xtcian

10/5/02 When you start reading

10/5/02

When you start reading other people's blogs, the natural inclination is to start believing you're doing yours incorrectly, or at least with a lot less fanfare. Folks like the Reverse Cowgirl and Driver 8 all have calendars you can click on, and update their musings whenever they see fit during the course of a day. I only write my blogs in the middle of the night, don't have a calendar, and have very little porn on the site, which makes me look tender and virgin by comparison. I feel like I lack an online community, made immeasurably easier by the "comment" buttons at the bottom of each entry something that connects these bloggers together.

I wish I had one of those buttons here, but my brother Steve (who administrates this thing) says he hates the accompanying code for one reason or another. It is a bit sad, though, me typing this thing at 3am with little or no input from my fellow human phylum.

It's a stark contrast to the heady days on Usenet back in the early 90s, when my entire life was subsumed by the vicissitudes of a particular newsgroup dealing with my Generation I was not only part of an online community, I actually lost my mind somewhere on a modem wire. For a few months in there, I was bereft of social grace, unable to care about the actual world, spending most waking hours chatting, manifesto-ing or cybersexing with as many virtual human beings as possible. There were a few wonderful people on that newsgroup, but the internet's natural magnetism to slightly-deranged kooks – along with my own carelessness – led to an online immolation of my reputation, but them's the breaks, right? Someone online once told me that I was behaving like a 21-year-old instead of a 27-year-old, a comment that gets even more funny as the years drag on.

Those days taught me some important lessons about online relationships, especially the ones you foment whilst still single:

1. Keep all of your discourse with the opposite gender as far away from sex as possible. Even the smallest reference can be construed as flirting, and then you're fucked.

2. Never meet a virtual person of the opposite gender in the real world unless you have both agreed and signed Platonic oaths in blood. Trust me on this one. It's fine to do the nerve.com or match.com thing if you're going into it with that expectation, but believe me: none of you reading this know yourself well enough to look for love online.

3. If you can't see people, don't take their admonitions seriously. You'll get more than you need from your immediate environment.

Speaking of along time ago, we went even further into the past tonight by attending Alec Guettel's party for Ned, a fabulous bash populated by tons of friends made during the heady years of the Reagan administration. Among the women we saw were Julia-Carr Bayler and Mallory May, two of my favorite ladies from the University of North Carolina and strangely enough, I had forgotten that they were both Pink House residents circa 1989. One thinks that at any distribution company would be guaranteed of selling at least 3000 tickets of the movie just by courting the demographic of Past Pink House Residents alone.

the lovely Julia-Carr and Mallory with me, aging fratdork het-boy