Stop me if you've heard this one.
Seven people get in a boat, go out for a three hour tour, the weather gets rough and bam, they're stranded.
They take a walk around...They look to the west, to the north, to the south, to the northwest, to the northeast, to the southwest, to the southeast.
They realise that they're stranded for real, nothing's gonna help 'em, and so they start trashing the ecology of their new home, hacking down vines and bamboo to build huts.
It's, like, three years later, and Gilligan comes shuffling by, listening to a bootleg of the new Beasties with a totally excellent bleeding-edge minidisc player.
"Gilligan!" the Skipper bellows.
G, of course, is totally plugged in to his walkman, and so the Skip has to bean him in the noggin before he pops the 'phones out.
"What?"
"Where'd you get that walkman, Gilligan?"
"Over there, to the east."
At which point the lot of them realise that all this time, they've been trapped on a bloody peninsula, and why the hell didn't anyone ever think to walk east?
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It's not an information superhighway. Superhighways are built by organised governments, they've got totally excellent maps, and you can join the CAA and get a guy to come by and break into your ride for you lock your keys in.
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It's a peninsula. And we're 180 million stranded castaways, no map, and we're wandering around, trying to remember if we've gone east yet.
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I just returned from three months in India: pulling hands off my ass on local buses, playing blackjack with Kashmiri carpet dealers, and learning the universal sign for "I think it's against my faith to eat that." Give me a Lonely Planet guide and a leaky tube of Biosuds and I'm on my way. I fancied myself well-travelled. Until now.
Cory invites me to his home and we venture forth, onto the net. Suddenly I'm busting up some major travelling hymen, and the fact that I'm naturally blonde seems like a cruel joke of nature. I have a sudden impulse to go home and stamp my passport.
Cory's been net-surfing since he was six. I have problems operating my voice mail, until I call the sickly sweet 1-800 lady at Bell, my message is: "What the fuck? This is not what I wanted to do...." Cory speaks in acronyms, and considers second syllables of words to be largely unnecessary. I write plays. Basically, Cory is a Net boy scout, he can start a fire in a thunderstorm while killing something to flambée for dinner. And I'm a tourist, smushing my nose against the window of the tour bus, hanky on my head, knotted at four corners... I don't know if I like this.
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The idea is:
• I use computers and BBSs and various hunks of the internet a lot. I've done so all my life.
• Kate doesn't and hasn't.
We're both "young, up-and-coming writers," which is to say that we're both pretty much broke. She's been playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre and has won a Toronto Arts Council grant, and I've sold a bunch of short science-fiction and won some prizes.
Think of the Divine Comedy. Virgil, damned soul that he is, shows Dante around for three really long volumes, while Dante makes pithy observations about the state of the afterlife.
Well, I'm pretty much guaranteed to be sterile and shortsighted from the terminal hours I've logged thus far, and that makes me Virgil, while Kate is perfectly suited to make zen soundbites as I show her around the net:
• Aren't there any women? (while scoping the "Who's Online" directory on Magic.)
• These people have a lot of spare time on their hands, don't they? (while reviewing a flame-thread in the CyberForum on Magic.)
• Who reads this stuff? I mean, besides us? (while reading the alt.fan.karla-humolka FAQ)
This column thing is pretty much a travelogue, a tour of the matrix of computer-mediated communications. We'll be here, regularly, sending back postcards from our parapatetic trips through (shudder) cyberspace.
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Today's trip started when I booted up Betsy, my trailing-edge Mac SE. She flashed her startup message ("Silicon good. Flesh bad. Come the revolution, you'll be first against the wall, Doctorow.") and then we were free to double-click the Magic icon on my desktop.
Betsy has serious attitude. It's way cool. She also hurls Simpsons/Beastie Boys abuse at you on the quarter hour. I think she's bitter because Cory has covered her in tacky Hindu goddess stickers from my travels. I don't think this is the sort of thing I'm supposed to be paying attention to.
My GVC 14.4 (New toy! I like it, I like it a lot.) chirped at us and we were logged into Magic, a FirstClass BBS of insanely great proportions here in Toronto (ATDT 288-1774, dial in with FirstClass client software or set your terminal to 8-N-1 and go!).
OK, so I hadn't thought this through very thoroughly. I got Kate an account last night and so this was her first login, and of course, a bunch of old automatic announcements popped up. This led to a largely unproductive twenty minutes during which I went over the finer points of the FirstClass Client's version history and why autoreply abuse was such a pain in the ass for admins.
Well, of course there wasn't time to see even a representative sample of Magic's treasures. Instead, we scoped a flamewar thread that had been raging in the CyberForum. Funny, it had all seemed so important when I was in the thick of it, but with Kate sitting beside me, skeptical eye turned to the messages we were reading, it all seemed somehow...weenie.
