Who is Mike: Part II

The highest flattery of my recent weblog writing career came when I noticed mikey fatboy delgado had linked to realgem - and one of the relatively few blogs he links to... (some people have arm-length blogrolls... How can they possibly read and assimilate all that info?... see infomania health warning...) I don't know who he is, I am thinking a professional writer, but it is fair to say of all the writing I have come across in sleepless nights of trawling through blogs it has impressed me and gripped me most.

I wrote to him after he removed all the words from his blog. I had never wrote him before cause I thought I was completely out of his league. I received messages:

hallo mike h, well the words went only a couple of days ago. i got fed up with looking at them and wanted some colours for a bit.

good luck with it all, you've done some good writing on coming off gear lately.

and

you might be writing from the perspective of a narrator tho. it may not be you. good writing though, carries you down the page

Yes. Who are these narrators? Who is Mikey??

And what is the evolutionary advantage of this blogging behaviour? In a Richard Dawkins sense, how is it biologically justified, the considerable (in the circumstances) time and resources Mike (or someone comparable) puts into maintaining even realgem, this humble... node... or whatever it is... This question has troubled me lately, and mikey's comments gelled with my thinking about this...

I found a validation, or at least an explanation, that satisfied me and dispatched the intellectual problem. It is contained in the book of early Pynchon stories Slow Learner I recently acquired, in the story The Secret Integration (passage reproduced here under fair use - note it was written and is set in the 1950s)

Grover was a radio ham. He put together his own transceiver rigs and test equipment. Not only the sky but these mountains, too, made incoming signals capricious. Grover's room, certain nights when Tim stayed over, filled as the hour grew late with disembodied voices, sometimes even from as far away as the sea. Grover liked to listen but seldom transmitted to anyone... Tim had never seen him sleep. He'd still be up no matter what time Tim turned in, fooling with dials, pressing a huge pair of rubber earphones to his head... Drifting in and out of sleep... mixed with dreams, cops being called to investigate car wrecks or just noises and shadows that moved where everything should have been still... all these coming down, filtering through to populate his dreams, so that in the morning he'd never know which had been real, which he'd hallucinated.

Somehow we're networking our minds, an atavism, reaching through technology back to the deep mind (the collective unconscious) like the Neanderthals and their shared mind in Jean M. Auel's epic Stone Age novels... Like Paulette says, internet in the brain...