Postmortem Post

(an email from Donna reminded me, yet again, that it is highly impolite to just disappear, regardless of one's disposition to do so......)

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ABOUT ME


The fact that one should not let one's Online Life mingle with one's Offline Life is rooted in Chemistry.  Chemistry, you may recall from high school, is based on Elements (which is to say that elements, and their reactions to each other, ARE chemistry).  And elements have their own natural rules.  It is against Nature, for example, to change lead (Pb) into gold (Au), although many have tried.  Chemistry also says that it is against Nature to mix the worlds of carbon (C) and silicon (Si).  

Carbon, in case you were not paying attention in high school, is the world you knew before you discovered the internet.  Most everything since that moment resides in the world of Silicon.

And while some have argued in favor of crossing the membrane--and BRAG about meeting virtual friends in person-- the fact remains that the CULTURE of one element is vastly different than the culture of the other.  Oil and water.  Would, for example, the online world care that I, in fact, NEVER wear dark glasses.... don't even own a pair?  Conversely, would my colleagues at Work actually deign to understand why I am compelled to write the memories of the distinctive smell of a former girlfriend?  Oh, trust me, they would be VERY interested in reading that, I am sure, but they would henceforth look at me funny and I would lose Workplace Cachet.

It is, quite simply, against nature.

To write about the smell of a former girlfriend was, in fact, my primary mission in coming to Gather.  I had joined, wandered about for a while, intimidated, actually, to commit anything to writing.... writing in public.... even something as ephemeral as electrons on silicon. 

As you know, writing anything at all requires a bit of surrender.  Once you write, passers-by can look directly into your brain and think: my god.  Like seeing a photograph of yourself posted on, say, the laundromat bulletin board, while various bored laundry folk scrawl devil's horns and goatee on your heretofore sacred visage. 

Writing is a form of nudity.

Laying in bed one morning, it came to me in a flash.  This is exactly the forum to do the kind of writing I have always wanted:  the type of disclosure so personal or so trivial or so mundane that it would likely invite derision in the carbon world, but is the raison d'etre among the silicon intelligentsia.

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Although I hesitate to say it, I am a bit of a scientist.  I like to study cause and effect.  The fact that I am not very organized has kept me from being called a real scientist, claiming, instead, the sobriquet: artist.  

As an artist-scientist, I thus approached the social network (I believe I may have been the first to declare that writing on Gather was more of a social event than it was literature--May 2006, look it up) with a combination of self-disclosure and discovery.  Me, the consummate outsider, loved this hit-and-run environment.  After nearly six decades of searching, I had finally found my pond.  I relished the opportunity to write practically anything, juxtapose it with graphic images and hyperlinks in a manner that would make Will Eisner proud. 

My writing here has always had a Plan, although the Plan itself has shifted and changed as I gained understanding of the medium, and as, in fact, the medium itself shifted and changed.  My plan, of course, was disclosure, but of a very narrow sort:  it would not be disclosure of who I am as much as what, and how, I thought.  In this way, writing (with which I have scant experience) is like painting: we EXALT that which we paint by the mere fact that we spend the time and attention on the subject at all, regardless of the subject (in fact, the more ordinary, the better) and regardless of one's talent to portray and interpret the subject.  And in the process, if we are lucky, we gain insight. 

It is, in short, a zen exercise.


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There is, of course, something called too much of a good thing.  So comfortable was I in my online pond that I tended to forget my carbon parallel universe.  There were times, for example, that I would actually spend half a Work Day composing an article, then spend the other half responding to comments.  Whole weekends were spent crafting, then talking about the ONE newsletter.  It was great fun.

I also learned things.  I learned to write.  I learned basic html tags.  I learned to strategize in the Web 2.0 world.  I became expert in art and physics, in editing and publishing, in health and counseling.  I held court.  Best of all, I made friends.

Online friends, as I said in an early Gather article Anna (look it up), are different from your flesh and bones pals.  In the virtual world, you are unencumbered by those spinach-in-your-teeth trivia that offline become, collectively, the definition of people themselves.  No.  Online, we are free of all that, that, that minutiae and a funny thing happens.  Our words... indeed, our THOUGHTS.... become us.  Since when have you been admired for your MIND?  Pretty seductive, no?


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The short version is that in my go-overboard style, I have to make a choice.  Business is down, I need to pay more attention, I need to find new ways to make money, domestic chores have gone untouched for four years, and there is the matter of family.  I am not, surprisingly, getting any younger.

So I chose the tactile world.  It has not been all bad.  No,  For example, I have re-discovered my basement (my former pond) and re-stocked it with new table saw (replacing my 30-year old Sears that I cannot bear to throw out so it sits as a kind of cast-steel altar in a place of honor) and a surface planer with which I can now make the holy grail of woodworking:  thin wood.  If I had the energy, I would show you my latest: the New York Apartment Murphy-Bed Wine Glass Holder.  I have completed two new paintings.  I have finished, after a ten-year hiatus, an illustration for an urban atlas of Boston's Chinatown. I have volunteered.  I have learned solo passages of Little Wing.  I have, most of all, watched all four seasons of LOST.  And the National Parks thing.

But I also want you to know that I miss our club here and most of all that small number of close friends (you know who you are) with whom I used to talk daily.  Although I vow I will not respond, I would consider it an honor if you would leave a comment.


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Okay.  Here's the Murphy-Bed: