The expansiveness of the internet never fails to baffle me. It competes only with the vastness of the universe, for sheer incomprehensible volume. My brain hurts trying to consider it all. I first remember hearing about “the information super highway” on a news program in the early 90’s, perhaps I was just slow on the uptake, or too busy begin a kid. But they made this new ‘interweb of information’ sound almost sinister, and I pictured miles upon miles of ‘fibre optic cables’ entwining their way over, under and through absolutely everything like high-tension power lines gone awry. I thought “wow that internet thing is gonna be messy, awesome, but messy” I guess in some ways I was kind of right (minus the literal fibre optic cable tentacles strangling everything like a manic octopus trying to feed you information. “you must eat this cute video of a kitten!”)

It was also around this time that Mum and Dad came home from a friend’s house, and relayed to Trudy and I the wonders of this new ‘music device’ they had just seen, a disk the size of your outstretched hand, as thick as a couple of credit cards, that played music at the touch of a single button and could hold every colour of the rainbow on its shiny ‘music side’ surface, an area that should never be touched. (The first thing I did when I got my hands on a CD was to touch the shiny underside, what a massive let down.)

Fast-forward to what feels like many lifetimes, experiences and an ever-increasing wrinkle collection later, and the internet is an integral part of (almost) our everyday life, we hold it in our hands and rely on it with some shame inducing frequency. And those magical CD’s – that I quickly grew bored of touching – have practically gone the way of the dodo, and are replaced by ‘clouds’ and intangible digital data.

Prior to my dads accident I had never kept an active blog. I had a private, unpublished site of silly missives and musings – pictures of my dog, photo-shopped randomly into objects – quality items like that, hiding silently now somewhere in the dark fringes of the internet. I should probably publish delete those. I never did any ‘blogging’ publicly, yet the spiralling desperation to keep everyone who loved him updated made the, then daily task, seem so important, or perhaps I thought that if I somehow kept writing words, surely then he would always be there to write about. Perhaps that is why I still write about now. Updates were a functional necessity and I loved being able to do something in a situation that was slipping from our control. Some action in inaction. What do we ever really control anyway? In publicly sharing this journey with our distant and close, with our family and friends, with our friend-amily, I have learned so much. It occurred it to me, perhaps one fifteen too many ‘Trudy jokes and bad photos’ into this that, the internet is really the world.

Prior to the infinite sadness – that spurred on this exorcism of words and content – my internet use ignored words like “Blog Spam filters” and “Spam Comments” and they hovered in the periphery, where they belonged. I am pretty comfortable with computers – especially ones with fruit shaped logos – and I got some fast track lessons and how to’s  from my blog savvy cousins Lizzie and Alex, so thankfully I quickly learned how to block spam comments, because the internet is messy and spam is its favourite meal, happily regurgitating an endless stream of update notification emails.

Some of them are so amusingly ridiculous that I wanted to share them here. (Which by some evil algorithm of fate will likely send even more spam my way, but these are classic and totally worth it.)