Someone e-mailed me yesterday to see how I am doing. She says she worries about me. I’ve detected that a number of people throughout my life, for entirely differing reasons, think I am someone to be worried about. As far back as grade school I remember Sam saying he paid special attention to me when were swimming in the pool. This was because I never really learned to swim until years later. I may have been the only kid in grade school who didn’t know how to swim. I learned later, at the University of South Florida. The person who contacted me yesterday has been something more than an acquaintance for over 20 years. We have never met, and maybe we never will. But I consider our bond to be genuine. She wanted to know how my depression had been treating me. She said she thinks of me any time anything happens in New York. The Chelsea bombing, the Hoboken mess… whatever it is she hopes I am not involved. We had corresponded a little bit in recent years but I never had occasion to describe the days of the first brain MRI, when depression was doing things to me I did not even recognize. It was a correspondence between two people whose first experiences with the Internet were concomitant with the confessional tone of sharing life’s experiences with strangers. That’s just what a lot of early adapters of the World Wide Web were publishing. Not everyone, of course. So we still talk that way, sharing things in the manner of “The Case of the Familiar Stranger,” that sociological phenomenon where one dumps their emotional baggage on someone they have just met. This is because there will be no lingering emotional tie to this person, so there is no risk. I guess a lot of us were familiar strangers in the early days of the web. Some of us still are. But certainly the confessional aesthetic is not unique to self-publishing on the web. But in the early days of online services there was less reason to fear consequences. I remember being on a BBS where a woman posted an erotic story she had written. Shock waves went through the denizens of that message board when it was revealed that someone had forwarded the story to the woman’s employer. I don’t know if she was fired or what might have come of that, but I know who forwarded the story but I never understood why. That was 1994 or maybe even 1993.
I would like to go for a long walk, like I did yesterday. But it is nasty out.
I feel like I am drowning.
