well, i told this before, but in case anyone is still interested...
when i was still new to having a double-digit age, my parents sent me to this summer school/camp place. it was a boarding high school during the year, but they opened it up over the summer as a place for younger kids to take random classes that they wouldn't otherwise see while pretending it was more camp-like. so, we got the fun of radioactive green stuffing with nigh-invulnerable crust and other such delicacies, and we also got to take classes over the summer. while i do have a few good memories of the place, they're mostly related to the wild pillow fights we had in the halls at night. the main thing i remember learning there was that if you dial 1-800-****-YOU (obscene word intentionally left out), you get a car dealership in chicago which has been prank called way too many times. this may have changed in the decade or so since i learned about it. i've never tried, myself.
well, one of the things they did to make it more fun and camp-like was to insist that everyone put up a nickname on his door (not sure if they did that to the girls, too).
i'd never had a nickname before (unless you count the fact that my first name is actually paul-gabriel), so i had to think about it for a while. i'd used "magician" as a handle on CB, but i'd already grown out of that by then.
so, i thought about it. at the time, i always wore a hat, since i was very sensitive about the fact that i was going bald so young (i've since gotten over that, thanks to a high school principal who refused to let students wear hats in the building. he said he'd let me, but then i'd just stick out even more. by then, bald was coming into style, so i just let it go. it's not a style i'd choose, but it's the one i have). at the time, i was also just beginning to recognize my cheerful insanity (see avatar
). so, i put them together and came up with MadHatter.
the next year, my uncles chipped in together and bought me a laptop for my birthday. my idol of the time (a guy who was more nerdy, more crazy, and far more knowledgeable than i) helped me set it up and introduced me to a local bbs called "cheers" (the sysop was a huge fan of the show, and went by "malone").
a quick explanation for those of you who missed the bbs stage (this was before the internet, you see...): BBS stood for "bulliten board system." you dialed into a computer using a (hopefully) local access number. many bbses had just one server, but some of the bigger ones had a few spread out. cheers had about 4, i think. that meant that users were streached out over about half of the state of NJ.
cheers, like most BBSes, was centered around a chat room, but it had some other features, too... a graffiti wall, where you could type completely random messages, a few other random features i don't remember offhand, and something strange called "email," where you could leave a message for another registered user, to be picked up the next time that user logged in. that part never made sense to me... if, for some odd, reason, you had a message for a specific user, why not just wait until the next time you ran into each other in the chat room?
well, anyway, i used the nick MadHatter there, too. wasn't long, tho, before i noticed that the chat room suffered from the occasional conversational lull. after a while, i came up with something to entertain people during those lulls. it was the fun and wacky adventures of...
"HatMan: Avenger of Boredum (and bad speller...)"
he'd drive up in a Sombrerromobile, have a silly adventure, and then, when conversation started again, quietly slip out, job well done.
after a while, he got a sidekick, Hairpin (which sounded similar to robin), who drove a CapCar. that's about all i remember about the routine, but it was fun.
later, i moved to compuserve (where i met pam, and was introduced to folcdom and the original ficlist), but soon found that the MadHatter chat room nick was also used by a major jerk, with whom i really did not wish to be confused. so, i went through a few cserve-related nicks, ending up with TSFILOCB, which was a good conversation piece. it stood for "The Search For Intelligent Life On CB" (cserve's chat room was called "CB simulator," as it was designed to resemble citizen's band radio). people would ask me about it privately, and i'd explain, and we'd get to talking, and thus i managed to make friends with the few people curious enough and intelligent enough to ask (if you've ever hung out in a teen chat room, you know what i'm talking about).
well, when i moved on from cserve, i realized that TSFILOCB wouldn't really work too well. it made no sense anywhere else, and the places i was going had far more interesting people, on average, in any case.
i remembered MadHatter, but decided that the HatMan persona had been more fun. so, HatMan it's been, ever since (except when i dress up for the kerths as TopHatMan
).
of ironic note is the fact that we're currently investigating the possibility that my health problems might be related to mercury poisoning from old dental fillings (i've heard about a couple people with similar symptoms who traced it to that, including kurt busiek my favorite comics writer).
so, that's the story.
NEXT!
Paul
