So shiny and new, come aboard were expecting you…One would look at my time on the Internet since starting with the help of qualified individuals back in 1995, actually they didn’t help me they created my website Thom Collins .
My first ever dot.com if you will. I had started a small online promotional business called CMC enterprise with my mother selling video tapes and photos of a Modeling/HIV+ activist to at this point as a marketing tool. Little did I know HIV would after my fight of close to 17 years at the time decide to come out and “play”. So back to the looking back at my time online you would see not only the perk of being ahead of the mainstream public by my name recognition and a dot com to boot, I would soon have endless amounts of time to host AOL 2.5 HIV/AIDS support groups, email every person who wrote and I can attest to having quite a supportive following back in the mid to late 90’s with whom I would go to the local coffee shop drink a ton of coffee, smoke my mind silly and answer my email’s sometimes from overseas and with the understanding to all of those who did write it may take me two months to answer but I would answer. Not due to laziness but because of actually being overwhelmed with letters. Tooting my horn over this is not my style and in a way I truly miss those days reading on this new medium called email and feeling the pain and prayers for both me and the writer struggling with the disease. It wasn’t until the year 2000 in which I have documented on numerous blogs, my website, and certain emails I had enough.
To say I allowed crazy in would be an understatement for I am crazy myself. I trusted far too many people and was very naive in letting too many people into my personal life going so far as to breaking the cardinal rule of the Internet and giving out my address to some. Looking back I don’t have regrets and I am grateful I wasn’t killed because a select few of those individuals truly helped both my partner and I through money, groceries, support in any which way possible. But if it is too good to be true it usually is. Once the head games and jealousy showed it’s ugly head some caused me more stress than any help once given.
Now it takes too to tango and I will be the first to admit if anyone is at fault it would be me and my personality which was compounded by the therapy given to me at the time for my A.V.N.( it means pain and it has to do with me walking) Oxycontin. No angel from years past prior to my suicide attempt in 1994 had it crossed my mind this certain prescribed medication could tear me down the way it did.
I am glad to be off of this particular medication today, however still having to depend on pain medication to have any quality of life and that scares me. From the HIV/AIDS medications, to pain, to bi polar depression, panic attacks, blood pressure, and for my ADHD I wonder what if there was a disaster like Katrina and my medications were floating away what happens then. I guess this is why my way of setting up little blogs here and there to remind me of my reality hoping to catch me on a day of bliss. So now with the promise I made to myself last night I would try to get back into social networking for friendship my efforts will reap whatever benefits allowed. My prayer is I am able to find a website or blog to finally call home and not be on this endless quest to sign up on every fucking free registered site which comes along hoping to be a part of something bigger than I.
Mashable.com has truly been therapeutic in helping me find a CENTER in this crazy world of WEB 2.0 and after a couple months of testing out all of the different free blog hosting sites Word press is the most impressive than blogger, etc etc. But I have blogs set up all over the damn place and I have so much to share in video, stories, photos and they are all not necessarily about ME or I I I ….they are compiled of funny sometimes controversial “things, stuff, more things” I find interesting or relevant in the world today. But learning the ways of bookmarks, flakes, css, digg this, etc it gets so frustrating I end up quitting before I ever start. so I will stop now and if I choose to write for the hell of it so be it, if not so what but the point is if you out there are similar to obsessing like I with registering with the latest and greatest sites STOP….because no matter what you may think they are only important and meaningful if your intentions are not for POPULARITY within a faceless community hoping for a chance at fame aka lonelygirl whatever? But for those bloggers, vloggers, photo artists who truly get what these services are about and it is the basic of all principles and this is the epitome of the Internet..sharing
