I WAS Going to Send This to All My Friends...

I was going to send this to all my friends. Got into the Compose mood, carefully checked all the contacts who might find it worthwhile, carefully placed the contact into the bcc: field, so they wouldn't be spammed.

Then, meaning to close another window, I closed the mail program.

As Homer says, "D'oh!"

So, I'm posting the link here, thus re-affirming the main point of the post - we don't communicate directly with friends anymore.

My old friend Ake (’awke’) Larsson was in St. Petersberg when he received my letter this week, as usual tinged with news about the curious desperation and isolation of Life in America.

He wrote about the boozy St. Petersberg tables where they were celebrating some colleague’s PhD, and it sounded like something out of Milan Kundera–just that, the idea of people at a table, the same table, for a long night in which an event is consecrated and celebrated, between people, friends, who went out of their way, in this case traveled from Sweden to Russia, to celebrate.

How often do any of us have that anymore?

These damn machines.

I fear the erosion and extinction of corporeal time, corporeal friendship, bodies together in time and space, more than I fear any other loss including the first amendment or polar ice caps. I sit at miserable piece of white plastic each night and I type forth, trying to connect and be less alone. The Internet. Soundless, it starves us very slowly. It is like a very tiny straw through which we are permitted survival breath. My father’s voice–I rarely hear it anymore. Friends voices, I never hear them. We email each other about getting together and then we cancel and send more email. Like ash flakes falling on a dying world, these emails.

Read the rest - it's a provocative treasure.

After reading it, I understood the rock opera Tommy as I never had before.