Auntie Dynamite

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September 16, 2003

Volume 35: Play me le jazz hot baby

I am interested in love; I am very interested in love. Unluckily, the Russian correctly said active love is labour and fortitude, harsh and dreadful, and my constitution has not lent itself to either. A ten year stretch of voice-killing sore throats lasting three to five months at a time; two years of mysterious knee damage intermittently putting me in a wheelchair; later, the multi-months of walking pneumonia made worse by antibiotics to which nobody noticed I was allergic. And so on. A parade of useless and often malevolent doctors. It's turned me into the most irradiated kind of romantic, a cynic. Knowing this weakness for romance, I treat it like any other of my diminishing frailties: I monitor, evaluate, and aggressively investigate potential cures — sometimes over the internet.

It is unsurprising that I should have immediately taken to the internet when I first got access over ten years ago. It allows me to research and socialize and publish my art so long as I am well enough to sit up. I need not even be able to speak that day (and easily revert to talking with my hands and facial expressions only).

I have moved around my whole life. One of the big effects of allergy is that you want to get away from whatever's triggering. When you have as many as I do, though, that strategy is pointless without a specific plan. Moving within the same town is useless if the problem is mold growing through the entire countryside -- unless your doctor, who didn't the first time I lived there, knows enough to prescribe the right steroid. My second stint in that town was actually quite nice, where the first was unremittingly horrible. Moving to get away from the mold is no good if you go to a city where air pollution from half the province collects in the downtown. Why didn't I know any better? My doctors were idiots. I have better doctors now, so I am getting better, and when I encounter a fresh idiot, I fire him. This is working extremely well.

The internet allowed me to, for the first time, maintain contact with people while moving around. (The phone is not your first choice when you've lost your voice as oft as I have.) I've had the same email address for eight years (and yes, I get a lot of spam). I've also run a mud at the same address (hypercube.org:9000) for about nine years. Some of my favourite people I know only from my mud and email, which doesn't make them any less remarkable or interesting or make me care any less.

(HEY PIBER IF YOU SEE THIS FUCKING SEND EMAIL STOP YOU LAZY COCK STOP YOU PHONE AT 2AM RAVE ABOUT THAT WANKER NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE ALSO GOOFY BILL JOY AND THEN DISAPPEAR TO SPAIN STOP WHAT THE HELL? STOP LOVE GT STOP)

For five years, ending about five years ago, when I was most sick (the pneumonia lasting eleven months straight this time, despite a sympathetic and relatively intelligent doctor) I wrote every day, on my mud. Purple stuff, and necessarily formulaic, but I have too much talent and cussedness to get stuck in method. I still work on the game when I relapse; I suppose it's no worse than a model train set. Structurally it's is an advanced form of the elaborate dollhouses I built when I was stuck at home from school. I wallpapered them. Sewed dresses and furniture. If I could get my parents to do some tricky bit with, say, lighting, great, if not, I improvised.

I slightly wish I could have worked on more publishable stuff in that time block, but despite a good mentor from CBS, I turned out only a few dozen traditional journo pieces. The mistake was in trying to develop a specific writing bent instead of just writing — like trying to learn how to play only Beethoven. Now, whatever motivates me to write — global politics or someone stuck in meetings or random narcissistic exegesis like this — I'll take it.

There are still friendships through my mud, and there were romances. The romances went as romances go — that is, they failed from incompatibility, dishonesty, character defect, or other usual reasons. I take dating over the internet about as seriously as I take dating in person, experience about the same amount of trouble and daydreaming, have gone out of my way for it to about the same degree, married (and divorced) one of them, and want to date over the internet now about as much as I want to date in person. Yes dear, almost not at all.

Yet...

There are people I've known only online for a decade or so, and sneakily, it's no longer enough. Last year I started asking for pictures. This spring, recommending my actual phone number. This summer, a surprisingly tolerable experiment with now-unborrowed videoconferencing gear, but mostly the idea is, come visit.

(THAT'S A HINT, GUNNAR, FINISH YR PROJECT, GET PI AND BRING BOOZE.)

The more forcefuly I inhabit my more-reliable body the more sensory connection I want to make with everything. More photography, more music, better food, cleaner air, doing weights again — it's logical that I want more physical — tactile — presence too. If I think you're delightful I want to experience your visceral existence, and if it's good, great, and if not, I still prefer regrets of things I did to regrets of things I didn't. I am not saying I want to run off tomorrow with some mountain guy to his distant homeland. I do not. I am talking about market research and calculated risk... Hah!

I will eventually be well, judging from my overall progress, and when I am, I expect to have a pretty good time. Even full of arsenic I've hiked to the highest point in the Gatineau Hills, been proposed to (YES NINO, IN PERSON) about once a year since I was fifteen (and very confusedly hat-tricked proposals in one weekend), worked for the richest department in the Canadian government as well as the poorest, beaten a grown man with my straw hat at a stoplight in a rental car, carried a twenty pound bag of cat food under one arm, listened to at least twenty thousand pieces of music and read god knows how many thousands of books, written half an opera, been an editor, a theatre director, an art smuggler... And cynic I am, I'm honest enough to admit I still believe in happiness. And the possibility of love. Yum, possibility. Let's float possibility.

Posted by gtaylor at September 16, 2003 07:56 PM

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