The Sea of Welsh Cowboy Porn Star Magic
In a world of smart phones and split-second search engines, having a very common name can create an uncommon experience. While I was growing up, a prevalent surname meant only perhaps a line or two in a physical phone book, just another entry among the litany of anonymous others who inhabited your home city. Now, it means 36,800,000 highly detailed web hits in 0.43 seconds or so. In fact, if you’re using the Internet exclusively to try and find me, you might find almost anything but what you’re expecting.
If you’re an old friend trying to reconnect, a new employer trying to background check, or a shadowy hater trying to stalk, a quick Google search may lead you to believe I have become either a handsome footballer from Wales, a deceased singing cowboy, Ron Weasley’s wizard father, or even an oily-muscled gay porn star. While I intend no offense to any in such employ, in the words of Johnny Cash, “It ain’t me, babe.” Shoot, pardner, I can’t even sing.
One of my namesakes, one with the rare confluence of correct first name spelling and shared middle initial, is a long-dead, West Texas troubadour whose career has apparently made more money for his descendants than he ever saw while still breathing. While I grasp all too well the concept of an earnest failure, that’s where our connection ends. I have no musical talent and I’m from the Bronx, far more Woody Allen than Woody Guthrie. Scroll down and you’ll learn I’m not a chiseled, young Welsh football hero, either.
Yes, I’d kill for those abs and equally impressive career stats, but I like to think I’d give a better interview, as my words fortunately tend to come with more than one syllable. Language is my pitch, so he can keep his. He plays Striker, while I’m better suited to keystrokes. Well, at least, he spells our name right. If you’re unsure of how to spell it, you might be led to believe I’m a redheaded actor recently made famous by the Harry Potter films.
With the blurry lines separating fantasy and reality these days, you’ll perhaps think that I’m the head of the Weasley clan, a full-blooded wizard at the Ministry of Magic. Ruddy-faced and now type-cast, I wonder if the actor ever sits down to Google himself. And then I think, isn’t it marvelous how a website moniker has now become an active verb? So much has changed since the days when Pages, both Yellow and White, were the only way to find someone or something you need.
Information culture is a realm of entirely valid discourse now. We have outsourced knowledge to an external hard drive we carry in the palm of a hand. Why remember anything when you can access it as fast as synapses can themselves fire? There’s seemingly little need to write it down when you can just look it up. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t even think this is a bad thing, at all.
Worry not, as all you kids are still welcome on my lawn! I love my iPhone more than I do most people. I know I’d be lost without my pad/pod/patch of digital grass upon which I love to bask in the shining sum total of human knowledge. I just happen to be the right age to remember the Before picture, when there were no such things. A child of the 80’s, my generation was born on the cusp of the true Digital Age, predating the silicon prevalence my own daughter will never truly fathom. I actually think it makes me appreciate it more.
The things my girl was born into are now a part of everyday human existence. That’s exactly how evolution works, both physical and cultural. A once-rare recessive allele becomes the dominant condition when there is a shift in selective pressures. Heavy books will always have a place. The Great Apes of our analog past will always function, if only as reminder of where we have been and that which we can still become. As zoos have evolved from sad, dingy prisons to barely fenced nature preserves, libraries too must evolve. Compete or go extinct, because we now carry the stacks in our pockets. But, it’s not perfect yet, maybe because information retrieval will always be exactly that, a search.
Searches have bottlenecks and dead ends. It takes skill to navigate the seas of combined human thought. The never-ending push toward cheaper and faster has begun to remove barriers of both cost and distance. These digital ice caps melt more quickly each day and intellectual sea levels rise, bringing rivulets of knowledge to the oceans of common experience. Any lack of guile handling this slippery sloop risks capsizing in a torrent of darkly swirling data. No, this kind of sailing still requires skill and not everyone yet has it. If they did, there wouldn’t have been a rumor flying around the twentieth high school reunion that I missed. “Did you hear about Marc? I heard he’s now a huge gay porn star. No, really, you can look it up!”
