Step with me into a parallel universe. Technology got here a little faster, or art didn't--anyway, it is 1828 and this blog was just posted on the internet. By the way, the incidents mentioned below are based on actual episodes in the life of Beethoven:

It�s been nearly a year since one of music�s most fascinating people passed away, and we are all still really bummed out about it.

I first met Beethoven one night when I was surfing for some cool videos on Youtube. He was on some list of people with crazy hair. They had a clip of him yelling at his landlady. It got a lot of hits. I favorited it. So did all my friends. It was about a year later that I found out he was on Facebook. I had no idea he was into writing music. Apparently it is the kind that nobody listens to because it is really long and you can�t dance to it. Some people started a �fans of Beethoven� page and tried to get him to interact with them, but he was kind of snotty and reclusive. I think this was just after he had uploaded several of his early works and discovered that the one that was getting the most hits was the Choral Fanatasy, and that it was probably because it had the word "Fantasy" in it, and a lot of guys were hoping it was pornography. As a result, they only listened to the first three seconds and quit after they found out it had some not very sexy violins in it. He posted a nasty letter about it one night when he was feeling angrier than usual, but he later confided to me that he had learned something valuable from the whole experience, which was that if you want people�s attention you had better grab it fast. He played for me an arresting little idea of four notes that he was hoping to use at the beginning of a symphony. da-da-da-DAHHH! I wish I could remember it better than that. Unfortunately he never got around to finishing the symphony.

I think he was kind of busy with all the stuff on Facebook. He was a really lonely guy and he kept friending people all over the place, but he lost them faster than anybody. I don�t think it helped much the time he posted the Heilegenstadt Testament online. This was a rambling document about how he was going steadily deaf and how depressed and isolated it made him feel. He was even thinking about committing suicide. Several people wrote what a downer he was being. But, he decided, he needed to keep composing, because he had lots more stuff to write. He put some of it on Sibelius.com, but nobody really liked it much except for this one guy who kept going on about how great it was, I think he was called [email protected], and he struck us all as a little weird. He liked to talk about details in Beethoven�s orchestrations and his use of sudden modulations like he was all that, which I think ticked Beethoven off a little. But then some theory professors started getting into it with him. He must have spent hours posting nasty things on their walls and throwing sheep at them. They were convinced that he was doing horrible things to music and he needed to just kill himself in a particularly grotesque way, because that�s how people talk online, you know? I don�t think they actually meant it. I mean, other than that they hated his music.

After a while Beethoven only posted in all caps. I think he felt like he was shouting at the world to overcome his deafness. But believe me, you didn�t want to get into a discussion with him about art. He seemed so depressed, though, that we tried to take his mind off of it. We kept sending him links to viral videos and dancing hamsters and saxophone playing walruses and guys fighting each other with mattresses and stuff. I suggested he set some of those to music, but he wanted to work on some ballet about Prometheus. Still, it seemed to help. Sometimes he would spend all night with us in chat rooms goofing around. I think after awhile he was writing less music.

This was probably a good thing because I think that was what was making him depressed in the first place.

One time he wanted to rent a theater and have a concert of a bunch of things he had written. I told him that it would be much cheaper to just make MIDI files out of all of it and post it online. That way, nobody gets sore at you for making them sit through a long concert in a cold theater, and you don�t have to pay the musicians. He grumbled about it, but he posted the files. I don�t think they got many hits. For one thing, the titles were not that interesting. Consirto and so-notta were his favorite titles. Somebody wrote in the comments section to his blog "that is so-not-a piece of music!" He really went off on that guy.

That was before he got the webcam. He used to stream his musical improvisations. They were pretty popular for a while, but mostly because people wanted to laugh at his hair. He really could have used a comb once in a while. Then he got a page on Myspace. The thing I remember about that was how loud the music came on when you opened the page. Everybody was just yelling.

One night he wrote on my wall that he was working on a Symphony about Napoleon. I don�t think he got very far with it. He used to start a lot of things and then wind up in chat rooms and answering posts from people. There was this time he was walking with a student of his in a garden and he kept humming this wild series of notes that he had come up with, but when he went to write them down he noticed his laptop was open and some guy wanted to chat with him about how his music really sucked or some other sophisticated observation like that and he forgot what he was doing for eight hours. When he got to the piano the idea was gone. I guess that must be why he only wrote eight piano sonatas, which is a lot less than Mozart.

Besides the two symphonies he wrote, the eight so-nat-as and about half a piano concerto, he left behind a lot of pieces he complained weren�t finished yet, although they have enough music in them for several television commercials, which is what we think he really should have been doing. We are going to try to upload as much of his music to Youtube as we can if his estate doesn�t stop us.

Then there is this guy Schindler, who is a real pain in the ass. He calls himself a friend of Beethoven and he is a real control freak. He is not very kind to the online community as a whole and he doesn�t care who knows it. I�m afraid he�s going to find a way to shut down Beethoven�s Facebook page. That would be too bad. A lot of people are leaving notes about how much they miss him, hair and all, and I think it�s safe to say the internet won�t see anybody like him in a long time.