2004-04-02 - 10:40 a.m.

Huzzah

There was a guy once -- though I've forgotten his name or the URL of his mailing list or even how I came across it to begin with -- that I felt some cautious kinship with based on the way he lived his online life. His mailing list was a one-way distribution of remembrances of intense times shared with interesting people. Some sex, some love, some loss. All in all, a familiar blend for someone reading back through the archive of this site or many others scattered around the Internet; it's not like those experiences or emotions are unique to a few people.

Some of his moments were poignant enough to communicate themselves independant of the prose he used, which was entirely adequate for the task anyway. I remember one of his stories was of someone who was leaving for another city, breaking up to follow some other future, who spent one last night at his house, showered in the morning, then left. She left some of her hair on the shower wall shaped into a heart and "XOXO". And years later, he's writing about it still.

I can easily identify with his reaction to pure moments like that -- it's rare to have them while alone, with nothing to mitigate the impact or distract you from the internal realm opened up by unexpected moments. When you're physically alone for those expanding moments where you feel how small the world has become, they can just go on and on, and the best thing to do is to go outside. I find that walking until you forget why you were outside in the first place works pretty well.

An immense moment for him, and yet I have to wonder. A lot of the things I've written about, particularly the ones involving important women in my life, didn't seem hugely important at the time and only became charged with significance in the moments of microscopic retrospection in the years to come. I wonder how important they were to him at the time, and how many of them he remembered simply because he didn't understand what was going on.

The fact is, I remember nearly everything that I don't understand and in idle moments go back over it and worry it and try to pick it apart. Some of the things I don't understand are specific people's actions, some are offhand remarks made years ago by strangers, some are jokes I didn't get and still don't, and still others are pieces of myself that don't seem to fit. I've the conviction that all the pieces of myself *have* to fit -- otherwise, how could they be there, eh? So there's a reason and a connection that just has to be found.

Shaky reasoning, I know, but it serves.

I wonder so much about this guy whose name I've forgotten because he had similar online experiences to my own -- he met, talked to, and quite routinely brought online people into his real life and had sex with them and lived with them and loved them and ultimately left or was left by them. Like this site, there's little pretense in his letters to no one in particular, and it's not as if any of the women could be said to have a rational reason for believing that they were the first to [i]really[/i] fall for him. And yet.

The series was always vastly interesting and made my heart hurt off and on with things I understood very well. Toward the end of my participation in reading his mailing list, he was writing about three women, all friends of each other, who'd approached him online and asked him out on a date -- the three of them and him. I don't remember exactly what the details of the situation were, but he ended up going to meet them and it was quite clear that they all wanted to have sex with him.

Subsequent issues made it clear that they were quite successful. I remember one girl in particular was written about as having said, "Make me beautiful," immediately before they had sex. In a way, that's what he was doing I think -- inflating his memories and experiences and making them beautiful.

I don't know if that's what I'm doing, but that's when I unsubscribed from his list. I could easily see myself having the same conversations ten years down the road -- hell, I'll be a better writer by then, my experiences might even seem larger than his. The question I kept coming to when I read his loopback thoughts that always came back to how no one seemed to live up to his

dewy, obscured, indistinctly glorious
indefinite, gossamer, shining

image of them was this:

Did I really want to still be in this same mental place ten years from now?

I'm not going to claim that I can win the heart of any lady, or that I've powers of magick that make what I wish for mine. The fact is, though, that my way of communication and some semi-fundamental personality quirks of the people who are likely to be online go hand in hand in hand.

I don't give many details of myself -- I only broadcast the surface: the comments, the opinions, the actions and moments of genuine genius. I give no hint of the shapes I know to lie beneath the oil-slick rainbow of the surface, and with a powerful wit it's so easy to draw attention to that brilliant skin on top.

Understand that the following statements are as universal as anything I say -- they're universal for the moment in these paragraphs on this page, and the only place they apply is to my own experience. Not even all of my own experience at that, just to a large enough portion that I consider it significant.

Your average woman, moreso than your average male at least, is a matter for attention in a social situation. That is, in a group there will usually be someone who will attempt to strike up a conversation or who will at least note the presence of your average woman.

Please note, I'm not claiming in the slightest that this attention need be positive, and I am entirely aware that the world seems often to be entirely composed of jerks and the mentally challenged. I'm only talking about attention-level as an absolute value over social invisibility, not the desirability of said attention.

I think that this other supposition of mine is one of the reasons -- moreso than any imagined difficulty with technology supposed to be experienced by women -- that there are substantially more males than females on the Internet. I think that the females on the Internet are usually here looking for something that they havn't found in the physical world of their everyday lives -- be it attention, a place to fit in, a similar mind, or what have you. That, often enough, the thing that they are looking for is a person-shaped ideal that will resuscitate their flagging interest in life or humanity or their faith in happy endings or whatever.

Again, I'm not saying all women online are like this, but a lot of them are.

It could be said to be very convenient then, that I communicate very little about myself and that I cannot be badgered into playing twenty questions -- because, you see, one of the things that I do not do often at all is genuinely trust people, and some level of trust would be necessary for me to tell someone that I did not trust them because to my mind that would be enough communication for them to come up with some concrete information about the workings of my mind.

It's a tangled mental web I weave, I know.

This boils down to a presence on email, message boards, instant messengers, or in-game that is obviously fairly intelligent and possessed of an odd sense of humor, but devoid of any real concrete characteristics of personality. To be sure, you can play the same game that I do and extrapolate all you like from random snippets of information, turns of phrase that seem a little forced, verb-choice, and what have you, but there's nothing concrete to be gained from such an exercise in fantasy.

So few people have enough awareness of their own minds to realize that extrapolation of that type is nothing but fantasy. To realize their suppositions are just as likely to be wrong (despite making complete sense based on the abysmally small amount of available data) as their guess for the temperature tomorrow on Mars.

He and I have a very similar online presence, and we both have the ability to put fairly substantial amounts of feeling into our writing and to make things more beautiful and more significant than they perhaps actually were at the time.

It's quite possible, it must be noted, that our perceptive powers were just not up to the task at the time and we've recalled old data in a new light with more powerful faculties and abruptly discovered some new and shining facet of Life. I'm not eliminating that possibility, because it's one that's important to me and I can't for the life of me think of any way that it's possible to entirely discount it. Or the possibility that it's mostly made up -- I can't find any way to discount that either.

So the loopback. He and I return perpetually to loneliness, to nostalgia, and to arms that we will most likely never feel again. This is a weakness that I do not think I can afford any longer; it cripples the capacity to intercept and challenge the rougher storms in life. How can you continue on boldly while wrapped around someone's leg shivering? You can't.

You could call it moving on, but it wasn't anywhere to begin with. It's just a state of mind, and it's a difficult realization that nothing changed inside my own head will alter other people in the slightest.

And so to work.

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