Who Knew?

There I was; sitting in my office at work, on the phone with a customer.  As usual, we were discussing her divorce, her bad luck with men... we were discussing her life.  We rarely spoke business because this customer was a friend.   I never met Laurie but I knew everything about her life.  Our friendship simply involved the telephone.

One day, she's telling me a story about her latest boyfriend; some redneck she met on some strange place found on a computer.  She said that place was called Myspace.  I had never heard of it.  Sure, I had a computer but it was more of a portal for playing solitaire, watching porn and emailing people.  This notion of social networking was foreign to me.

Laurie knew I enjoyed writing stuff.  That's all she knew about me.  Our conversations were always about her; which was fine by me.  She was my customer.  She made me a lot of money.  She eventually became my telephone friend. 

"You should join Myspace.  Ya know, you can write stuff there and friends will read your stuff if ya want them to", Laurie told me in her thick raspy unsophisticated voice. 

"The internet is for pedos and fags", I replied.   Our comfort level with each other was at a level where I could use any offensive word and not have to worry about losing her business.  It probably helped that she was a truck driver's daughter and her limited vocabulary was all centered around various uses of the word fuck. 

After countless stories of her redneck boyfriend she met on Myspace, I eventually caved in.  I clumsily made myself a profile, added thousands of random people, a handful of real life friends and then began playing around with the blogging feature that existed on that potentially life changing platform.

Now, at the time, I didn't consider this to be life changing.  In fact, I was a little embarrassed to even admit to my real life friends I had a profile there.  The internet is for pedos and fags... that's what we all believed.

As I began to learn how to navigate myself around Myspace, I started typing in the names of my real life friends into the search button.  Lo and behold, they were all there.  They all had myspace profiles.  But guess what?  I didn't dare mention that I knew their dirty little secret because that would mean I would have to admit I have become "one of them".

Funny how life is... Who knew one could become the very thing he mocks? 

Myspace became a little oasis during the day.  It was my little vacation home when boredom set in.  Then, it evolved to become a permanent place of residence.

I started writing stuff.  Random people took an interest in my words.  I started showing up in some strange blog rankings Myspace had which distinguished the popular "writers" from the unknown.  Rankings that gave me a sense of pride with a dash of delusion blended in.  "I'M FAMOUS!"  I thought, as I would find myself nestled between a blog from The Jonas Brothers and the supermodel wife of Peter Brady.

Who knew artificial rankings not based on talent but simply representing the number of views your blog was seen could grow one man's ego to an enormous degree?  But hey, in my defense, I didn't really understand how social networks work.  I was deluded by my own naivety. 

It didn't take long for me to begin to meet new bloggers and read their words.  And then in some miraculous twist of fate, I made friends.  I made friends that simply existed inside my computer.  I was embarrassed by the fact. 

Who knew making friends inside a computer could be embarrassing?  The irony that I met these friends inside my computer was all due to my telephone friend, Laurie, was lost on me. 

Here we are, eight years later, at the beginning of 2014 and some of my best friends still live inside my computer; friends I probably will never meet, friends whom sometimes creep into my dreams, friends I think about when my computer is off.

Back in 2007, on that dreaded place called Myspace, I met this woman named Michelle.  She was a woman born with Muscular Dystrophy.  She wrote these poignant blogs about her life and struggles. They were almost always funny befit with sarcasm and a touch of wisdom.  She was universally loved by all her friends; those of us inside her computer and of course, her real life ones.

On her About Me section of her Myspace page, this was written:

In the last few years, I've been told by various people I should tell my story, get it out there or even write a book. I'm told my personality and life experiences conflicts with someone who has a physical illness. So rather than feeling overwhelmed and writing a whole book, I thought I would start off here and mainly in Blogs [READ THE BLOGS FOR MORE DETAILED INFORMATION]. And then maybe eventually I can put it all in a book.

Funny how life is... Here I am three years after her death and she just randomly showed up in my thoughts tonight. A friend from inside my computer whom I only knew from her blogs and some relatively funny conversations impacted me to such a degree that I find myself missing her and her refreshing view of life.

Who knew that someone from inside my computer could be more real than almost anyone else I have ever literally met? 

I wish Michelle had lived long enough to write her book.

I wish words like maybe and eventually didn't exist.

I wish we treated time like a valuable finite resource instead of letting it waste away as we discuss our own potential and our own dreams. 

These eight years I have spent wandering the deserts of social networking has finally led me to this oasis which is this understanding that life is a tapestry of events and characters that culminate into an exquisite, sublime plan. 

Funny how life is... One day, you're sitting in your office on the telephone thinking you have life all figured out.  Then eight years later, you realize that learning about ourselves and how we fit into this twisted world can only be done through the eyes of other people.  And sometimes those people exist in a virtual world where touch ceases to exist but the shrapnel of their words and the vagueness of their identities comes to a complete understanding that indeed they do not solely exist inside our computers but have become real life friends who will impact us from that day forward.

Who knew?