Webmeesteres V., c. 1995–1998
I do not know whether I will always remain alive on the Internet, but that I wish to be buried on it has, for some days now, been certain. A place in eternity is expensive, however, and I will need at least four or five megabytes. My theme song alone already takes up one and a half.
A close friend recently asked what had come over me, that I had begun going on about graves. Whether some new computer virus had been discovered that could jump to humans, along with other, more obvious jokes.
No, it was because of that visit to the grave of Charlie Parker.
I had instructed the search engine Lycos to look for cemeteries. I wanted to go to The Eternal Flame Cemeteries, where I intended to place a short necrology for the much too early deceased junkie poet and essayist Rob van Erkelens, but the server was so busy that all my attempts ended in half-constructed pages. Which, all things considered, would not have suited Rob, who in life was the embodiment of modesty and for whom “exposure” meant five laps on a bicycle with Café De Zwart as the fixed point.
At The World Pet Cemetery it was no less crowded.
A little later I saw, in the index, the grave of Charlie Parker. I decided to pay a visit and immediately understood why one would rather be laid to rest on the Net than in an actual cemetery. What a dreary mess that Memorial Park is, where he lies in reality, judging by the photograph. Although the virtual grave could not exactly be called sparkling either.
Why I felt compelled to steal the entire page from Netscape’s cache directory in order to rebuild it on my own PC, I do not know. Grave robbery, my friend called it.
In doing so, I made a small mistake. I gave one file the wrong name, and as a result the face of Nina Hagen appeared where Parker’s gravestone should have been.
I searched the directory for the correct file and could not find it at first, because I was looking for a square image of a gravestone, while all I could see was a rectangular picture that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be the correct photograph.
One glance at the HTML code of the image, and I had tears in my eyes.
Width = 441, height = 368.
Someone had made that small gravestone appear more imposing by increasing the height of the image relative to its width. Before I knew it, I had two graves of Parker on my hard drive. One with, and one without that correction.
That small difference in a single line of code, that is what you call love, I explained to my friend.
A love as alive as the Internet itself, as became clear when, upon finishing this column, I revisited the grave and saw that the grey background had meanwhile turned orange.
Part of the Webmeesteres V. archive →