My place in the cloud

Now I am immortal. For the next year or so, anyway. In March of this year I was on my daily walk when I noticed the Google Street View car rolling by right in front of me. A quicker man might have flipped two birds or reversed course and dropped his pants for a moon shot. But I’m more mature these days and anyway my reflexes aren’t what they were.

So if you call up a street view for the corner of 7th and Walnut in the city of Jacksonville, Fla., you’ll see a guy on the sidewalk, hat and sunglasses, who looks like he could have been a second gunman in Dealey Plaza. They didn’t really get my good side. Even if they had, they blur all the faces anyway. But look! There I am!

I take kind of a childish pleasure in it — just as I knew I would on that sunny day in March. Somewhere, I’m sure, there’s a group of dorks who are competing to see how many times they can appear in Street View. If there isn’t, there should be. I totally understand the impulse.