A Death in the Family

I guess this day was inevitable, and i knew it would come, eventually. All the warning signs were there, but i kept myself in a state of denial - until last week.

A stroyteller site that breathed new life into my writing six and a half years ago appears to be dead forever. I could be dead wrong, and maybe there’s still something that can be to bring it back to life, but right now, i’m feeling like there’s been a death in the family.

You see, i have 2005 stories on that platform. It’s a tremendous loss, and i’m grieving. Those stories were mostly created between 4 and 6 am, every morning for five years. My average story length was 1,098 words(yes, i kept track of my word counts), so in all, i have 2,201,302 published words therem that can no longer be read, on that platform.

Do i have most of saved somewhere else? Of course i do. But it’s not the same.

The creator of Cowbird, JH, dubbed it “the most beautiful place on earth to tell stories”, and it truly was. Somuch thought and intention went into the creation of the Cowbird platform - J and a team of creators went to a place deep in the middle of Iceland to put it together - and thousands of storytellers were seduced to tell their stories there, as it was to be an archive for stories to live on, forever.

J once shared a story about a time he lost a number of his sketchpads, and was devastated by the loss. He determined to create a place where stories and art could be stored, electronically, and last forever. He nailed the creation part. The forever part lasted just about six years.

Forever ain’t what it used to be. Now when you go to the site, you get this big black screen. I’ve been seeing this screen for weeks now, and eachi time, it feels like another death in the family. It’s not coming back, Pete. It’s dead. They lied.

In March of last year(2017), J closed the site to new content, and turned off the interactive features of it, but promised that the stories that were on the would be sustained forever in a cyber-library, and anyone could continur to access their stories, and to see other stories, there, as well.

Over the years, i had become the guy that other storytellers turned to whenever the site went down, or if they had a proble, then would go to this guy, Dave, who could fix such things, and that was how we kept it going for a long time.

He tried, this time, but reported that he couldn’t figure it out, and would try to contact the host server to see what needed to be done to bring it back. That was nearly three weeks ago, and the screen still comes up black ,saying the Birdcow is out of helium. I haven’t heard back from Dave.

I think Dave has run out of helium to pump life back into the birdcow. I have gone through all the stages of grief, and have reached the final stage,accotance. The bird is dead, and the cow is off roaming new pastures in the forever beyond - i envision it shitting stories as it goes. Once all the stories have been shat, the cow will lay down in a beautiful pasture, and chew his final cud.

Hey, sorry about that, my imagination must be still impacted by the King of Rock and Roll dying on the shitter shitter at age 53, shit happens. Life goes on.

The king is dead. The cow has kicked. Long live medium.

Thank God it’s here.

-Hawkeye Pete Egan B.

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