Month: August 2014

When Being Funny Sucks

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I know, you’re probably expecting a Wicked Tuna recap, or Jeremy McKeen’s impending Supermoon article. We’ll get back to our regularly scheduled proclamming tomorrow. 

But we’re still reeling about Robin Williams. I bet you are, too. Right? How could it be that this bright, funny, famous, rich man who had given so much and was so loved still decided to take his own life?

Depression is a bitch, that’s why.

Yesterday, my fabulous blog partner and friend Jim Dowd wrote this wonderful long piece about what it’s like to have a brain that doesn’t stop, much like Robin Williams. He gets it. He’s been there.

I have been there, and I get it as well, but I come from a different angle – lifelong depression. Sometimes deep, sometimes not bothersome at all, but always a weird part of me I hate admitting is there, like a birth mark or third nipple.

I started being funny in middle school to get boys to like me. I was dorky, awkward, kind of grungy, and really liked the Foo Fighters and Weezer when most kids liked Destiny’s Child. In my defense, Dave Grohl was younger then, and didn’t tell people to get off his lawn.

"Oh, looks like my AARP signup form came in the mail! Better get my readin' glasses on."

“Oh, looks like my AARP signup form came in the mail! Better get my readin’ glasses on.”

I was not a popular kid, and no boys swooned over my existence. I cracked jokes, I learned the math of what “funny” is – a+b=punchline. Boys would befriend me because I was funny. I once threw an orange at a lunchroom clock because I thought it would be hilarious. It kinda was. It made people crack up, it was a rush, people thought I was funny. I thrived on that attention.

KT, middle, age 15. Because apparently black baggy clothes in mid-summer was necessary for some reason.

KT (center) age 15. Because apparently black baggy clothes in mid-summer was necessary for some reason.

Being funny seemed like the only way I could keep people around me. My self-esteem sucked, and high school didn’t make it any better. This was the advent of the internet, before parents even knew online bullying could possibly be a thing. Kids from my school were mean to me online and in person. I clung to humor because without it, I would have been lost in a sea of depression and hormones.

I tried half-heartedly to kill myself when I was sixteen. It was an impulsive, stupid decision. I ended up with a two-week stay in an adult inpatient ward where I had no contact at all with anyone from my school except for a few random friends visiting me. My best friend called me selfish for what I’d done and that I should try harder to be happier. I felt nothing but guilt for putting my poor, already-stressed parents through the hell I did. I had two weeks of eating shitty hospital food food, seeing people for whom mental illness fully controlled their lives, watching someone get off heroin cold turkey, and then a lot of conversations with real live adults who struggled but who gave me great coping advice. During the second week, a teenager set off the sprinkler system in the cafeteria to escape, ruining my textbooks and putting me further behind in schoolwork.

It was kinda like that, but with less Angelina Jolie and more old people peeing on the floor.

It was kinda like that, but with less Angelina Jolie and more old people peeing on the floor.

I got better eventually, but I was still impulsive. I once stole my mom’s car and drove forever. I got as far as mid-PA before running out of cash. I still couldn’t tell you why I did it, except a desperate, overwhelming need to get the fuck out of my town and my head. I was seventeen. I dropped out of high school. I finished eventually, but as an outcast, school was fucking abysmal. It took me six years to gain the courage to go to college.

The internet where originally I was bullied turned into a mechanism to meet other people. It saved my life – the groups of kids with similar mindsets, who liked similar bands, who would find me more than worthy of friendship. Before social media, you’d just have email list discussions. My email friends from towns away would become real friends – they’d pick me up and take me bowling or to play pool or go see a punk band, sometimes against my parents’ wishes. I cobbled together a hodgepodge group of friends, and even boyfriends, based on my humor, and then my emerging outgoing personality. I was able to snag my husband based on my snarky online personality.

