Investment

I’ve been inspired by aubergine’s random comment about dial-up. Uh oh.

(edit: This started off as a random How Things Used To Be Different post, and turned into a long reminiscence. Beware, abandon all sense of time ye who enter here.)

Earlier this week, we’d restored basic power to the library and surrounding areas, which includes the just-down-the-road administrative hub of our entire system. While we were open, we didn’t have Internet or Intranet connectivity.

This was a source of dismay to the teens that frequent our library. We’re something of a popular hangout, which is unique to me. I don’t know if it’s that way in other smaller townships, but in St. Louis, my teen years were spent at houses and parks and malls, not libraries. I can’t say I’m upset by it; it’s simply peculiar.

When the library opened, they were waiting outside the door, pacing around anxiously when we announced the Internet wasn’t back up yet. Still, they sat, and waited, and waited, and when the call went over the PA that our connectivity had been restored, the kids migrated en masse to the computer terminals, and immediately sat down, and did what?

They hopped onto Myspace, and immediately began losing themselves in the nooks and crannies of pseudo-identity. Now, I have nothing against Myspace, Facebook, or other community sites; it’s just that kids these days communicate differently. They aren’t limited by phone lines or the postal system or the fact it will be dark soon. The primary difference, however, is that these kids multitask their communication.

It’s like living in a world of drivebys. It’s a very shallow form of communication and interaction; that’s not meant in a pejorative manner, but in an illustrative one. It seems at times like we have an entire nation that’s simultaneously more connected and more disconnected than ever. We’re trying to fill ourselves up on one-liners and snippets of conversation, but we don’t go to the depths, oh no, because that would take time, and effort, and no one has either in abundance these days.

The irony is, I remember people thinking how disconnected my generation was when I was younger. I sense a flashback incoming.

Four Paragraphs of Necessary But Tedious Exposition

When I first got into computing around 1985-86, there was no Internet. We had a 300bps modem on a dial-up connection that was one hundred billion hotdogs awesome. Thankfully, for no apparent reason at all, my interest in computers coincided with my mother’s, and from that point on, we both were involved online. (This had the side benefit of ensuring we always had up-to-date hardware. Not always the best or the fastest, but certainly upper end machines.)

We bought an Atari 800, and discovered St. Louis Atari User Groups in magazines. These were people that would meet at the local computer store and hang out. We had no chat rooms; we had face-to-face interaction to talk about our hobby. It was the refuge of the nerd, of course; it’s safe to say a lot of people didn’t have a personal computer at that point (though some had word processors, which I never understood, since they were pretty expensive on their own; why pay half the price for 1/8th of the functionality?).

At these meetings, we learned about Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), and those are what permanently corrupted me. These were, essentially, isolated message forums. Each had its own Systems Operator (SysOp) and community of people. There were usually 30-40 active people on the busiest ones. We’d log in by dialing the SysOp’s actual computer. Not too different from forums today, except there were no avatars, signatures, images, hyperlinks, or easy way to navigate between them. You could e-mail people, but it was all stored on that site. You couldn’t, say, access Gateway BBS mail/site from Sylph BBS, and you had to actually go there to get it. You had to pay long distance fees where applicable. Oh, and yes, you often got a busy signal, meaning you couldn’t log in and had to wait for the line to free up. (Heh, imagine trying to connect to like, Amazon, and getting a busy signal.) That’s where I first developed an online identity. Gryphon was my handle/username, and everyone knew me as Gryph, and if you can’t pronounce either correctly you lose.

Still, it was wonderful. We’d have get-togethers every month or so, and my mother and I would go and hang out with everyone from the BBS. It was good times; being social was the primary reason for the BBS in the first place. I was one of the few kids that was on there; for the most part, it was adults from 35-50, I’d say, and therefore the young ones like myself tended to stand out. Soon, a subculture of teen BBSes arose, and I met many people that impacted my life in a major way.

Moving on.

As I grew older, multi-line chat boards originated. The first one, whose name I’ve regrettably forgotten, had FOUR CHAT LINES. Yes, I capitalized it just for you. It meant that FOUR PEOPLE COULD TALK AT ONCE.

Omg. Capitalized and bolded.

Obviously, being one of those four people was like winning the Golden Ticket. You’d call for hours waiting for it to ring, and you’d get on and….ok, maybe it sucked, there’d be one cool person on and two you hated, or it’d just be you. Still, when you had four people on that were all friends or cool, man, it was seriously awesome.

The second multiline board changed my life over a short span of time. Offworld BBS. June 1992.+

32 chat lines.

Now, four people may sound pretty sad, but it was exciting to us. Imagine how amazing thirty-two people on at the same time was.

I wouldn’t turn 20 until two months later. Take a second, contemporary reader, and imagine if the height of your personal communication ability were 1) these isolated BBSes and 2) a 32-line chat board in the city you live in.

