Friday, April 01, 2016

Life in the Blue Nowhere; or Nostalgia

There are times when I like to sit back and just think about nothing in particular; let my mind wander around and around and around and around and around, just waiting to see where it lands and where that takes me. Tonight, talking with someone I would consider a friend, it ended up landing on the subject of no small amount of weird: How I grew up.

I was an awkward child, to be be completely fair about it. I was scrawny, had freckles, wore "nerdy" clothes, and my tastes were not that of the average child of my age. Where most kids chose to eat chips, I would go for fruits and veggies. Where they would get soda or artificial juice, I wanted water. They were into sports, I was into the X-Men and Super Mario. They played during recess, I watched ants and bugs and even wildlife. It made it hard to have friends.

I say these things not to prop myself up in some weird, egotistical way, but more to provide context for the rest of this mental vomit that's the result of entirely too much meandering about in psychological/memorial purgatory.

When I was 11, I got my first real PC. I remember it well: It was a cheaply built tower with a 28k dial-up modem - top of the line for its day, really - with moderate graphics and disc space (250MB!), CD-ROM, keyboard, mouse, and old fashioned CRT monitor. My father built it for me so I would have something to play games on and go online with.

The first time I made a connection - via NetZero, if memory serves me correct - and first fired up Internet Explorer, I was hooked. My every interest was minutes away - forever by the standard of today, but back then was lightning fast - at any given point in time. I could get the absolute latest news of my favorite comics, TV shows, video games, and so on whenever I wanted, and it wasn't long before I discovered chat rooms.

Here's where it starts getting weird.

I had recently seen the movie First Kid (I'm not proud of it) and gotten the idea to even search for them from there. There was this scene where the kid is talking in a chat room called "Kid Chat." I couldn't believe this was actually a thing, so I did what any kid with enough privilege to access the Internet that age: I used it. I went to a search engine that I can't remember - maybe Lycos? - and typed in, of course, "kid chat."

I was warped (almost) instantly to a slew of results. I clicked the first one, and was connected to a chat room of the same name via the IRC chat Web server WebNet. Suddenly, I found myself thrust into a constant, seemingly unending, stream of constant conversation with people around my age, and I couldn't believe it.

I was finally, at the age of 11, able to talk to other people nave have them acknowledge my existence. The feeling was one of exhilaration and disbelief that had an unholy union to produce an emotion that can't even be described as a mixture of both that is at once gratifying, and intoxicating, therefore addicting.

Attention. Beautiful, beautiful attention.

Before I knew it, I was spending all of my time in this chat room, as well as others. I was an active member of no fewer than three chat rooms at one time, and I still remember the elation I felt at finding out that they were all a part of the same network, meaning I didn't have to have multiple connections or windows to talk to everyone.

You might be saying to yourself "Yeah, but you really don't know them. You've never met them. They could be anybody." And in certain cases, you'd be absolutely correct.

Over these (almost) twenty years, I have made many friends. While I've lost touch with most of them, there are many of them that I still talk to this very day. One of the best friends I have ever made was over the Internet. My friendship with her is something that I cherish, and she is probably the person that knows me the best out of everybody else that is a part of my life. She understands me on a level that is matched by only one other (who is also a very close friend of mine, and appreciated just as much).

During this time in my life, I learned to substitute interaction with my immediate, more physical peers with the interactions I could get at will with those that I found infinitely more interesting. These were people from all over not just the country, but the entire world. I was talking with people from all over the States, in England, Scotland - hell, even the Middle East - and, what's more, they talked right back to me.

Some would call this unhealthy, that this is no way to go about learning about human interaction, but I would beg to differ. I know that when we're online, we have the ability to be anybody that we want to be. However, in my vast experience - very close to twenty actual years' worth - everyone tends to become themselves while they're online. With the promise of anonymity, knowing we could adopt whatever persona we want, we will more often than not revert to our true personas.

You see, I feel like we all want to be known and understood, and, in turn, know and understand each other. We have this deep-seated need for companionship that, as I am walking proof of, we have an instinct to seek out however we can.

There are probably many discussions out there about the merits or disadvantages of learning human interaction in this way, but fuck them all. I have something more than studies: I have actual experience. All they'll ever have will be second- and maybe third-hand stories.

I, however, along with the very friends talked about here, helped to write a book about some of those experiences. It's free, so there's no harm in at least giving it a look-see.

This is to all my Internet friends, past and present, most of whom I've never met in person, and the likelihood of ever doing so is realistically remote: I love you all. I love having you in my life. and I can't really put into words just how much I appreciate each and every one of you, and the things we've all been through together. You all helped me through some of the roughest times in my life, and I am indebted to you in a way that I don't think I can repay. Thank you all so much for being there.