Every so often, I Google myself. Now, now, get your mind out of the gutter – it’s nothing that I’d be ashamed to do in public. I’m incredibly vain, and nosy. And I always like to know what the world is saying about me (not that it cares very much, but a man can dream).
Sometimes, this vile habit can actually be useful. For example, way back in 2009, I discovered that I had a gig at the Nameless Coffeehouse that no one had bothered to tell me about. It took a while to get to the bottom of that one – you can find the whole sad story in the Low Notes archives – but it was certainly good to find out about it.
But most of the time, it’s just sheer bloody curiosity.
It turns out that there are only a few Sam Bayers out there on the Intertubes who have any real Web footprint at all. There’s Sam Bayer, photographer, videographer for Nirvana, and director of the remake of “Nighmare on Elm Street”, who lacked a Web presence for many years, which led various fifteen-year-old girls to send me email begging me to get them into the movie business. There’s Sam Bayer, IBM materials scientist, founder (and abandoner) of half a dozen computer consulting startups, North Carolina resident, book club member, and world traveler; it took me several years to figure out that those were all the same person (I assume the fifteen-year-old girls dying to get into materials science must have caught on). And most of the rest of them, pretty much, are me.
Not that this makes me easy to find, apparently. A good friend of mine, who I hadn’t seen in more than 20 years because he was living in Singapore on the State Department’s dime, recently got back in touch with me, motivated by a muddled conversation he had with someone who suggested to him that I was dead (false, to the best of my knowledge, in case you’re worried). He went searching for me on the Web, and found me, and told me that he hadn’t been able to find me previously. My Web site has been no lower than hit #10 on Google for more than a decade, and my picture pretty much floods the screen when you visit; on the other hand, my doppelganger the videographer has pretty much crowded out my formerly enormous footprint, banishing most of the other references to yours truly to the nether regions of the Googleplex. So I might have gotten lost in the shuffle.
Actually, the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me, Google-wise, happened when I was idly Googling my brother Josh. As some of you may know, my brother is a bass and guitar player extraordinaire down in our nation’s capital, and I like to find out what the world is saying about him, too. And I happened upon another Josh Bayer. This one is a cartoonist. He lives in New York City. And his brother – no kidding – is Sam Bayer, the videographer.
You can’t make this stuff up.
The dream, of course, is that someday I’ll discover a heretofore unknown admirer raving about how I’m some sort of undiscovered Boston gem. But instead, I’ve discovered newspaper columns from high school, press releases I wrote myself, academic papers I’d rather forget, and, well, a yawning black hole where my ego used to be. In the end, for most of us, a trip down Google Lane is mostly a reflection in a very cluttered mirror, with people who share your name filling up most of the frame. It’s a really clumsy way to look at yourself; but, after all, vanity is an ugly mistress.