Ouroboros doesn’t really mean what I take it to mean. But I saw the symbol long before I learned what it symbolized; to me, the thing that struck me was the idea of repetition, of cyclic fashion and, ultimately, self-defeat. After all, the snake that devours itself ultimately kills itself, or cannot, as in order to complete its digestion it would turn itself inside out, rendering complete digestion impossible. To me, there’s the connotation of only being able to go so far before being stuck; a paradox of attempting what can never be completed; the ultimate symbol of repetition. To an extent, that is what Ouroboros means. It’s actually the symbol of the cyclic nature of Life, a Western version of the yin-yang. My view’s just a tad more pessimistic. (quelle surprise.)

This Blog is becoming dangerous to my health. My Silent Friend Who Witnesses All is the smart one. She made the conscious decision never to use names. Names have power, and she is more aware of the consequences of that truism than I--or at least more worried about the repercussions. All her subjects are carefully code-named, ensuring that no one who casually comes across her blog can decipher who she’s talking about. I may name-check Setec Astronomy, but she takes its sentiment to heart, and she’s all the safer for it.

I, on the other hand, blithely use full names, or at least first ones, and provide enough context to allow almost anyone to connect the dots. Thus my boss, Matt, was able to learn about my Blog, reading it the day after I made a lengthy post about how I was excited to be moving ahead with plans to leave the company. A year or so ago, a guy named Anthony P. Ciravola wrote me wondering if my friend Tara Ciravolo was related to him because I accidentally misspelled her last name as “Ciravola”. And I got a huge scare a few months back when I wrote a lengthy description about a dream involving my co-worker, Brenda, and (of all things) the movie The Godfather; the next day, during the course of an e-mail conversation with her, she asked me if I “figured out the connection to The Godfather yet”. Fortunately she was referring to something else, but the coincidence was unsettling, to say the least.

Thus, four paragraphs in, I come to the point of this entry: Shara Litowitz, and my accidental haunting of her.

Last Friday I received a very odd e-mail. It was from Troy Lokitz, who I apparently went to High School with. I didn’t remember him. When I looked him up in my yearbook, the face didn’t jog any memories . . . although, really, I don’t even recognize my own High School Senior Picture. (I had a mullet for Chissakes! A mullet! OK, granted, I didn’t even know what a mullet was at the time, but I still had one, and, dammit, that’s fucking embarrassing.) And let's pause to note the irony in my not remembering a person talking to/about me in a familial manner; turnabout isn't just fair play, it's mandatory.

Anyway, Troy wrote to me and he asked me five questions. This was in reference to the ”Personal” section of My Unemployed Life where people could ask me any five questions and I would answer them. How did Troy find my site, how did he know that the man behind that site was a guy he went to high school with?

Well. Troy is friends with Josh Bernstien. Josh told Troy to check out Reunions.com. When Troy did this, he saw that Shara Litowitz was listed, and he decided to google her. (He googled her through Yahoo, though, not Google. Which odd, especially as I am using the word “google” when talking about Yahoo, but I digress again.) If you go to Yahoo and type in the name Shara Litowitz, you will find that the search engine returns six links.

Two of them are mine. One of mine is the number one link.

The first link is not my fault. It’s Ryan Pearlman’s. When he submitted his five questions to me--and please keep in mind we’re talking about something that happened in 2002, and I feel it is important to realize that time, as always, is a factor--he asked me who I preferred; Shara Litowitz or Liz Loennecker. You can read the whole thing here; it’s question #2. If it wasn’t for him, I never would’ve written the thing, which incontrovertibly confirms who I’m talking about, and thus I wouldn’t be in this mess.

Anyway, I knew that, even when I wrote that answer and posted it online, theoretically, the site would be indexed by spiders and that, possibly, if someone did a search on either woman’s name, it would bring up that link. (High note of irony: since the HTML page in question has no META tags, the page is titled under the first words listed on that page, which are “Ryan Pearlman”. Which means, with a little luck, people will think he’s the one to blame for this mess. And, of course, he is.) But what were the odds? I mean, you do a search for “Craig Klein” and Google gives you thirty pages of returned links. Surely there’d be at least a dozen or two for someone named “Shara Litowitz”.

Now, the second link is my own fault. When I wrote a blog entry in September regarding Rosh Hashannah, during my reminiscing of childhood traumas regarding the holiday, I made passing reference to seeing Shara at one of the services looking all dressed up (as Jews are wont to do during the Holiday’s) and looking very good as a result.

(Actually, the memory is a bit more detailed: at the time, the Temple my family belonged to--Temple Beth Shalom--held High Holiday services at Manalapan High School, due to the size of amount of people attending. I was hanging outside the school, bored silly. At one point, this woman came out literally dragging a small child with her. She must have been the child's mother and she was livid that the kid was crying up a storm. She yelled at him to stop crying (always a helpful solution), let him drop to the ground, and she walked back into the school, letting him whimper on his own. Somewhere between me being outside and the kid being left, Shara had come outside as well. Seeing the child crying, she went over to him, sat down next to him, and began doing her best to cheer him up. At that point I left to go back inside; probably feeling too self-conscious of the fact that I was watching this all unfold without saying or doing anything. That’s the whole story. That, in my original blog entry, I focused merely on the fact that I found Shara attractive is simply a matter of expedience. What can I say; I don’t like kids.)