That’s it. Put away your cell phones, your e-mails, your IM clients, your IPoDs, your Blackberries.

Offworld quickly became a close-knit, rather bohemian society. St. Louis is pretty stratified in terms of income (that’s the reason people in the area joke about the "what high school did you go to?" line being the most common one asked, because it provides an instant snapshot of the person’s socioeconomic background). Offworld was the melting pot for people who just wanted to be themselves, free from pigeonholing.

We’d hop on and say, "Who wants to go to Denny’s?" and people would say "Sure!" and before you knew it, we’d have 20 people hanging out in the back booths. Almost anyplace you could hang out, at anytime you wanted, you had an instantly accessible group of people wanting to do something with you. Most of them were cross-clique; people that you never would have thought would hang out together if you subscribed to the segregation of a typical high school.

In some ways we inbred. People dated within the

group, hung out within the group. Still, when the group is about 50 people strong, that’s fairly diverse. If you think about it, your true social circle is probably about 15 people max, and 10 of those you can hardly find time to interact with regularly. Offworld was a non-stop party where you constantly saw scores of people, you knew them, you were part of their lives, and were up to date on what was going on. You talked. For hours. And hours. And hours. The irony is that people considered the fact that we sat at a computer all day as antisocial, yet we were engaging in more social behavior than anyone we knew. 

We had the brains, the athletes, the basketcases, the princesses, and the criminals. We had as fine a cross-section of individuals as I can ever remember interacting with, and we were full of teenage vim, vigor, and angst.

(Sometimes I chuckle at the library, because the conversations I overhear while shelving remind me of the conversations we had long ago. I shake my head and chuckle not out of mockery, but out of recognition of the same desperate search for profundity and uniqueness. I imagine sitting them down and saying, "You know, my friends and I were just like you," because I doubt they’d believe that I was a rebellious paragon of angst. Yet I was.)

It was, probably, the happiest few months of my life. From June until August, I had Offworld. Then, I returned to college for my junior year, but oftentimes I’d drive home on weekends (only 75 miles) for Offworld parties and to visit my friends. Since calling long-distance to access the board wasn’t gonna happen, I couldn’t talk to or e-mail them.

So, you know what I did, of course? Wrote letters.

And I mean wrote. Handwritten letters. Pages and pages,with amazing alacrity and devotion; as an example, my dear friend Cathy and I wrote reams almost every week. I wrote 9 or 10 people in all (lemme think; Chris, Laura, Michelle, Cathy, Kathie, Janica, Jeff, who am I missing, there were more…) It was a thrill to me, to set aside time to communicate with the people I loved. The friendships were a priority to me. The people that didn’t write back obviously didn’t value me, but I didn’t necessarily hold it against them because they were the exception rather than the norm and we all realized you couldn’t write everybody

You’ll notice when I write that my entries are often long. Certainly, it’s because I write like I talk, but it’s also because I was completely spoiled by those days when I would either write to or sit with a friend at a table and just converse for hours. It’s an investment. By reading this, you are investing in me, and possibly our friendship, and I appreciate that. There are few things I enjoy more than sitting with a sandwich and reading a 9-page missive from someone I care about. Unfortunately, nowadays those are rare. And mourned.

You see, I firmly believe that as we grow older, what we will value most in life are these interactions between people. I love music, I love television, I love movies, I love books, but there is nothing comparable to being with those you love, and sharing your life and thoughts with them. Taking time for your friends > all, and if you don’t have/make enough time, your life and its priorities are out of balance. If you take one thing from this, take that: Value your friends. Cherish them.

Fast forward.

Communication became easier and more convenient. With that ease of communication, it seems as if people have become lazy. I’m not exempt from this; my emails are spaced by months instead of days. Still, too often conversations end from the other side, not mine. The conversations go something like..

Me: xxxxxxxx
Them: xxxxx
Me: xxxxxx
Them: xx
Me: xxxxx

And then it’s like, hey, where’d you go? It seems like there’s only two people who are consistently proactive about communication–Jennifer and myself, which is probably why she’s the one I’ve kept in touch with most successfully. It seems like I’m forever waiting for someone to respond, or better yet, waiting for someone to simply say hello instead of needing me to prompt them first. Or, they say they’ll tell me about something and I reply immediately saying, "Yes, tell me more!" and then they never do. It wears me out. It discourages me.

Anyway, KTD have MySpace. They have OD. They have Facebook. They have blog sites by the dozen. They have representations of themselves that they want and expect people to come and visit. This is impractical communication. It’s passive. They spend more time working on their personal effigies than necessary, and they tell people. "Here I am, please stop on by, I’ve left this collection of information and anecdotes behind to entertain you while I’m off doing other things."

We’re all hermits on hills. We wave to each other in the distance.

When do we actually talk?

I enjoy some people’s blogs, but it doesn’t compare to those hours-long chats. Man, I miss those days. I miss them one-on-one, I miss them one-on-thirty. I miss the intimacy of just talking to a person or group of people from dinner to close.

