Most of my Wikipedia life is offline.  It’s in the people I meet, the places I go and the experiences I have.  One person I met this year is a Wikipedia editor I will call “Rob.”

Rob’s a Wikignome, which in the parlance of the website means he does not particularly add content.  Instead, Rob spends hours correcting the site’s punctuation, spelling, grammar and sentence structure problems.  He is proud of this work, although he would never identify himself behind the myriad amount of sockpuppets he creates using names he finds amusing.  He has never been to a Wiki event, and he has no desire to ever go to one. In order to write this story, Rob insisted I change many factual details about him to protect his anonymity.  Thus, his name is not Rob.

He wrote me back in June of this year to ask about what had happened to me after I left the site.  He followed my photography and interviews, although keeping with his Wikipedia ethos, he never engaged me on the site and never commented on anything I ever did or wrote.  When I left Wikipedia it was cause for him to e-mail me.  We started a correspondence.  About a month later we spoke on the phone and then we met for a couple of lunches.  I consider him a friend.

Rob was briefly notorious back in the early 1990’s for a news event that came and went, but at the time received a good deal of attention.  It did not paint him in a good light.  “My son won’t talk to me, and my daughter just calls me on Father’s Day.  Not on my birthday.  I call her for holidays.  I still send my son cards, but I don’t know if he opens them.  He wants no calls.”  They don’t talk to him because of his notoriety from the early 1990’s, which exposed his family to the fact that he had been living a second life as a gay man.

He doesn’t look like your typical gay.  “No, I’m not a bear, but I guess people call me one just because I’m fat,” says Rob, clutching and jiggling a bulbous belly.  He loves photography.  He has thousands of photographs sitting on his hard drive.  I started a game with him.  I would e-mail a photograph that I had taken with words underneath it that I thought perfectly illustrated it.  “Excess of wealth”; “Maternity”; and “Debasement” were a few.  Rob would respond in kind with his own photograph that he thought illustrated the theme.  We would not write the stories behind the photographs, but tell them to each other in person.

Last week I sat in Rob’s Roosevelt Island apartment as he leaned back in an Aeron chair to take a drag from a brown cigarette.  He was wearing a fishing vest festooned with hundreds of buttons that bear the names of Internet companies he admires: Apple, Mozilla, Cisco, Adobe, amongst others.  There are also some political buttons, including an old Kerry/Edwards ’04 pin, and clichés such as “Why be normal?” (“normal” is spelled backwards”) and “What, me worry?” with Alfred E. Neumann’s face morphed into George W. Bush’s behind a mushroom cloud.

I sent Rob a photograph with the theme “Rebirth”, and his response was the reason I write this.  Some of Rob’s photographic retorts would leave me laughing so hard my sides hurt; others would deeply trouble me.  I am not someone who is bothered to be troubled by people and their lives.  I’m not judgmental.  I’ve seen and done a lot, and the people I have the highest regard for tend to be those with the maturity to understand that life is both sublime and heart-breaking.  Rob is one of those.  This is his photograph for the theme “Rebirth” and the story that went with it.  I typed it as best as I could in Rob’s own words:

“Rebirth”
How one guy started to edit Wikipedia

“I was a drug addict at the time.  I would go out, do a bag of coke, and then drink off the come-down until I could barely walk.  Those were freaky nights, the kind most people don’t want to know ever exist for another human outside of television dramas.  Some afternoons I would wake up with someone sleeping next to me in my bed.  I wouldn’t know who they were, where we met or what we had done.  If I was clothed I knew we didn’t have sex.  I was usually naked and dirty.

“One night I had been doing drugs and drinking at a bar called The Monster in the West Village, until I was thrown out.  Walking home I found this guy passed out on the street and I stood there staring at him, trying to make out what his deal was.  He was very attractive, I thought, so I decided he wasn’t homeless.  He had no shirt on, his cheek pressed into the cement, completely unconscious.  He could have been me.

“I bent down and shook him.  ‘Hey guy, you okay?’  He sat up, completely dazed.  He had no idea what the hell had happened to him.  Then he started mumbling about his friends had ditched him.  No wonder!  He was clearly out of his head.  I asked him if he needed a place to sleep.  I told him I had some coke on me, and that excited him.  We walked back to my apartment.

“We sat there doing blow and drinking on my bed.  He’s still fucked up, and so am I.  He takes out my old acoustic guitar and starts playing really badly.  I feed him coke.  He gets more messed up.  Then I make a proposition:  Hey man, let me suck your dick.

