An Aside to the Guide

I was amazed that the guide of the art forum was a southerner, one who had lived in the North Georgia mountains at one time, and had Alabama ties, as well. It isn't important to know a guide's biography, but meeting a friendly face with a familiar story in a sea of tech-talk added a whole new dimension to Internet technology for me. It made the world smaller. So occasionally I e-mailed Philip or sent him an update, and he would do the same. He was perhaps my first on-line human/cyber contact, outside of friends and family. At one time or another, over a several-year period, I corresponded with him and others did too. This was not a case of our taking his forum 'guidance' so personally that we thought we should direct correspondence to him instead of posting on the Forum. It was more in the nature of an 'aside' to the guide. Sometimes a subject might go off topic, so we went outside forum to keep from boring the rest of the crowd. Southern stories, for instance, didn't really belong on Art Forum, but it would be silly to go search out a new forum just to elaborate on a thread or reminisce over old times.

But what started this friendly chit-chatty kind of off-topic conversation was when, early on, I'd made the off-hand remark to Philip, 'Hey, weren't you the same guide who ran an old art forum on MiningCo? I was that person PauperWitch who used to post. We e-mailed once.'

And Philip said (my paraphrase), 'Oh, yeah. I remember. I like your new nickname better.' Because by then I had settled on what would become my true web presence, humble and obscure though that presence may be. I was, by then, Southern Muse.


Topics: Philip the Guide, southern, MiningCo, North Georgia mountains, Annals of Southern Muse.