It was weenie. I was reading a flamewar about censorship with the repetitive, insistent clamour of third-graders bickering in the playground about whether you called "no punch-backs" after seeing a Volkswagen. You can ignore bullies; they may not go away , but you can ignore them.
But flamewars seemed a promising subject for a column, so we logged out of Magic and I dialed into my PPP connection at Hookup, an internet provider (+1 905 847 8000 for info) and opened up a newsreader app (NewsReader 2.017d, email j-norstad@nwu.edu for info). We browsed over the alt.flame.* hierarchy for a while:
• alt.flame.roommate
Definitely the funniest of the lot. Some highlights:
> Goodybye Lestan! Goobdye you stupid nonverbal
> Czez nincompoop! Good bye good bye
> Goodbye to your blank stares,
> goodbye to your stupid bears
> goodbye to your idiotic talk,
> goodbye to your idiotic walk!
> I want a roommate that can speak English!!!
(from jeoloughlin@miavx3.mid.muohio.edu)
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> My roommate pays lots of rent. I like this. The
> money has enabled me to endure almost 3 years
> with 'it'. However, I'm kicking it out asap.
> It:
> 1. regularly sets the house/kitchen on fire
> 2. decides it must eat as soon as I start cooking
> (no matter what time - & our kitchen isn't big
> enuf for even one person!!)
> 3. leaves all electrical appliances, etc ON
> 4. leaves the door open so the cat cn escape
> 5. screws the most hideous, unattractive married
> humans (??) it can find
> 6. assumes my room/bed is available for whomever
> it wants to allow inside while I'm out of town
> 7. breaks all my stuff (damn, this is annoying)
> 8. is a snob
> 9. is an airhead
(from pauly@psy.fsu.edu)
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• alt.flame.faggot
Totally disappointing. Half of the message traffic was taken up with a flames about the IRA, and the other two messages were a homophobic screed from some Biblebelt illiterate who couldn't hardly spell worth a damn and whose arguments consisted entirely of biblical quotes and a followup from someone who shredded this guy in a workmanlike, but bored fashion.
• alt.flame.parents, alt.flame.landlords
Nothing! Nada! Zip! No message traffic at all. I was starting to sweat, since I'd promised Kate I'd find her some excellent flamage.
• alt.flame
Tons of message traffic, none of it more than 25 BTUs of heat.
We'd exhausted alt.flame.*, so we browsed a few other newsgroups.
• alt.society.generation-x
Except for some guy named Ralph Tait, who identifies himself as the president of the "Institute for Conservative Thinking" and gets squashed with alarming thoroughness and regularity, there was very little flame traffic. One person posted a message along the lines of "You whiny GenXers are pond scum, crawl away and die," and in typical cynical media-savvy fashion, the denizens of a.s.g-x posted five followups analysing flamebait and comparing it to various sitcoms they'd seen in the eighties.
There was also much debate on which dates constituted Gen X. This I found fairly interesting, in my life-long quest for something to put on a business card. No definite answers, although being unemployed and eating lots of junk food seem to put you in instant slacker status. This net thing lends a certain dignity to the life of the sloth, knowing that there are thousands of others who spend hours hurling abuse at Geraldo, and debating the purpose of male nipples. As one put it, we are not losers, we are "ambitionally unemcumbered." Well. I feel so much better now. Am I the only one who doesn't remember what day of the week it is? May be if I do this for long enough, I also won't care.
This was Kate's first exposure to computer-mediated communications, so I thought we'd blip about a bit longer and logout and write up the article.
I gave her the mouse (which doesn't work so hot anymore, as I took it apart and lost the little springy and replaced it with the mini-slinky from the barrel of a cheap ballpoint) and she checked alt.sex.fetish.diapers (Best not to mention what we found there. Suffice it to say that human behavior covers a very broad spectrum of activities).
Why shouldn't we mention it? After all, anything beetween two consenting adults is OK, right? I pored over a step-by-step guide, that included Depends, Pampers and two-sided tape. Didn't Mr. Dressup do this? I'll never look at June Allyson the same way again.
One more trip to retrieve the FAQ from alt.fan.karla-humolka and make ick noises while we satisfied our prurient interests.
That is too gross to mention.
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It's kind of like taking a friend to meet your family. You forget just how weird they are, how surprising, how irritating.
Yeah, and you spend a lot of time explaining why jokes are funny.
You spend a lot of time fighting the urge to run away and find a bar.
Let's go get drunk.
Your treat.
Bite me, Doctorow.
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