the past comes back to google me

hilary came over to watch queer eye last night, as she always does tuesday evenings at ten o'clock. it was a rerun, but that's fine; queer eye kinda sucks and we know it. it's really just an excuse to sit around for an hour before bed and watch tv, make fun of people, and eat ice cream. i enjoy tuesday nights. hopefully, since hilary and i are moving to new york at the same time (and plan on being roommates), tuesday night ice cream/bitch fest/television night will keep going for the forseeable future.

as we sat there, i told hilary and terry something particularly funny that had happened to me that day:

"so, i was obsessively checking my site meter [the counter at the bottom of this page that tells me how many hits this site has gotten and from which domain the visitors came], and noticed that someone had googled a specific name and gotten to my blog."

"so what?"

"well, someone searched for the name matt s. and came across the entry where i talked about jerking off in 8th grade, thinking about the time in class when he unbuttoned his fly. what's worse is that it was someone in the central time zone, which means they're in oklahoma. so it was possibly him."

-riotous laughter at my expense-

should i be troubled by this? does it matter that someone i went to junior high/high school with knows, eleven years after the fact, that he was fodder for my early-teenage gay fantasies? would he be flattered, or would he send a mail bomb to my parents' house? what happens next time i'm home for christmas and go to the bar in the basement at the veterans of foreign wars lodge--the big hangout for people my age in my home town? the bottom line is i don't really care. it was eleven years ago.

this gives rise to a bigger issue, one that i've been thinking about a lot since i started writing for gay life. just how personal should i get with what i publish? i've been lucky so far that no one has been pissed, because whether it's a column or a 'blog, my writing is pretty confessional--and i usually don't even bother changing names to protect the innocent.

it's just a law suit waiting to happen.