I didn’t always used to be this way, blogging everyday, tweeting, interacting with my imaginary friends online. There used to be a time when I would meet people in the old fashioned way, by getting drunk in bars and clubs and simultaneously bludgeoning them with my opinions while beguiling them with my witty insights.
You’re on safe ground with drunks, they’re predictable. Not so with people you meet on the internet.
Problem with me is I just don’t trust my imaginary internet friends. How can you trust a person you’ve never met before? You can’t even begin to understand a person until you’ve shaken their hand, heard their voice, watched their mannerisms and looked into their eyes.
In a lot of cases, all you get over the internet is a facade. You get the character traits and virtues that person wants you to get. In this way people live out a kind of fantasy life online – the shy, mousy girl you knew back in highschool becomes a kinky dominatrix, the weedy, Star Wars-obsessed geek becomes a loud and brash, bullying anyone who would dare to challenge his thoughts and opinions.
Then you meet these people in the real world and surprise surprise, they not only have nothing to say, but they are nothing like the people they pretend to be online. It’s so lame!
And don’t even get me started on all the retards out there, trawling porn sites and leaving their badly-written, poorly punctuated comments like horse droppings all over this supposed ‘information super-highway’.
Hank Moody, David Duchovny’s character in Californication says it best. In season one he gets interviewed on Henry Rollins’ radio show about the blog he’s writing (completely against his will) and says the following about the online world:
“People they don’t write anymore, they blog. Instead of talking, they text. No punctuation, no grammar, LOL this and LMFAO that. It seems to me that it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.â€
Amen brother.
If there’s one thing I strive toward every time I sit down to write for Them’s Fightin’ Words, it’s congruity. The person you’re reading is me. I’m just as loud, crazy and vitriolic in real life as I am on this blog and I don’t give a rat’s ass who can handle it and who can’t.
Having said that, I think it’s only fair that I mention that I’ve also been surprised by how many genuine and intelligent people there are out there using this powerful and twisted medium I like to call the Interblags.
We’re not in the majority here by any means, but there is a small community of thinking, feeling people out there with a healthy appreciation of irony who aren’t robots or retards and I can’t tell you how refreshing that is.
This blog is for you. It’s never going to be huge, for a lot of reasons I don’t want it to be, but it will always be here and so will I, so don’t be a stranger 😉
-ST
Ah the days of meeting people in the real world. I don’t think I have the skill to do it anymore.
Beyond that I think it may be entirely impossible to comment on this post and go, “Yes, yes indeed, those people are lame”, without sounding like a total prat – because, you know, everyone refuses to believe they’re THOSE people.
Nice quote from Californication though. Love that show.
By leaving this comment I’m just perpetuating the cycle. Darn you Slick. Darn you to Heck.
Woah big fellers, we may camp out here for the night. What? OK so I’m a trickleblagger so far – interests are too many interest – comments splattered over this net thing – then other venues – my own site, unknown, generally – then FB – I did have an extremely hot sort of shakesperian lilterary romance in a great old chat site, Stonehenge. I never wanted to see her picture cause I was afraid of what I would think, and I was right. OK that was pure excitement of shared lustful literature and images. Had to call smokey the bear to help me put that out quickly. But otherwise now FB helps me to know the friends I can and do see, and their families, activities, etc. I write better than I can talk, so that suits me. I have been on various Yahoo groups and other listservers and have encountered complete kinship on a very profound level around common experience, knowledge and devotion to certain principles and set of teachings – the ones that germinate into fulfilment in life. Now mostly out of touch with those, thought some are now FB! Sometimes it is sufficient to know that you have one real friend in the world. I read emails less now, with FB, and I’m always researching everything. We gotta use what we have with humanity, while we have it, despite its flaws and you know it may be taken from us at any moment. Hey, don’t punch me.