Recently, I had a bit of a breakdown regarding the internet. Trends move and change from week to week, people talk almost exclusively in references and shorthand, and the outside world, ads and all, have become an inescapable foe.
I'd been strapped to the front of monitor since '94, back in the days when the word "Compuserve" meant something and the All-Seeing Eye of AOL stared from the top of its Gnostic Eye-of-God pyramid, bestowing the most meager of us with 14.4kbps of information trade. I remember waiting over a minute to get connected, listening for the slight variations in modem noise to see if the phone wires were loose or if, get this, too many people were on the internet at the same time. Dial-up had a magic to it, a spellbook of timing to dodge through porn sites and see maybe one boob in a half hour, sneak into the grown-up chatrooms (hell, cybering taught me typing much better than either Mario or Mavis Beacon. However, this now brings up a disturbing mental image), and find all the mods and cheats for Doom II and Heretic. While certainly not king of my domain, I made a decent run of it, and found a certain level of contentment with the spinning dishes of Early Internet Adolescent.
Jump forward eleven years. I was three years out of the depressive episode that consumed my collegiate aspirations and nearly took my life along with it. I had tucked myself into a closet near the Art Museum with enough space for a loft bed and a Playstation on top of my fridge. This was the year that I would cut my umbilical cord to the wall socket. My college friends had moved to NYC and the land-line had become obsolete as a result. On top of this, the Free Wi-Fi movement had finally pulled off its birthing caul and shrieked in triumph throughout the city. It became time to cultivate a taste in black coffee and dive into that secret world once again. At this point, the world was... well, less secret. The anticipation had gone. The Secret Porn Missions were obsolete when over half of Google images were filled with The Most Degrading Things Ever. Plumbing the depths for secrets gave way to gamefaqs.com.
At this point, I feel self-conscious for having left links out, for having one of the default backgrounds on this blog. I don't know how to embed pictures. I don't have the attention span to Photoshop an image, let alone find one appropriate. I still don't know or care about 4chan, and I can only stand to read maybe five webcomics, three of which my friends make. My phone is not smart. In fact, my phone is pretty dumb, old and tired. Does this really make me less of a man?
Fuck no.
Perhaps what's happened is that I'm applying my "Information Superhighway" skills to everyday life. I use my timing to figure out the right time to get all of my chores done and chase the momentum like a rabid dog. My Dirty Pics Search has finally grown up into a search to find strange and interesting ways to bring together the various circles of my life, between cocktail bars, connoisseur cafes, comic book stores, kung fu schools and student dentists, to name a few. The many, strange online personae that I've cultivated have developed into a still-evolving, well-meaning mask to navigate this scary Real World ("What do you mean there're no dragons here!? Who's going to keep the elf population in check?") and find the best way to pretend to be myself in a way that doesn't disturb the people sitting next to me or leave me as fodder for the Twitter Riots that I'm sure are going to happen again. The internet has no anonymity, but in the real world we can twist up that spit-curl and face what we can actually defeat.
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