I want to write in this blog, but more than that I’d like it to be old and huge and forsaken. Imagine it: Quotendquote, a tome of ancient net lore, shut forever in 1998 like the best of the internet. Or like the Mundaneum, a proto-internet one hundred years old , slowly rotting in a freezing Brussels building and covered in geological eons of bird droppings. You’d have to climb in through the eighth floor windows to get in. You’d have to use a candle to light the long, dark corridors. The root directory will be shut, the navigation too old to work. You’d inch yourself though the posts by hacking the URLs, by guessing page names, by hunting obscure hyperlinks. There’ll be hundreds to read if you wanted them bad enough, but you’ll never get the full picture, never find who I was, or why I wrote Quotendquote, or why, suddenly, one day in April 1998, I stopped writing.