In the beginning I created my page. Over the first few weeks and months after creating my IAM account I added a few photographs, of very poor quality but they were all I had, and started keeping an online journal of sorts. The more comfortable I grew hanging out on my page the more I would start wandering off and making visits to the pages of other members and very gradually started developing the threads of conversations with people, who by and large seemed quite nice, if almost as neurotic as myself. And all the while I was able to stay in touch with the few friends I knew IRL (in real life) and make contact with a few people I hadn't seen in years but had IAM pages. My little corner was fairly quiet but was always a nice place to chill; to recollect my thoughts about the real world around me. A place I could vent my frustrations.
At A Glance Author oji Contact [email protected] IAM oji When It just happened Location www.bmezine.com I began to grow so comfortable that I even began to submit accounts of my very recent forays into the world of body modification, and the community at large seemed to welcome me even more. I began to receive more IM's and slowly started to receive a small but steady trickle of visits to my little corner of the online universe and everything seemed all very pleasant. Then one evening I went out to do a play piercing performance and some light S/M demonstrations for a fetish show called Absolute Kink, and my sub, Silver, took a photo of me while we were in the back kitchen pulling needles out of ourselves and I didn't think about it again for a few weeks.
A few weeks later, I finally received copies of the pictures that Silver had taken, generously developed at the expense of the owner of Ritualistics, the studio where Tanyaworked at the time and had done all of the recent work on me. I dropped them off with Silver and in short order had a couple of pics waiting for me in one of my email accounts. I was excited; it was the first decent photo that had been taken of me in years. I logged onto IAM, wrote an entry in my diary and attached the pic, deciding to submit it to BME at the same time. I had no idea which category to submit it under but shrugged and submitted it as a scarification photo.
The next day I received a message in my original forum from Don congratulating me on becoming the BME cover boy. I didn't think anything of it, well, not much aside from the fact that it was a HUGE compliment from the owner of the sight. I checked out www.bmezine.com and after refreshing the page a few times to clear my browsers cache, there I was. I felt a flush rising in my cheeks, I was on the cover of BME. I didn't know what this would mean, but over the next few days the counter on my page rose from a few hundred hits to over two thousand. People I had never met or seen on IAM started sending me IM's, and a few people I had tried to talk to previously who had merely shrugged me off without a second thought were, all of a sudden, very interested in getting to know me. Overnight my quiet little corner of the world had exploded and I quickly began to dread logging on. Now there were dozens of pe ople tracking me when I was logged on whom I had never heard of, some leaving IM's most merely adding me to their IAM.alive lists without a word. And the number of IM's I began to receive quickly grew to a flood.
Most of the IM's initially were polite and congratulatory in tone, some were interesting, and others were downright bizarre. Regardless of the quality the difference was there. Overnight I had gone from keeping a track of my little, insignificant (to anyone but me) corner of the universe on my IAM page to not having the time to do anything but answer the volume of IM's I found myself faced with.
Over the last couple of days the volume has let up, slightly. It still takes me hours to respond to IAM's but knowing the online community people will eventually move along, or lose interest, or realize that I'm really not here to get it on with anyone. The people who've contacted me with overt sexual innuendo, I've politely told I'm not interested, and some of them have actually started to become real and interesting people. As the dust settles, I find that I've acquired more online friends than I've had in ages. Some people are still taking up the lion's share of my time, but I don't mind because the interest appears genuine and mutual. Some of my stalwart online companions have uttered the odd complaint or two that I'm not as available as I have been previously and I've assured them that that too will change.
After all, my life before the cover was very quiet, and will probably go back to being very quiet, but for a brief moment in time I was given the opportunity to share in the spotlight which so many have experienced, and the IAM community stood up and, by and large, showed up to welcome me into the fold.
(c)2003 oji