Daydreams for Cyberspace

An artist and writer of a certain age, I still daydream about creating that perfect business that will enhance peoples’ lives and, at the same time, bring in some money. The ecommerce rage swept me off my feet like a new lover. How simple it would be to sell a product or service on the Internet! I felt like a child let out of school for the summer.

Why not sell friends’ and relatives’ handcrafted items on eBay? Like our universe, eBay is endless. All the books written about this eBay phenomenon fail to encompass it, because with each passing year its technology advances to include an ever-widening range of products and services. My first product was a sofa pillow crocheted by my sister-in-law, an exquisite piece of art, a rendering of a variety of abstract motifs, all details sewn with great care. Dead sure that the pillow would sell for three or four hundred dollars, I took it to an eBay agent who looked up what crocheted pillows were going for. The answer: the average price, eighteen dollars!

The ecommerce world began to overwhelm me. I hired a tech tutor, the only Macintosh expert I could find in the area that encompassed my county and the one north of it. Everybody around here prefers IBM-compatible. Twenty-three years ago, I chose the more art-oriented Mac. To transfer at this stage in my life to the IBM-compatible would throw me back to the Stone Age.

Every other Friday afternoon, in my home office, before my Macintosh PowerBook G4, the young teaches the old. My tutor is thirty. I’m sixty three. In high school I wrote papers and essays long hand. My hi-tech was a manual typewriter. Eventually, my tutor and I progressed to the idea of a website, an online gallery where people could view my art and buy it. In daydreams, I worried that I’d get so many orders I wouldn’t be able to keep up. The site that he designed and launched, lovely and user-friendly, did not get a single hit in over a year. I killed it.


Would my tutor quit, frustrated because I couldn’t seem to get a grip? He is good, and I’m imagining him seeking other clients whose results would be more satisfying for him. He suggested a blog with ads.


I thought I’d launch a blog with photos and illustrations. What would I write about? What would I draw or paint? What would I photograph? Reading my tutor’s favorite blogs, I’m awed by what goes on there: I’m seeing the flush of life, active careers in exploration using a variety of media, and watchdogs analyzing Internet fraud. Products they advertise on their sites are there to augment their interests and what they stand for.

After reading those excellent blogs, I looked at my daily journals, which depict a loner’s navigation through daily life: “Me, the one and only psychiatric anthropologist: It won’t help me one bit to try to examine others’ paths of self-destruction in order to avoid looking at my own.” Who would care about a blog like that? I wouldn’t.

What do I really do with my time? Winters here in Montana are long and unbearably cold. For exercise, I work out in a gym. I read. I watch television documentaries, pay per view movies, and good scripted programs like the Law and Order shows.

Read? My tutor logged us on to Amazon.com to read book reviews. Here I could practice writing in cyberspace, gauge my skill by comparing it to others’, and see what kind of response I get from voters. I wrote several, which garnered an acceptable level of response, but no rocket to the moon. And, how can you profess to run a book blog without buying, reading, and reviewing every book on your site? The costs of the books I reviewed would exceed whatever I could earn selling them.

A blog that is rocket to the moon? When have I ever been a rocket to the moon? So, cyberspace really is no different from feet-on-the-ground life! Even a blog has to be based on a concept no one else has thought of. I surfed for ideas, using Google to cough up results from every search word or phrase I could think of, which suggested other search words or phrases. I spent entire days, like an addict. After hours straight, my exhausted imagination had me suspended in the air, stuff I couldn’t identify clinging to me as if I were a life raft, while back on the ground I chase unrealized dreams unto death.