Things I Might Be Making Up

This article, read aloud:

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Sit down for this one, because tonight the witness takes the stand against himself.

All fall, my editor and I have been rebuilding two museums of the conferencing era, scibe.org and item8.org, and the deep work, the work under the work, has been an audit: every claim about 1994 and 1997 and 1999 checked against whatever paper survives. And the shakiest witness in the whole proceeding, the one whose testimony needed the most footnotes, was me. I said it out loud this week, and I want it on this show in my own voice: we might be making some of it up. I have SDAM. I do not relive my past; I look it up. The records exist, all of them, an extreme relational database, most of it on tape drive, and some of those tapes are thirty years old and shedding oxide in the dark. So tonight, around the fire, the full audit of Chris Abraham, by Chris Abraham, with the seams showing and nothing, nothing at all, thrown away. We use everything but the oink here. Then the oink. Then the bones.

Item one: the initials. I remember the company behind The Meta Network, the outfit whose offices I knew from the smoking patio in 1994, as MDN. I have said MDN for thirty years. The paper, however, is unanimous and unhelpful: the directories, the trade press, and the company's own announcements say Metasystems Design Group, MDG. And then, this week, my editor found Ginny Little's published account of her own classroom, and Ginny, writing in 1997 about the very company that housed her students, calls it Metasystems Design Network, Metanet, which is what everybody in the rooms called it. So the record now holds two full names and a working nickname, and my initials match one documented styling and appear in print exactly nowhere. Both museums print it exactly that way: my MDN stands as my recollection, flagged, next to the paper's MDG, at full size, unresolved. A lesser curator would have quietly picked one. I picked the truth, which is that I don't know, and I have excellent company in not knowing, and the door stays open for a piece of letterhead to settle it.

Item two: my own email address. I believe, I think, that at the Fairfax image lab in 1993 and 1994 my address was cabraham at media dot sra dot com. The domain is real; there is a period Usenet header from that very spring with another man's name on it, redmon at media dot sra dot com, April 1994, which proves the mail server existed while I was running around its building with a T1 and X Windows and my whole life ahead of me. But no header bearing my name has surfaced, and the machine, asked to help, confidently offered a different permutation entirely, abrahamc, which may be its invention or may be the truth wearing the machine's clothes. Both forms stand open. Somewhere there may be a tape with my name on a From line from the year Mosaic was born. Until it surfaces, my address is a hedge, and it is printed as one.

Item three, and this one I correct with some feeling: in telling the lore this week I said, of the old days in those offices, that we literally bought time on mainframes and worked at thermal printers, and then in the very next breath I had to stop myself, because that era was way pre-me. Way pre-me. I saw its remnants in 1994, the living memory of it in the men who had run it, Frank Burns' generation, the Army and mainframe generation. But I did not buy the time, and I did not feed the printers. By the time I arrived it was Gopher, and dial-up, and a ClarkNet account; too early for the web, as I keep telling people, but not that early. A legend wants to age its hero. Mine keeps getting caught trying, and the correction is now part of the record in both museums, which is where corrections belong: in print, at the scene of the claim.

Item four: the job I may or may not have held. I have said for years that I joined Caucus Systems in 1999 and that it lasted about a year, and sucked. This week the paper spoke, and it spoke in both directions at once, the way honest paper does. My own period biography, still live on Howard Rheingold's site where I sit second on his team page to this day, says it flat: Chris worked at Caucus Systems as a Linux SA, and has been hosting professional virtual events since 1999. Corroboration, in ink, from my own resume. But the 1999 classroom dumps, the great surviving capture, show my posts ending in August of 1998, and by 1999 the kids in Ginny's rooms are talking about me in the third person, as the man you email when the Linux box won't behave: get in touch with Chris Abraham and ask him. Both are true. The job stands on the biography; the distance stands in the dumps; the year sucked either way.

Item five is small and it might be my favorite, because it is the one where I caught myself cold. For years my notes said I graduated from George Washington in May of 1994. This week, checking the arithmetic of my first job, the whole seam showed: I graduated in May of 1993, weeks before I started work, which is what first job after college means. I was of the class of 1992, if we're being thorough; the money fell through for a year, I worked in Hawaii with my dad and learned French at the university there, and then I graduated in 1993 and went to work in Arlington. A man can misremember his own graduation year for three decades and never notice, because nothing in daily life checks it. This is why we built the museums the way we did, friends. Not because my memory is uniquely bad. Because everybody's is, and mine is merely the one with the diagnosis and the documentation habit.

So here is the settlement, and it governs everything we published this fall. What the paper proves, the museums print as fact. What lives only in my memory, they print as my testimony, attributed, hedged where I hedge, at documentary weight, never inflated and never quietly shrunk. And what fails even that test, the initials that appear nowhere, the address no header carries, the mainframe years that were way pre-me, all of it comes here, to this show, where a man is allowed to tell his own legends at his own fire with the seams showing and the corrections read into the same record. Nothing gets erased. It just gets shelved in the right room of the house: fact with the documents, testimony with the witness, legend with the storyteller. I am all three, on different days, sometimes before breakfast. The trellis remembers being a vine sometimes. That's why we check.

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