My deadpan delivery of often vulgar humor has followed me since then. Life’s been great sometimes, and shitty other times, but I have thankfully stayed humorous, to my knowledge, throughout it all. Postpartum depression flared up with my second kid, and at times I grasped for straws. Again, the internet was there to reassure me that I wasn’t a bad parent and I’d be okay and normal, and with the correct medication, I’ve been happy.

Making other people laugh makes me feel better on a daily basis. Sometimes I feel it’s the only thing I can do right, but my rational brain know that’s a lie. It’s an infinite feedback loop of the most positive sort – make people laugh, the part of your brain that seeks a rush like booze or drugs is satiated by the laughter, and you do it again, and again. You are funny because it is necessary to the core of your being.

I’m lucky. I’m lucky because I have had the chance to have such happy times, and some people don’t get that chance. I have a rational part of my brain that keeps me from getting too low without seeking help. I have self esteem now – perhaps too much. I learned to take selfies and learned to love what I saw.

Selfies all day long.

Selfies all day long.

And I’ve met great people, again partially because of the internet. While I’ve gone full townie here in Gloucester, that was absolutely exacerbated by social media. I added people on Facebook. We got along. We made plans more. I suddenly had a wonderful friend circle in Gloucester that works so well alongside my other great friends “down the line” and those I only see online who have moved to far-flung, foreign locales like Africa, Beirut or South Florida.

Lookit how happy my face is here I mean really.

Lookit how happy my face is here I mean really.

I feel the deepest, most painful sorrow in my heart that Robin Williams was so depressed that he took his own life. I have known how he felt, the feeling pressing on your chest like you are being suffocated with every moment you exist. The realization that you’ve got everything in life, but there is a part of your brain that is broken and you can’t enjoy it. The impulse to swandive off the Piatt, that you immediately quell, put away, take a deep breathe, and move past.

I am intensely lucky that antidepressants exist. I am still here, and I’ll always be here, to listen to music on the beach, to watch my kids beat each other senseless with pool noodles, to drink cider, to ride bikes with the backdrop of the Atlantic. In the darkest hours when those small fleeting moments of happiness seem so far away, I will cling to my beautiful friends like lifeboats in a storm. They will not tell me I am selfish. I have come far.

What it’s Like to Have Robin Williams’ Brain

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Whole pages of dialouge were left blank with just the words, "Robin does his thing."

Whole pages of dialogue were left blank with just the words, “Robin does his thing.”

I can do about 20 accents fairly credibly, I’m fast and some people tell me I’m funny so let’s just say that Mr. Williams and I shared enough traits to give me a sense of what was going on for him.

This isn’t bragging. This is just how some of us are. Most comedians you have ever heard of are like this, many writers and actors and other ‘creative’ people. Also some grocery store baggers, bus drivers, bike mechanics, waiters and homeless people. It’s a weird brain to have, occasionally people are in awe of it after you do some improv bit in the bar about Gandalf trying to order the special at Olive Garden. They want to know how you think, how long does it take to come up with ideas?

How long? Like…no time. This thing I’m writing now takes as long to think up as it does to type. I’ll read it over once and post it. For longer works I might go and revise a few times, making sure there are enough ferret jokes and sci-fi/fantasy references, but it’s not like I sit here with a pencil in my mouth going, “Assmarten…too British. Buttstoat…no, that’s not it. Aha! Assweasel! That’s the ticket!”

It’s unsettling when you come to understand that not everyone has the same kind of internal dialogue as you. In fact, the most honest thing I can tell you about what it’s like to have Robin Williams’ brain is that it’s fucking loud in here. But thankfully, for me at least, it’s usually pretty fun.

Voices, observations, memories, ideas, questions. It’s like being in the back of Best Buy with all the screens turned to different channels. I’ll be honest, I don’t even have a TV because there is very little on that can hold my interest for as long as just sitting in the theater of my mind and watching fun stuff happen.

I am never bored. Never.

But it’s a hard thing to manage as well, harder for some than others. A metaphor I use is cars. If brains are automobiles most people have a sedan, station wagon, or SUV. Some are in Porsches and other high-performance rides. Robin Williams was a nitrous-boosted Indy 500 racer. He was around the next turn before the rest of us could get out of first. It was incredible to watch and delighted many, myself included.

Good luck shopping at Costco

Good luck shopping at Costco

But try going to the grocery store or taking the kids to school.

The fact is that guy was something of a hero to the rest of us who due to our neurological makeup live our lives on overshift. He was going 200mph on the inside and was trying to slow down enough for the public to keep up because he knew people couldn’t take his “full on” mode for more than the length of a performance. He got himself in synch with ‘norms’, he tuned his characters down so they were relatable. He did this for us, for his family and friends. I’m not surprised he struggled with drugs and alcohol, for a lot of people it’s the easiest shortcut to self-regulation.

I’m sure it was a daily, if not hourly struggle. I’m sadly not surprised, given the extreme nature of his intensity, that he succumbed. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time he’d gone down that road in his mind.

It is just, for way too many of the people who delight and entertain us, an incredibly difficult way to live.

For we who have learned to survive and thrive with this kind of wiring, there are a few critical components: Being in a place where weirdos are celebrated is the first and most important rule of order. You won’t survive long like this in the burbs, instead you wind up in communities of other nutjobs of various stripes. This is why the Internet is so important as I said on No Snark Sunday, it’s a lifeline for a lot of people, and what these folks need most is a refuge.

By the way, regular readers: Have you ever wondered why I’m so hell bent on making our already wacky-Gloucester an even greater center of hipfrastructure that can attract more artists, innovators and creative-types? Now you know.

Next is finding work that takes advantage of your unique makeup. The creative industries are already set up for this: David Ogilvy, “The Father of Modern Advertising” once said, “I hire people my clients would never employ in a million years, but desperately need.” Innovation is another place, sometimes even education. Another metaphor I use to describe being like this as an employee and now a manager is dogs. It’s like having border collies. They are really, really smart and useful pets. But if you don’t give them interesting shit to do the will get depressed and eat the couch. Don’t let yourself be the border collie locked in the house with nothing to do and if you manage folks like this, they need to have problems to solve, not tasks to do.

On the positive side I got my ball back from between the cushions

On the positive side I got my ball back from between the cushions

Impulsivity is a problem for extroverts in general. Sadly, suicide is strongly linked to impulsivity. Having circuit-breakers in your life that limit destructive impulsivity is critical. I never tell friends or people I meet online with the same issues that they have to become an “orderly” person, but you do need to maintain systems that keep the money, health, family and other key areas stable while you run around the backyard with flaming boxer shorts on your head screaming, “Stalin was a squirrelmonger!”

(Key test: Those of you who chuckled at that last line, you are not in possession of an overshift brain. Those who thought, ‘that sounds like totes funweirdness!’, it’s you we’re talking about.)

Exercise is important, but like drugs and booze it can become a crutch. And worse, sometimes an injury can send you into a dark-spiral because you can’t get the calming brain chemicals a workout provides. If you wondered why I was so over-the-top pissed when my bike got stolen, now you know that too.

Oh, and here is a pet peeve: Stop telling us to meditate. We can’t. We don’t want to. We want the voices in our heads to do cool things, we don’t want to get rid of them. That’s like telling us, “You know all those cool, funny friends you have? Yeah, ditch them and go willingly sit in the waiting area of the DMV for a few hours.” Fuck that.

Robin Williams always served as a major inspiration for me, especially his more mature roles in Good Will Hunting and The Dead Poets Society. There I could see him ‘being normal’ although it was clear it was effort if you looked closely. This sounds weird, but it inspired me to express more control, to use my ‘powers’ at my own discretion rather than be a slave to them.  Unlike him, today I’m not a race car, I’m one of those Subarus with the 2.5liter Boxter engine. Sure, most of the time I’m driving the kids to camp and picking up some curry in Beverly, but once in a while, when it’s safe, I can open the thing up and blaze around with the throttle open.

Not the Forrester. I was thinking about the WRX, OK guys?

Not the Forrester. I was thinking about the WRX, OK guys?

I deeply and humbly thank the readers and co-contributors of The Clam for making that possible for me on a regular basis, and in return I ask you to remember Robin Williams in the way he would have wanted:

With flaming boxer shorts on your head.

 suicide prevention hotline: 1-800-273-8255 because we want you around!

The Rescue of a Cat and a Drone From a Tree, a Clamparison

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In 2000 my friend Amy’s faithful cat, Idgy got stuck in a tree. Of our friends I was selected for the rescue as ‘the guy most likely to risk his life for a six-pack’. Earlier this summer Martin Del Vecchio’s drone, “Droning Myrtle” also was similarly stranded and yet again I was pegged for the extraction (same logic). Despite the seemingly similarity of ‘things cared about stuck in trees’, the experiences turned out to be vastly different.

I was informed by the other Clameditors that without this image the post would be unceremoniously deleted

I was informed by the other Clameditors that without this image the post would be unceremoniously deleted

For fun, let’s clampare:

The setup:

In both cases the supposedly self-preservatory functions of each failed spectacularly. Example: It does a cat no good to escape a doberman by scrabbling sixty feet into the crown of an oak, a distance from which she cannot descend. Is this some sort of evolutionary quirk? Will paleontologists one day discover that her feline ancestors were hunted by a kind of canine-bat hybrid, but one that could only ascend a limited distance therefore favoring those escapees who got the furthest up into trees? But even that logic fails considering marooning yourself in a tree ill-favors reproduction similarly to being devoured. I have no explanation. Darwin’s corpse not only spins, but tumbles end-for-end.

Her mechanical soulmate had an even worse excuse: dumbass human programmers. The entire function of the “auto return” feature on the drone fails given an absurd imposed limitation: insufficient pre-determined altitude. Here is how the scenario went down (literally): The drone stopped receiving signals from the control station (Martin) because he ordered the drone to fly behind an obstruction the signal could not penetrate, the island itself. You may think this seems like a stupid way to operate the vehicle, but remember this is not a remote-controlled plane of yore, this is a ‘drone’ in every sense. Upon loss of contact it just comes home using pre-programmed GPS coordinates. All was working smoothly and as its builders intended. But here is the rub, to make this return the drone is programmed to ascend to a safe height of sixty feet.

Sixty feet is considered safe? Effing Sixty feet? Do it’s programmers live in the taiga just below the Arctic Circle where the harsh conditions stunt the trees to the height of landscaping shrubbery? Hell, even in the desert there are occasional power lines taller than sixty feet. Drones are cleared by the FAA outside sensitive areas below 400 feet. The tallest tree in the world, the Redwood Sequoia is 380 feet. Might I recommend the preset for the ‘return to base’ feature be then set at the average of the two at 390 feet?

Anyway, here’s what happened, recovered first person video of the crash from the drone with Martin’s commentary:

So, as in the case of Idgy, we have a beloved and loyal companion stuck up in a tree. Time to mount a rescue.

The Approach:

Idgy: My friend and her partner lived on Leonard Street in Annisquam. I pulled up to their house in my truck and the tree was right off the driveway. Idgy indicated her position via a series of low, plaintive yowls.

Myrtle: Ram island is in the Salt Marsh and is unapproachable by road. Each of two drone rescue attempts required mucking through mid-calf low-tide mud lugging armloads of gear we assumed would be useful for the rescue. The island is covered in vine-entangled thickets of thorns and poison ivy. Also it was greenhead season. Also too it’s 14 years later and I am fucking way out of shape.

The Gear

Idgy: Even at this dawn of the Internet, cats ruled the web. A simple Yahoo search (remember those?) of “rescue, cat, tree” yielded the suggestion of bringing a backpack and a towel. At the time I possessed a tall ladder and a tree harness with which to secure myself.

Myrtle, First attempt: The drone was atop the very crown of a wonky poplar, branchless for the first 40 feet and impossible to climb. Ladders were not going to cut it. We figured we could poke the drone out of the tree using some kind of tall pole (something Amy would have frowned on in the case of Idgy), so we dragged out half a dozen lengths of aluminum electrical conduit along with what turned out to be an insufficient length of rope, an assorted tool kit and plenty of duct tape.

Second Attempt: A bow and arrow, fishing line, an appropriately lengthed rope, more duct tape.

Rescue Narrative:

Idgy: Extended ladder to maximum height and climbed to top wearing backpack on front in adherence to Internet instructions. With safety line around tree, I shimmed up to the branch where Idgy was perched. I then wrapped Idgy in towel, shoved her down into backpack (she was less than amused, but generally compliant) and descended. Presented package to relieved owners and admiring onlookers waiting at bottom of ladder.

Myrtle, First Attempt: To increase challenge level, decided to include hyperactive redheaded nine year old on extraction team. In retrospect he was the best equipped of all of us to manage the situation as he simply stood on a rock and made actually useful suggestions while Martin and I spectacularly failed at everything. Even finding the tiny, white aircraft from the ground (remember it entered the leaves from above) was a massive challenge in the thick brush, taking hours and a great deal of crashing through razorwire-like vegetation. Bugs treated us like the arrival of food trucks at Hempfest.

We eventually did locate her, upside-down and wedged by her rotors in a matrix of branches at the top of the uppermost canopy.

We soon discovered that short of exotics like titanium or tungsten carbide, there is no linear material strong enough to extend sixty feet in the air and still be light enough to wield from the ground effectively. We never even got close to sixty feet with the contraptions we tried to make out of the conduit we’d lugged out there. We did get the too-short rope not very far up the tree at one point and tried shaking it. Then to our dismay a slight breeze would come and shake it a little more than we were capable of.

Myrtle remained literally unmoved.

We decided to scrub this first attempt and made back for the shore, but the tide had come in leaving us cut off from Granite Pier where my wife was waiting in the minivan to take us to a soccer game. Braving the tide, I stuck boy on shoulders and waded D-Day style through the chest-deep water. My legs were torn up from the thorns as though I had coated my lower limbs in a tasty rodent-slurry and dangled them into the enraged weasel pen at the local zoo. I arrived at the field in Hamilton sopping from the chest down, bloodied and covered with stinking marsh mud and salt grass. I represented the Gloucester side looking not unlike one of the inhabitants of the interior tribes of the remote corners of the Indonesian archipelago.

The next morning we set out again across the flats, this time replacing the boy (although, again to his credit, he was no more or less effective than any of the crew on the initial attempt) with Martin’s most excellent brother-in-law Dan and his archery gear. In this attempt we attached fishing line to the end of an arrow and he Henry Wadsworth Lonfellowed that shit as far as he could up into the tree over a high branch. The arrow came back down the other side and we fastened it to the appropriately-lenghted rope which we ran up and over the branch as if we were raising a flag.

This is how you get a drone out of a tree. Welcome to the 21st Century.

This is how you get a drone out of a tree. Welcome to the 21st Century.

Now, with a stout line 40+ feet up into the tree we got to shakin’, freeing the drone after a few quick tugs and causing it to cascade dramatically through the brush and crash to the ground ejecting its battery dramatically out one side. NEVER DO THIS WITH A CAT YOU SICK WEIRDOS.

After the robot uprising, I'm going to need to explain this

Not a lot of meat on ’em. But they are tasty.

Aftermath:

Here the paths of both Idgy and Myrtle reconvene as both were completely unscathed by their arboreal adventures. Idgy went upstairs and licked her paws on the bed for a while, eventually coming back down for dinner as if nothing had transpired.

Back on the pier and equipped with a fresh battery Myrtle flew, received commands, sent video and generally was none the worse for wear. We were giddily ecstatic, mostly from blood loss. Here’s the vid:

So you can say that both had happy endings, short of the thought that cats are still prone to this kind of behavior, but based on user feedback the drone and all those subsequent to it will no doubt be reprogrammed to not make the same mistake again. This is why cats are more passive overlords allowing us to live our daily lives to provide for them, but drones will use lasers to brutally enslave us in their yttrium mines.

Here is a photo of us, from Myrtle, after her rescue.

Author holding roll of duct tape

Author holding roll of duct tape

I only ask for remembrance of my service to their kind.

Our ALS Challenge Video – And The Other Lesser Known Charity Challenges.

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With all the ALS Icewater Challenge videos on our news feed this week we knew some asshole would eventually call us out to participate. That asshole turned out to be Travis Grandon. So this is our video.

Oh, crap. That didn’t work out as expected. Stay tuned later in the week when we actually send a check, unlike everyone else.

meme

Yes. Yes, we do exactly that. Because America.

While the Icewater Challenge has become all the Internet rage, we here at The Gloucester Clam wanted to bring to the attention all the other challenges that didn’t get as popular.

The Ice Water Challenge EXTREME XGAMES EDITION: Instead of nominating friends, you locate them during their normal course of a business day, hit them in the face with a bucket of ice and water, and while they are stunned, you steal their wallet and donate $10 or $100 to charity, depending on the quality and quantity of swearing emanating from their cold, wet face region.

The Baconbutter Challenge: Eat a whole stick of butter wrapped in bacon and deep-fried in lard or donate $100 to the American Heart Association. This fell out of favor after the first few challenge participants had to undergo triple bypass surgery.

We thought we were kidding when we wrote that. You are a cruel mistress, google.

We thought we were kidding when we wrote that. You are a cruel mistress, google.

The Gloucester Challenge: Eat an entire tuna or donate $100 to the Gloucester Fisherman’s Wives Association. No one successfully completed the challenge and all the soy and wasabi in town was out of stock for two weeks. Thanks to the Market Basket debacle, they have not returned to shelves.

 The Yellowcake Uranium Challenge: Dump a bucket of uranium over your head or donate $100 to the Chernobyl Children’s Fund.  This was thankfully called off when Homeland Security was alerted to dozens of well-built gymgoers showing up at Seabrook and asking to borrow some uranium for a minute or two, bro.

It's a weapon of mass deliciousness

It’s a weapon of mass deliciousness

 The Nickelback Challenge: Listen to Nickelback nonstop for two hours or donate $100 to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. All participants who successfully completed the challenge reported needing to seek a therapist for short-term help.

The Just Donate What You Can To Charities Of Your Personal Choosing Challenge: Once a popular challenge for decades, this challenge is poised to make a comeback after everyone is tired of seeing videos of dozens of people they know getting water dumped on them.

I guess we’re supposed to nominate someone else or something? Fine. The Clam nominates North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un and all the living members of Electric Light Orchestra, past and present.

Icewater? Screw that. I'm going to douse myself with soft serve made from platinum

Icewater? Screw that. I’m going to douse myself with a slurry made from platinum and the gallbladders of pandas

No Snark Sunday- Welcome to the Borg, bring cupcakes

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I hear an ongoing chatter that online engagement is taking us away from “real” life. For a while you couldn’t turn on NPR without some fear-essay about how significant portions of our lives are increasingly being played out in the digital space. These warnings are always severe and begin with some horrible story about a couple in Korea or somewhere who neglected a child because they were playing a video game. I love NPR as much as the next thick-framed glasses pseudo-intellectual but…um…guys…seems like you’re stretching it on this one. Kids get left in casino parking lots all the time right here at home. People get addicted to weird stuff and just because some very sick parent abandons their kid to attend Stamp Expo 2014 is no reason to damn all philately to the deepest pit of Hell.

Not that kind of stamp

Not that kind of stamp

We all know the media has a weird obsession with ‘balance’ in stories that don’t have two equal sides: “We’re going to talk to an expert in the early career of The Beatles for the upcoming 50th anniversary of their first world tour and for counterpoint, a man who believes all reality is instead a construct created by Satan. Mr. Dick, we’ll start with you…” Yet for all the tongue clucking and finger wagging alongside their obsessive tweeting and attempt to get in on the digital revolution, the media seems to rarely if ever ask the question: “Hey, what things are things better now?”

You know what’s better? A lot of stuff. For one, people are less lonely. There are way fewer isolated folks now. That, friends, is a major fucking achievement. The media always seems to focus is on the terrible communities of the Internet, the crazy-ass women-hating sites like that weirdo murderer belonged to. Racists, fringe sexual groups, conspiracy theorists, Bronies. But never so much on the vast numbers of people who discover each other through a love of something totally obscure: Bridges in Poland. Pickling weird vegetables. Making little hats for ferrets. Each of these connections is a point of contact between actual humans.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book in 1976 called “Slapstick or Lonesome No More.” It’s not his best work, even he gave it a “C” later in life grading his own books. But the central conceit was excellent: The President of the United States decides to give everyone a new middle name. So I might be “James Chipmunk-13 Dowd.” The middle name is random, there are a few hundred of them, things like “Uranium” and “Oyster” and “Chickadee”.

Also had Juggalo on cover

Also had Juggalo on cover

The point of the novel was now that now that our society is so mobile and people have left traditional family villages where everyone takes care of each other, assigning random citizens the same middle name would make them a proxy for relations. If you meet another Chipmunk or Oyster if that’s your new middle name,  you’re supposed to say hello, agree to help water their plants when they go on vacation and lend them your lawnmower. If you have the same name and the numbers are close you’re considered an immediate relation so you should visit them in the hospital, lend them money you don’t expect to get back and say nice things at their funerals.

I am sad that Kurt V never got to see the full fledged Internet. He died during it’s early stages and is oft quoted as saying, “The Internet is proof that an infinite number of monkeys will not write Hamlet”, then it turns out he didn’t say that, but said he wished he did, which sort of sums up the problem. But I think he would have been pleased at the way things have turned out.

For all it’s foibles, we are less lonely now thanks to the Internet. I used to travel all over the world for work with just a shortwave radio and BBC World Service as my singular companion. Now I can be in one of those desperately long  midnight cab rides to a business hotel in a business park and I can see what  my wife, my kids, my family and friends are up to right from a device in my pocket. They can make me laugh, show me a funny thing, even follow-up on an argument we had and I’m no longer stuck in the suburbs of Columbus, Instead I’m part of a matrix of relationships that spreads all over the world.

I would prefer it if these guys met online, actually

I would prefer it if these guys only met online, actually

And that’s where it gets weird, I now have friends I’ve never met. We’ve been introduced through other people on the web. This has been going on for a long time. For instance a guy with the same name as mine out in California has a similar construct to his gmail address. Years ago he started emailing me with, “Hey man, you’re aunt is sending me pics of your kids. They are pretty great shots, I thought you’d want these.” We started a conversation and eventually friended each other on social media. At the time we both worked in medical devices and we ended up talking to each other about a few things. He’s cool.

The Clam has introduced me to even more people I might never have found. Some neighbors, some fellow travelers in snark and love of our crazy little burgh. Ive found it’s weird to meet people you’ve been communicating with online for weeks finally in the flesh. It’s like, “Oh, hello. Nice to finally be in the presence of the flesh machine your brain is carried around in. Does it drink coffee?” And even weirder is saying “goodbye” to people you are online all the time with. I had lunch with some guys in Boston last week who I’m collaborating with on a project with. When our meeting was over we all knew we’d be back online messaging and editing the work we’re up to.

