Where have all the Cowboys gone?

"They" say time on the Internet moves much quicker than time in reality. I've lived on the Internet a long time and after taking almost a year away to live amongst non-Internet folk, I come back to find myself in The Twilight Zone. It's your usual story about the man who goes into the bomb shelter and comes out to find ...

What does he find? It could be exactly what he saw before he went underground. He may find that a new city of the future has sprung up. He could peek his head out to discover alien spaceships whirling around firing at Terminator robots 100-stories tall! He may find a planet completely run by meerkats (pictured right).

I've poked my head above ground back into the Internet planet to find that people have done what people do best: Fuck it up further. Where in the hell is everyone? I swear, I leave you alone with your tinker toys and Playboy Magazine for one second and you ruined it. Didn't you? It looks like a lot of folks have become bored with the Internet. I sauntered around and it looks like most people spend times reading Huffington Post and spending hours refreshing their Facebook page. Oops! There I go showing my age. Pages refresh themselves in the 21st Century.

People aren't networking like they used to and that makes me smile. It's Facebook or bust. The good thing about Facebook though is it appears to have obliterated what us Oldsters call "The Blog." They have this thing over on Facebook called "Notes." You write notes and your friends read the notes, but they aren't really blogs and it's given people permission to no longer say anything of comment. Just notes. Just Post-it's on the refrigerator door. It's what the sheeple always wanted. A boring dream come true. A snapshot of the nation.

There are plenty of blogging platforms left, but people are terrified to share their opinion on the Internet anymore. That's Facebook's fault too. They are the ones who gave a crushing blow to the grass roots of Internet anonymity. Anonymity was the way we Internet Super Stars meant it to be, my dear Internet babies.

I've come to find that there are very few "good" blog network communities. This makes me smile too because if it's harder to find bloggers then there appears to be less of them. While I'm certain there are not less of them, they do appear to be a background whisper to what people now use the Internet for. Opinions and commentary are still everywhere, but it was always the infringement upon the personal blogger / webmistress domains that got me riled. Leave us alone. Leave Britney alone!

I sat and pondered on an Internet tree next to a beautiful Internet lake as to what my Internet has become. Remember the days when everything was personal site driven? I would never have signed up for any service to help me do anything (post picture, movies, blogs, etc.). It was all setup on my own domain and nobody got a piece of my pie. That was the point of growing up to be The Internet's First Super Star. Learn to do it yourself and screw everybody else. But now it's been flipped and reversed. All celebrities, personalities, friends and your neighbor's cat prefer to just have a domain with links to other places. An interesting change. Change I can not believe in, but change I can deal with. Thanks for the simplification, guys.

So I return with a site and links, because I have better things to do than design fully structured sites. I have things to say, just like everyone else, and instead of working on the layout I'd much rather say it, type it, speak it, record it. If "they" want their Internet to be streamlined with neutral walls and art from Posters.com on the wall, that's just dandy because the Internet goes psychedelic with me in it even if it is a streamlined P.O.S.

As my first act of returning to the throne I will be appearing LIVE on Cotolo Chronicles this Thursday at 6PM PST / 9PM EST to do our annual Roll Call From the Bone Garden! We will be reviewing this year's dead in the most refreshing of ways. You must tune in! (http://cotolochronicles.blogspot.com/)

I have poked my head out of the Internet top soil. Now where the hell has everyone gone!? Welcome to the Internet of the future. Fucking meerkats everywhere ...