We talked yesterday about ridiculous overdiversification of Amazon.com and the dilution of their core product and identity? Well, they have added... I swear I'm not making this up... Women's Apparel to their web site.

Women's. Apparel.

I can accept the concept of purchasing Women's Apparel over the internet. But from a bookstore?

A few years back I interviewed at Amazon.com. It was a good interview, and a lot of fun. I was living in Seattle at the time and this was the most exciting prospect I'd had in a while.

Their offices were the utter opposite of "Corporate." Lots of wide open areas and the furniture was any scrap wood they came across. A good number of offices had doors with legs nailed on them for desks. People in the systems administration area were permitted to have nerf guns. It was a very good time.

I made it to the final round of that hiring sequence, but lost out -- and rightfully so. They had to have better qualified people than I interviewing there. But I've felt very sympathetic to Amazon.com since then. Very sympathetic.

It bugs me to see them dilute themselves like this, because it's putting themselves further and further out on a tree limb, when they're trying to build way too big a treehouse. Sooner or later, the branch will either bend to the point that you can't stand up in the house, or it'll break and that'll be that.

Or, of course, I could be wrong.

So this brings us to today's piece, which I'm going to call "caring too much about things that don't matter." Amazon.com is one of those for me. I do care if it lives or dies, because it was the first, and it changed the world, and because I've seen some of the faces behind the ever-expanding web site.

I used to do this a lot. I would spend a lot of time investing a lot of emotion into irrelevant things. Either because it was a hobby, or because I felt very close to it, or I felt responsible for it, or because I was a bonehead (which perhaps shouldn't be in the past tense).

I bring this up because a friend of mine is digging up some of that past, and it seems sillier in the remembering than it did in the living, and it seems sad that... well, he still seems to care a great deal. And so I'm watching him very slowly drive his car into a wall, and I'm finding myself fascinated, like watching a bus that's up on two wheels sloooooowly finish falling over.

Said friend is writing about his own life as a writer, which is a lot of what I do here. And he's writing about the situations that led to his leaving Superguy, which as you'll remember I wrote for as well. And there's a lot of emotion there. He's setting a lot of fires (or rather, he's lifting several years worth of compost off of things, so that oxygen can get to the simmering materials and combust again) in the process.

I'm not going to speak to his essays. The friend's journal is on my recommended page (no, I won't tell you which one -- you can read them all and find it! A-hahahaha!) if you're curious what he says. It's certainly accurate so far -- but then it would be. It's about his life and course. Even if someone disagreed with everything he said, it's clearly accurate in his experience.

And it's an online journal, which makes a difference there as well.

What comes to mind is how much I cared about this once upon a time. How important it seemed to me. And how unimportant it seems to me now.

I liked writing for Superguy. It was a lot of fun. And then different factors cropped up which made it very not fun, and I stopped. For me, the breaking point was someone dictating what I had to write to participate in a project, more or less by fiat. So I closed out my commitments, packed up my tent and moved on. These days, I plug away at the World's Largest Round Robin post sometimes, but that's about it. My connection to the source was broken, and there were more fun things to write.

This was incredibly painful at the time. Now, it seems pretty remote. Like me discussing the way a role playing campaign from high school closed out in the end. (Note -- all role playing games end unsatisfactorily. The group always falls apart in the end, and you get a bad taste in your mouth which takes a while to clean out.) In any case, I can sit back and think "wow -- we did some great/wild/weird/seriously sick stuff in that game" today and not worry about how it ended or wish I were still playing.

Superguy's the same for me. I grew up, it seems, and that was a part of my past that I remember fondly, but f'r God's sake, it's just Superguy.

Oh, but we cared once. One writer I know sold an Internet book and filled it with references to Superguy and how great it was. Another turned his experience into a real live magazine he edited and managed to keep going for a while. A third managed to complete a story that had future presaging going back three years, up to and including scenes.

Stunning, really. In the essay referenced to the right, I talk about the volumes I wrote for this thing, and there were a lot for them. At the time of the essay, I'd written the second-most of anyone. One of the few remaining Superguy writers has since passed me, and power to him.

So it's kind of strange reading this guy's viewpoint of what was a painful time, because it reminds me of that pain, and because it seems strange that anyone would care enough to write it this long afterward. Then again, it probably should be written. There's stuff in my own journal that's years beyond caring about, but you cling to bits of your past. They're precious to you.

I ran into one of those not long ago. Some people keep the old EARN/BITnet/Relay docs on websites "as historical artifacts." I remember BITnet very very fondly, and Relay was the point of it. I made a lot of good friends, including some of my best who are still my best friends, on Relay. Frank was a Relay Friend first. So was John. Bill Dickson. Others I've mentioned in here in the past. Andrea, who I mentioned a couple of days ago, was on Relay at least once as a part of our Synchronicity Express.

Finding those docs online was like running into an old friend's gravestone. A pang, followed by a lot of rememebrences. I found I still cared a lot for an outdated protocol that had a lot of problems running over a network that didn't do anywhere near as good a job as modern networks, but which just seemed so cool....

Anyway, this is his journey that he's describing, and what's a journal for if not to describe one's journey? And if he ticks people off or sets fires or names names of people who would rather not be named (and I figure there's even odds I'll be one of them -- I don't know why but it seems safest to assume), well, they shouldn't care that much either. Or so it seems to me.

Off to Maine on Sunday, to drive Mom and Dad to the boat so they can sail it to its early/late mooring in Falmouth. I'm dragging Mason along, so he gets to see the boat and sail for a bit, perhaps. It should be fun.

In the meantime... eBay is eeeeeeevil.... (First edition hardcovers of Heinlein juveniles. Mmmmmm....)