go to eat. Because I wanted to know where to go to eat.

So at first I just cloned Gazette capsule reviews, since I figured, no one reads them anyway but the fucking Gazette wasn't even online, let alone publishing rewrites.

I don't have a clue what the readership for boulevardmontreal.com was, not a clue, but it just morphed into a diary. Just what had happened in the food universe maybe, or somewhere I went, or some kitchen tool I liked. There were no comments and no one emailed me, so I had no idea if anyone at all was reading what I wrote, so I just wrote whatever occurred to me, actually mostly for my own amusement.

I guess other people must have been doing the same thing, but they were hard to find. Then my brother gave me a little Fuji camera for Christmas in 1997 and I started taking pictures of my food. The resto people were mostly nonplussed because I always pretended I was a tourist and took a picture of my partner first but occasionally I'd get hit on, as in, why are you taking pictures?

Aah, I always deflected it. But little did I know that what I was doing was blogging restaurant reviews. The word "blog" was years away from being invented and all I thought I was doing was being Mr. Amateur Food reviewer, and by the way, here's a picture of my curry . . .

Who knew? I certainly didn't. I never said "This could develop into a major thing." I never spied dollar signs. It eventually became montrealfood.com, which was a herculean effort over six months, but never at the root of it was "How can this make money?"

I certainly don't put even close to any effort into it as I once did. But now, not only are people blogging about food of all kinds, recipes, restaurants, cuisines, but they're taking professional-grade, Gourmet magazine quality photos of it. Literally, the sites are a dime a dozen. Thousands upon thousands, with top-notch writing and photography and creativity, just like This Is The Way It Should Be. When I think of the effort required in writing a nice piece, taking majorly good photos for it, framing everything nicely and making it look extremely good, I think of how much time it takes to do that. And most of these folk just do it to amuse themselves, really. No, really.

I think of my free time. I think of people who, maybe do all the sudoku puzzles in all their daily newspapers, who develop complicated avatars for their nightly game of World Of Warcraft, and I think how much EFFORT goes into this stuff.

And I think whaa??? Who could anyone besides me be possibly interested in reading my rants, my raves, my nothings, my little masterpieces (only to me) that I literally used to write for myself; In the old days I literally thought not one single individual on the earth was reading what I was writing. I didn't know what lurkers were, didn't even know the word.

What is my point? I'm not quite sure. I try to make it fun for anyone who happens to stumble across my words, but in the long run, it adds up to petty meanderings, in many ways. It's actually quite selfish, because if I ever did have someone who actually reads what I write, they would be subject to my whim on that particular day. That's kind of not fair; I like to write and I like for everything I say to have a vague point. Well, it seems to make sense to me at the time I'm writing it.

But these days there are amazing writers out there, seemingly doing the same thing I do, except ten times more assiduously, like they looked at your golf stroke and then patented ten improvements on it. I pride myself on my writing skills, but some of these people blow me away. They're funnier, wittier, have an angle and develop it far better than I ever do in my rambling rants, but the kicker is that they do it for free too! The loving care they put into every post makes me feel like some guy under the freeway in a sleeping bag.

Some day I'll make a list of links to the kinds of sites I'm talking about, but you've already been to them.

So what's left? Rantier rants? Christ, I was taking pictures of my airline meals in 1995 and see what happened with that. Missed all the boats and quicker folk than I saw the potential in all of this, but you know what?

I like to be stuck in 1995 and have someone like you read my diary. It's very little effort to write it and that's what it is--the same way it was in 1995. The endless ramblings of some guy you don't know with no particular agenda, far too many bad words, a childish temper and pictures that suck.

That makes me feel better. See?