by: Mark Thomas [[email protected]] 
date: 09/22/95 17:22 PM






It's been 5 or 6 weeks now since the last time I chatted on IRC,
and it's been months since I saw a usenet post. There was a period 
of time during which I was on IRC practically 24 hours a day. I 
kept my SLIP connection open and left the program running, and 
always liked waking up in the morning to find what /msges had 
collected for me overnight. A lot of people on the channels I 
frequented thought I was a bot. I seldom said much of anything, 
and would go days and weeks without typing so much as one word. 
I know the principle reason I stayed on-line that way was because I 
wanted there to be someone to talk to when I would bolt awake in the 
middle of the night, or when I never got to sleep in the first place. 
This insomnia which has dogged me so badly this year has been a brutal 
and commanding enemy, and a tireless companion throughout some of my 
most paranoid delusions.

God, why does this sound like a Roman Catholic confession?

Like most things in my life, I lived the experience too intensely. 
I took it far too seriously, and after only a few months of not 
being there it is hard to imagine what I ever saw in a place where 
thousands and thousands of social misfits are clammoring for attention. 
True to my own nature, though, I got all wired about the scene and 
without thinking about it did everything I could to be the loudest 
clammorer of them all. Anything for attention, that will be my 
motivation until the day I drop off the meter.

I've always been desperate for attention; as a kid people always 
wondered where I was going, because I appeared to always be on my
way to some place or some event. In fact, I was just looking 
like I was going somewhere, and looking very concerned about 
where I was going. In most cases, if anyone had followed me around 
the corner or seen what I did when I got wherever it was I seemed 
to be going, they would have seen me standing there looking around, 
pacing and fidgeting, trying to think of some other way to look 
occupied and busy.

It was important to me that I appear to have a purpose. It still is. 
My character has not changed one atom between the day I was born and 
the day I type these words. Now, though, I think I have a better sense of 
humor about it all, and don't care one way or another if anyone knows who 
I am or what I do. There could not be anything inside of me so ghastly 
that the the world could not someday handle being exposed to it.

Still, I can't help but to think of irc as a place of social purgatory. 
I don't mind visiting it, but to go back and to even see an irc screen 
right now just makes me want to scream with memories of some of the 
frustrating and impossible people encountered there, some of whom I 
met but some of whom I never knew and probably never will because I've 
expended all the effort I intend to put forth for the goal of making 
friends that way. It really is exhausting, and the real rewards are 
flimsy and unsatisfying.

I shouldn't really talk like that too much, though; it reveals a lot
about myself, and sooner or later a guy has to take stock not only of the 
people with whom he surrounds himself, but also of the way he perceives 
and describes them.  The people and the personalities that I choose 
to identify with must certainly reflect as much about myself as 
about the nature of the others. And if I choose, as I know 
I do, to be drawn to people who handle their friendship as a weapon, 
who weild their sexuality as a whip and their smile as a cannon, then 
I will certainly end up feeling that life is full of revenge and devious, 
manipulative cowards whose clattering keyboards would wake the dead with 
its obscene thrashing.

I guess these are all very obvious observations. i hold no grudges, you 
know, against anyone but myself for being such a fool to think that there 
is some kind of answer or happiness lurking out here on the network. this 
is a grudge, however, which I will maintain even while staying
here, even as sooner or later I return to irc and return to all the 
most ingratiating places of contact with others. i mean that is what this 
is all about, isn't it -- making contact and communicating. i just really 
need to grease up the bullshit detecter, and quit making the naive 
mistake of taking people at their word or believing that what they say 
about themselves in an effort to let me get to know them is true or 
meaningful. IRC has been like a booger that I just could not get rid of. 
It brings out the worst in me, and to take stock of myself again, it's 
sobering to think that I would, of course, either place myself in or 
create for myself a world in which everyone is so distant and 
manipulative, madly /msging damning rumors and imperiously dismissing 
the best of friends and the most sincere of acquaintences with just the 
slightest provocation. Social purgatory.