NEON GENESIS

Jeff Ihaza My first Internet username was neonwolf2000 because I had an obsession with the anime Neon Genesis: Evangelion. Also, I liked to draw wolves on all of my class work. It was the year 2000.

neonwolf2000 lived in the computer room at our house. His silhouette could be seen through fluorescent-blue rays from the Samsung monitor. In a corner of the relatively roomy den sits a Dell PC nestled in a computer cabinet facing the window. Its keyboard scrapes out of its tray because neonwolf2000 might have ADHD or Acute Anxiety Disorder and nervously disassembles and reassembles the plastic slider while he stares blankly at the computer screen. The rooms IKEA office table has a light brown wood finish that is incrementally chipped from neonwolf2000's late-night battles with dull hums from the PC's 1.2 GHz Pentium III processor: his nails (claws?) scratching through the maddening murmur of lightning fast computing marketed by the Blue Man Group.

Late in the year 2001 he spent close to a month on the auction website EBay trying to buy his own computer. The search was prompted by something he saw while watching 60 Minutes with his parents in the living room that was within earshot of the computer room (for hands-free

parenting purposes). There was a segment on the "dot-com boom, that featured EBay's web-based auctions. The host, which might have been Ed Bradley because his mother was paying especially close attention, said something about it being possible to buy electronics for as cheap as a penny.

neonwolf2000 was himself, a product of the Internet. He mastered sleuthing the web at night, blocking phone calls with the dial up modem's cacophonous screech. While online, he was parentless. Not in the way that getting dropped off at the movies alone or driving a car seemed parentless, not even how he assumed college felt for his older brother. When neonwolf2000 was online, he literally didn't have a family, he existed in an entirely new way that even Ed Bradley couldn't explain.

In late 2001 neonwolf2000 was nine-years-old, a fact he ardently refuted by pointing out that his birthday was less than a full year away and thus he should be treated as a ten-year-old, the double digits of the age being access to a club that included all adults under the age of one hundred. This was the rationale behind neonwolf2000 clicking the box indicating that he was at least 18 years of age as he joined EBay in the fluorescentblue room. His mother groggily walks in while he perpetrates the lie and asks if he is doing anything "inappropriate" on the computer, a question

he had grown increasingly frustrated with because he knew what she was talking about and only stumbled onto a porn site once and was terrified. He returned to the site two more times, both of which left him confused and mostly scared. No I don't do that stuff," he responds.

"Don't glue your eyes to that all night, go to bed soon." she says while trying to get a peek at his screen to confirm the banality of his activities.

On EBay, he searched for Power Macs because according to message boards, Macs were quieter than PCs. He filtered his searches to only include results that accepted money orders, this way he could ride his bike to Kroger and buy a money order with his lunch money surplusnegating the need for parents, and keeping true to the point of this whole thing.

neonwolf2000 was given $20 a week for lunch at school. His parents were aware that food in the cafeteria was $1.75 a day, which meant every week he netted $11.75provided he didn't opt for the brownie at lunch (which he often did). In three weeks he had a total of $20there was an issue of seeing "Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone" for a second time that drained $10 from his portfolio.

After he collected his funds, neonwolf2000 went grocery shopping with his mother and snuck away to buy the money order from the customer service desk. neonwolf2000 liked to pretend he was on secret missions when he went to the store with his mother, so his brief absence went unnoticed.

After getting home from Wal-Mart, neonwolf2000 rushes through dinner while his parents talk about something college-related. He goes to the blue room and nervously clicks through pages of results for Power Mac 6100s. neonwolf2000 liked that particular model for its space-saving design and ability to run Windows. His parents occasionally stroll by the computer room to check on him. In their view, he is sitting motionless in the chair doing absolutely nothing. He scrolls through the search results looking for pictures that seem the most authentic. LOW RESERVE APPLE POWER MAC 6100 catches his eye.

neonwolf2000 didn't know what "low reserve" meant but assumed it had something to do with the computer's speed. He clicks the link and watches the blue loading bar in his Netscape browser crawl to 100%. He scratches at the wood paneling on the table as the partially loaded page reveals a photo of an off-white computer sitting on a kitchen table. Up to that

point he only came across stock photos of the computer, which led him to be suspicious of the sellers authenticity. This auction had character though, a home that he could place the computer in. The brown kitchen table looked like countless kitchen tables he'd seen before and he thought of how easily it could be his own kitchen table. There were zero bids on the computer when neonwolf2000 sends the seller an email about the product. In AOL, neonwolf2000@aol.com sends a polite email asking how much it would cost to ship it to his address in Sugar land, Texas. The seller's email was masked with the item number that neonwolf2000 copied and pasted into the messages To: box. He makes the subject of his email "Power Mac for sale." The seller responds quickly saying something about needing to get rid of it fast and that he'd throw in free shipping if neonwolf2000 met the reserve, there were numbers after that but neonwolf2000 was too enticed by the idea of free shipping. He wondered if he could buy two Power Mac computers with his internetworthy fortune.

neonwolf2000 places a ten-dollar bid on the Power Mac with 8 minutes left in the auction, he saunters between the computer room and the living room where his parents were watching something about the new millennium on TechTV. He goes to the bathroom before crossing through the kitchen to eat the last of the brown sugar Pop-Tarts on his way to

the computer room. The auction ends and neonwolf2000 gets a message from EBay saying he is the highest bidder. neonwolf2000@aol.com sends an email to the EBay seller asking where he should send his money and that he had a $20 dollar money order so he could send all of it and maybe get another Power Mac. The EBay seller was a man who lived in New York City, his dog was sleeping on the floor in the picture of the computer on the kitchen table. He mentioned something about going to work in the previous email. The EBay seller told neonwolf2000 that he should walk his "retarded ass" to his house and get the computer himself so the EBay seller could also "kick neonwolf2000's ass." the EBay seller copy and pasted MapQuest directions from neonwolf2000's address (which he was now worried a stranger had) to his house in New York City. If neonwolf2000 walked to New York it would take 557 hours. He cried in the glowing room because he was scared.