This is all just perception, of course. My perspective is skewed. I belong to a generation that was the last pre-Internet. Change is irrevocable, and inevitable, and certainly many people my age have adjusted, but many that I talk to haven’t. I think what it boils down to is that we had to work to preserve those friendships, or else we wouldn’t have them. I couldn’t simply throw up an IM window and exchange a couple of lines a day. We had to make dates, we had to write letters, we had to travel. We lacked the conveniences of cell phones and IMs and MySpace notes.

Somehow, though, it feels as if those days have depth. Gravitas. A seriousness about them. Because they took effort so ingrained that it became part of me, and now I expect that effort to be part of communication. I expect that sort of interaction, response, and result.

Instead, I see people with IM screens up barely paying attention to the person with whom they’re ostensibly speaking. They’re watching tv, working on a presentation, eating dinner, listening to an IPod, and talking to their roommate/wife/dog.

It’s an illusion of communication, fulfilling some atavistic need to have a person available to you without taking advantage of it. It’s saying, "I don’t want to talk to you, but I need to know you’re there." It’s a Comfort Window, not a communication window. It’s sharing a virtual room, not sharing a life.

Drivebys.

If I log onto IM, it’s with the express purpose of talking to somebody. Not exchanging phrases every seventeen minutes. I’ve tried to do it the modern way, but it’s almost too hard. My personality was set years ago.

Maybe it’s just loneliness leaking out, but I miss the days when someone wanted to spend time talking with me instead of relegating me to the window in the background.

In hindsight, that’s part of what went wrong in my last relationship with HFoL.++</

span> To a degree, people grow comfortable in a relationship, and start taking each other for granted. That’s natural, and it’s healthy to a point, in that you need to be able to trust and rely on the person and have a life apart from them in addition to a life with them. Still, you need to make sure you maintain that sense of prioritizing the relationship, whether it’s romantic or platonic.

That person needs to know they matter, that you’re interested in them, not merely in their vague, nebulous presence. That’s what hurt the most, I think; that after supporting her project for over a year, willingly accepting de-prioritization so that she could complete her dream and meet her self-imposed deadlines, I was ecstatic when that time drew to a close.

Instead of her saying, "Thanks for your support and patience, now we can focus on us and our future!", making me a priority again, valuing me, investing in our relationship, I was met with a fine how-do-you-do and a don’t-let-the-door-hit-your-ass, and an it’s-not-like-we-were-married. I realize after typing all this that wow, you know, that’s what so much of my rants and entries and internal angst is about. It’s not just the fact that she wasted time I don’t have to waste, and I’m overly conscious of it.

It’s that I miss mattering to someone. I want to be a priority to somebody. I want to be important to them. I’ve spent too many years of my life in various relationships without that, and it puts a very small me in a very large, empty place. I want to be told that I am loved, and that someone wants to be with me. I want some sort of validation. Verification. I’m tired of reading the press release. I’m tired of looking at my stats on paper. If I’m such a great guy, I want the reward.

I want an investment.

Despite the fact that sounds almost petulant and attention whorish when I read it back mentally, it’s not, I promise. I’m just old enough to want to be loved, valued, and secure.

I think one of my mini-projects for this site may be trolling my memories. Thinking of Offworld makes me think of Laura, but I think of Laura a lot because she might have been The One That Got Away. I sure hope not, no offense to her, because that’d make for a pretty bleak future outlook.

You know how sometimes when you wake up and walk into the cold morning, your car’s windshield is frozen over? You don’t want to be late, or are short on time, so you don’t let it defrost all the way. You start driving and realize about halfway down the road from your home that you should have let it defrost more, because you can hardly see where you’re going. All you see is foggy whiteness, except for that little section at the bottom directly above the vents where everything is perfectly clear, and you can see the road in front of you. You scrunch down in your seat and tilt your head and you’re trying your best to navigate the road via that sliver of clarity, and the entire time you’re saying, "fuck, I hope I don’t crash, I hope I don’t crash, I hope I don’t crash."

That’s how I feel. 

+ In January of 1993, in a controversial FBI raid, Offworld BBS was seized because there were pornographic materials on the computers. If you’re interested, you can read about it here: http://textfiles.com/news/boardwat.txt and use your browser to search/find "Offworld". It’s about 60% of the way down the page. Looking back, it’s amazing how things have changed in the intervening 13 years, considering the smut you can find on the Internet that the FBI does nothing about. By taking down Offworld, they destroyed a healthy teen community, which was a shame.

++ In grand tradition, I have come up with a name to represent my ex. This one came courtesy of Heather, who smirkingly approached me in the aisles with an Ann Rule book entitled "Heart Full of Lies" and said, "You should get this for her for Christmas." Thus, HFoL was born, and joins She Who Has No Soul, Rebeckyll and Hyde, and others in my personal pantheon.