My point is: I was talking about Rosh Hashannah 2004 and whilst talking about the holiday in general, I mentioned a snippet of memory involving Shara, and then moved on to the actual point. She was a footnote, a parenthetical reference, nothing more.

But Yahoo is an Evil Thing. Exhibit B, your Honors: after searching The Entire Fucking Internet for mention of Shara Litowitz, when Yahoo presents it findings to you, you will find our very own Electric Wire, and the phrase “and I still hold the memory of seeing Shara Litowitz dressed up and looking oh-so-fine . . . but that was zen ...” listed as the fourth of six links. (Google, by the by, is worse; with Google, I’m the top two. Why couldn't I be that when you do a search for "web design"?)

Are you beginning to get the damned and incredible picture? (Thank you, Ray Bradbury.)

(Hmm, that link’s probably going to come back and haunt me, isn’t it? I digress, I digress, I digress....)

So. Three Microsoft Word pages later, we come to this point of my entry, where I mention the inescapable irony that by posting this entry I am doomed, doomed, doomed to add a third entry to those despicable search engines. Three entries about a woman I haven’t seen in almost twelve years, who I never knew, who has no bearing whatsoever in my present world, who enters the picture by default, who is probably married and changed her name and therefore negates this whole damn thing.

But time has no meaning for Search Engines. A site indexed ten years ago is as good as a site indexed last night. And to the viewer of those pages, despite the protestations of any date stamp these pages may contain, the viewer is, inevitably, incontrovertibly, reading them now. Their permanence creates the perception of immediacy, however out-of-date the actual content may be. For the words of the prophets are written on the web browsers walls, and they will bite you on the ass.

It doesn’t matter that one entry was done for a lark in 2002, and that the second entry, two months past, was forgotten about as soon as it was written. Sometime in the future, someone will find these pages, and no matter how long its been since they were written, they will read them as Present. The snake devours its own tail; life doubles-back on you when you least expect it; everything ripples.

I spoke to Mike Zavarello and his fiancé, Erin Smith, about this. I told them that this situation was begging to be blogged. They cautioned me against it, or at least making the entry without using Shara’s name. After all, if two entries look bad, surely a third would be grounds for a restraining order. Can you imagine what Shara's reaction would be if/when she finds this out? Reading Troy’s e-mail threw me for a loop--and I’m the guy who wrote this stuff! How would she react, seeing that the only online references to her are made by the same guy, thanks to the last vestiges of a crush he had a decade prior? That alone is reason enough to make with the mea cupla, and solid argument to delete everything completely.

But I hate being beaten at my own game. (Yes, Virginia, there is a game.) This is my Blog, dammit, my website; nobody gets to cast their own perception over what I try to do, least of all some lifeless bit of programming that categories names irregardless of meaning. You’re damned right I want a third entry. My self-referencing, meta-textual, tongue-in-cheek, bravado-filled, fuck-you explanation/rebuttal to theoretical--imagined--perceptions.

And I know full well none of it matters. Once you go public, sole proprietorship vanishes. It doesn't matter what you want to happen. People will make up their own minds; they’ll factor in your intent only if you’re lucky.

So. Shara Litowitz. Typed, in full, eight times. First a memory, now a mantra. I owe her an apology. Names have power. This blog is a false shield. Taking a person's identity and fashioning it to suit my purpose is a variation over exactly what I’m decrying. Is it wrong to use a person in such a way? (Goodbye, Norma Jean. Bernie Taupin and Elton John meant no disrespect, but they still get all the royalties.) This entry is about the struggle between wanting to write what I feel and how others will perceive those feelings; do I need to drag someone else into the mess?

But Setec Astronomy is an anagram that means “too many secrets”. If I used a code-name, called Shara “Suzy” or “Cheryl” or “Jennifer”, it wouldn’t mean the same thing. It’d be a lie, covering up what I’m afraid could happen, hiding behind another false shield.

(Oh who am I kidding? The phrase says too many, not all. By implication, some secrets are necessary. How can you tell the difference between secrets that are necessary and those that are superflouous? Answer in 1,500 words or less, using previous entries from The Electric Wire to support your answer. Counts for 10% of your final grade.)

I'm using her name because I want this indexed, that's the only reason. After all, I've already done it twice; what's eight more? Sometimes I'm Sisyphus, sometimes I'm the rock. (Albert Camus, where are you?) If I’m going to talk about this--and I do want to talk about it; to get it out of my system, to make fun of it while at the same time giving it its due--then let me be completely open about it and accept the consequences as they come. The snake devours its own tail, but it can only devour so far.