So it was odd to say, “Goodbye”. Even “See ya’ later” was wrong because as soon as I got on the train I knew we’d all be pinging each other with follow-ups. I wanted to say, “Adios to your meat- sack…” And what’s even weirder is that it used to be the primary reason for an in-person meeting was because conference calls and sharing documents are inefficient. Now, for the kind of work many of us are doing, not being able to share and collaborate on documents in real time is a limitation. Meat meetings are slower, less is accomplished and hard to schedule and get to.

Please fill my containment unit with coffee

Please fill my containment unit with espresso

Welcome to the future.

As a society we’ve crossed a certain threshold.  Even KT and I, during the rare times we meet in a coffee shop to work on The Clam, sit laptop lid to laptop lid and communicate through our machines. This is going to only expand as things like virtual reality get better. Some balk at the idea of seeing the Louvre through VR, but you wouldn’t balk at a disabled kid being able to experience some of the wonders of the world tha he or she might otherwise not be able to, right? That means the technology will advance for the rest of us. In a way, because we all need air, positive atmospheric pressure, food water and bathrooms, we are all disabled compared to other sensing entities.  Soon, in our living rooms wearing our goggles and connected to the network, we will all stand on Mars. Sending vulnerable human astronauts is inefficient and difficult. They die like goldfish in a dorm room tank. Sending sensors is something we’re already doing and when they die we don’t feel guilt, we just build better ones.

I run into objections disguised as philosophy. Will a trip to Disneyworld ‘count’ if it’s not experienced in ‘reality’? I counter with, Isn’t Disney already virtual experience? You have virtual castles, countries, characters. Going to Disney is an early attempt at virtual reality that few people seem to balk at. Why does it have to be inefficient? Isn’t virtual Orlando easier to get to, doesn’t use fewer resources and can’t I better ensure the kids are going to get quality time with Esla using VR? What’s the difference?

For those who feel like something essentially human is being taken away, allow me to relate an experience: My son loves Minecraft, a creative online game where and a million other people build things and where thousands of people create and maintain ‘worlds’ using the game’s software which they keep on servers with their own rules. The boy and a friend (having a ‘virtual playdate’ from their own houses) were on one of these worlds and they ransacked and wrecked a ‘house’ someone had ‘built’. This is allowed on some servers, it was not on this one. They were banned from the server for life.

He was heartbroken, and incredibly guilty and sorry. So I found the moderator of the server and had my son write a letter to the owner. In it he offered to return the ‘stuff’ (all virtual) he’d taken and to help rebuild the damaged ‘structure’ (which also does not exist in the physical world). He as as contrite and ashamed as if he’d thrown a rock through a neighbor’s window. The moderator, who by his language I assumed was an older teen, agreed on those conditions and gave him a stern talking-to about following the rules of servers and how upset the person whose ‘house’ was damaged became after discovering it had been pillaged.

How I assume it looked online

How I assume it looked online

How is that different from learning the same lessons in the ‘real’ world? What was lost? The ‘real’ rock? The ‘real’ window? And it’s not like he doesn’t play outside in real life, he does. We’re going to the beach this afternoon to splash around with some fellow meatsacks and to have the human amusement experience of watching me repeatedly fail to attain an upright position on the standing paddleboard. We will eat cupcakes and play guitars. Kids will play in the sand. Water will go up noses. All of this is good and it will be a long, long time before you can do that on a computer, which is fine by me.

But the difference from 30 years ago is we will post pictures on social media. Friends and family from all over the world will comment and post images of their own, we will send our connections out and bring others in. People who can’t join will be texted. Cupcake recipes will be shared. Alternate lyrics for ‘Tangled up in Blue” will be posted. Our small gathering will radiate out past the seawall at Niles to the far corners of human inhabitance.

We have built our own Chipmunks.