MetaFilter

What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

I started using the name "Kozad" in the Seventies as an identity for various art projects. It comes from a memory of Cozad, Nebraska, where I saw huge leeches in the town fountain across the railroad tracks from the Dairy Queen.

Aside from that little tableau, I can't remember what life was like before the Internet.

No, I have millions of memories, few of them the unfiltered truth, about my life as a nature boy - ahh, the thrill of finding a tiger salamander under one rotting log, the terror of finding a yellow jackets' nest under another - and the memory of sitting by a sunny window reading Silent Spring fifty years ago when I was ten or so, being introduced to the horror of what Mankind was doing to Nature. There are also the usual memories of the vagaries of many loves found and lost, the discovery of inner (and simultaneously outer) Mysteries, and the joys of Art.

What drew me into the internet? It was 1994, and we had a two-year old child and a dial-up connection on our basement computer. I started having conversations in moms' groups. (I was a male mom.) That was the first time I felt like I was part of an invisible community. Probably the last time, too, since Metafilter is too big to feel like a community, and I don't feel like searching for groups of, say, jazz pianists or surrealists. Wait...that might be fun. It would be too much to hope for finding a group of surrealist musicians, though.

This morning I had a dream where the long past, the short present, and the long future were formatted visually. I chose to project from the present an energetic and joyful state of being into the future. So far, it has worked.