To say that I'm surprised -- by any of the events and experiences since 1996 especially -- would be an understatement in recalling my original somewhat disultory and very humble digression into creating an HTML page when intending consciously to use my new Gateway fully-loaded micro-computer for part-time "home publishing" work as an independent contractor of that profession exclusively. It reminds me of the story Joe Sottosanti, deceased founder and long-time owner of Shenandoah River Canoe Outfitters, told frequently of how he just moved to the country to live on sunshine and wild berries, but bought also two canoes. And a few more. And then an old nearly-abandoned cabin housing development with a partner. And became a no doubt surprised millionaire living in one of his own comfortably and artfully designed larger cabins with his own private lake, a now-legendary fleet of canoes and tubes and accessories, and a few other rental properties here and there. And a pleasant, attractive, intelligent fourth wife maybe twenty years or so his junior for whom he bought my A-frame to enjoy and run as a rental business of her own.

I had thought that maybe I'd like to write a little finally and publicly about my country life experiences and people and share that with the urban crowd as a kind of mental excursion for them, and weren't the color graphics and music software capabilities a lot of fun? Maybe I could even sell advertising to support my digital/analog habit, it later seemed. Things were looking up, definitely, in ways I'd never imagined or foreseen. And then I was talking through e-mail with greatly interesting and talented folks from there and Australia and Germany, British Columbia and Florida, Manhattan and DC again, and so it expanded cross country and continent and planet. The Brave New World, but not Huxley's, was here! And I was in the middle of it, hustling and bustling, brimming with enthusiasm, excitement, promise and ... pitfalls, catcalls, pratfalls and everything in between including even the interference and intercession of the universe and ecstancies unknown, or at least uncalled, previously. All that from about three months of playing one computer game until I finally beat it, got bored I guess, researched on-line programming and design structure briefly, and created a little home page with one short prose poem (a phrase I didn't even know at the time) and a graphic file tiled display behind it with pretty little colors and shapes now afforded by my miniature wonder at a cost then of around $2500 total including the printer and $55/month for now-miniscule space on Geocities server system plus $20/month to my (disgraced) ISP. If all that's happened consequent to my deciding on a whim perhaps to order a heavily software enhanced computer instead of buying a typewriter locally as originally planned isn't an example of "Man decides and God laughs," there is none under the sun or elsewhere.

So many years earlier I'd become a traveling accounting systems manager and "trouble shooter" because I wanted to learn database programming, became fascinated by the fun and possibilities of coding and wanted nothing more or better than to stay in my own office winding digital commands somewhat mysteriously into solved equations, neatly aligned screen displays, and crisp rows of data sheets all created by the esoteric interactions of me and the breathings in and out of electricity, electrons dancing from my brain to an infinite complex of off and on switches and currents rising and falling like the waves they are, analog to digital and back again repeatedly to and from me and other human beings interfacing through electrified machines and wire, now space, transfers and transformancies. Like West Virginia, it was and is a wild and wonderful ride (if occasionally quite bumpy and sometimes trash-strewn).

In college I attended two computer programming classes and passed both with "A"s and the feeling that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing although the code and answers came out right, magically in my view. Perhaps that explains it all.