“Let me suck your dick.  He looks confused.  All night I had been waiting to make this proposition, sitting through his shit guitar playing and him rambling about some girl he wrote a song that he barely had the cognizance to play three chords.  He asked me what I asked, and I said again.  “Come on, man, let me suck your dick.”  The guy was straight, and it was the first time I felt like a big fat predator faggot.  I was out of my head, like a hungry wolf.  It was horrible.  He suddenly sobered up real quick.  Really, really quick.  He said no.  I tried to persuade him in this pleading, “Not such a big deal” kind of voice.  “Come on, let me suck your dick…come on…just…let me suck it.”  He was still fucked up, but had the wits to try to figure out he needed to get out of my apartment.  “I…I…I need to get going.  No.  This is no good.”  He had been sitting on my bed, where you see him playing, and I noticed fear wash over his face.  He took that crappy Yamaha and hit me in the head with it.  He was too messed up to do me any real damage, although he tried to sprint out of the room and tripped over his own two feet.  He cracked his head into the door jamb.  Then he dashed out.

“The next day I got sober.  I went around to Alcoholics Anonymous rooms all over the city.  It was that experience with that guy that really made me want to stop the drugs and the booze.  I didn’t like who I was becoming.  A whore, preying on the people passed out on the streets of the Village, waking up with people I didn’t even know where I found them.  Disgusting people.  They all had drug and alcohol problems like me.  I don’t know who troubled me more: the ones who woke up mortified like I did, or the ones who tossed off the experience as old hat.

“I don’t remember taking the photograph that night.  I woke up and saw it on my camera, not remembering anything.  Then the night flooded back into my head.  I printed out that photo and kept it in my back pocket for about the first six months of my sobriety.  The thing I wondered every time I stepped into one of those AA meetings was whether I would come across this guy.  I wondered if the experience he had with me was the catalyst for him to clean himself up, also.  Did the circumstances around this photograph make him want to change how he was living?  Would I run into him?  Was he reborn that night like I was?

“You’ll see the date on that photograph is May 16, 2005.  May 17, 2005 I went to my first meeting and I have been sober ever since.  I started to edit Wikipedia because I had a lot of nervous energy I didn’t know what to do with in those early days off the drugs.  I couldn’t sleep at night.  I used to go on Wikipedia and get lost in page after page.  Wherever the links took me.  I would spend hours correcting everyone’s mistakes as I tried my damned hardest not to call my drug dealer or buy beer at the bodega.  It worked.

“This photo, more than anything else I have shot, says to me “Rebirth”. I’ve never found out if I was the only one in that room that night who was born again from such a disgusting moment.

Rob’s story moved me.  These are the kinds of stories a lot of people don’t like to read or know exist, but things like this happen every night, most likely in every major city.  It also shows that there are many different paths that bring people to Wikipedia, and there are a million different stories.  Now you know one.

Thanks for letting me share this, “Rob.”

Kudos to Brett Beanan for this shot of Sarah Palin taken in Carson City, Nevada, for her Wikipedia article.  Excellent.

Robert Thurman recently wrote at Newsweek‘s “On Faith” column about how the media has ignored Palin’s belief in End of Days scenarios, and that American wars are God-ordained.  He’s right:  if you read her Wikipedia article, you can’t find any mention of Bishop Muthee, or what Palin has said about her religious view of politics.

Palin talkin’ about them doggone End times

Thurman is one of those egghead “elitists” we are supposed to deride in America, and anyone else who questions the wisdom of Joe Six Pack running the Free World.  Mr. Fancy is is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University.  Writing for the magazine’s “On Faith” column, he openly chastised the media for not examining this as a fundamental point:

She is on record as herself openly espousing “end times” theories and considering that our national wars, actually occurring and actively anticipated, are part of “God’s plan” for the world. So in her case it is abundantly clear that her decisions in a possible position of national governmental authority would be very directly influenced, even motivated, by specific, extreme, religious prophetic beliefs. This means that a person within close reach of nuclear codes and so forth could make decisions to use them based not on rational calculations of the dangers and necessities involved, but on avowedly non-rational religious beliefs. This is simply unacceptable for anyone who does not share her particular beliefs, and should be brought out in the press much more forcefully for people to consider. No one so far has asked directly on the record if she would make decisions based on her belief in the “end times” scenario that involves Muslims, Russia, Israel, and America.

Currently there is no mention of God on her article, beside the statement that she belongs to the Wasilla Assembly of God.

Palin said it is un-American to pay taxes.  Thomas Friedman responds

Thomas Friedman in the International Herald Tribune finally writes what we have all wanted to say to Sara Palin’s when she turned to Joe Biden in the debate and bizarrely declared, “You recently said paying taxes is patriotic. In middle-class America, where I have been all my life, that is not considered patriotic.”  Responds Friedman on behalf of America:

Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects – printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.

To read about different theories of the End times, begin here.