One day a man came home to be greeted at the door by his wife dressed in a sexy nighty.Now, I don't normally pass on jokes from people. Speaking for myself, getting an email full of jokes, or campaigns, or heartfelt stories, or petitions, or ANYTHING that has a "Forwarded" list of about 200 people on it is the fastest way I can think of to wind up high in my "Spam" filter.
"Tie me up," she purred, "And then do anything you want..."
So he tied her up and went golfing.
BDSM fail.
New internet people are the worst.
For example, I have a friend who lives in a fireplace and wood-stove cabin up near the Idaho/Montana border. He's on the edge of the grid, so has plumbing, but the only reason he has power to the place at all is to run the half-dozen or so light bulbs scattered at random throughout, a water heater (which he still marvels at, having done without for quite awhile) and a small TV. He's no Luddite, not anti-tech - he just hasn't got much use for it, mostly.
In fact, he's from a big East-Coast city, and was a hard-core pavement and concrete New Englander until the military got him. We were in a unit together about a hundred years ago. It's where we met, and we had adventures and smoked dope and chased women and did...a lot of things.
And when his time was up, he never really got back into the groove. Maybe he never was in it in the first place, I don't know. He hung out with bikers for awhile, did a couple of short jail hits and a somewhat longer prison stretch, got married a couple of times, had a kid, got divorced a couple of times, and gets along well with the ex with the kid, and not so well with the other who sells real estate now.
It's been a life, for sure, although probably not the one you'd have picked.
During all this he had discovered hunting and how to be alone in the woods, and his hunting and fishing trips up-country got longer and longer, and he finally just sort of wandered off into the high ranges.
He works when he needs money, hunts when he needs food and is, generally, as happy as any of us, as far as I can tell. We see each other for a couple of days about every five years. We catch up and tell stories and look at old pictures of us which he has improbably managed to hang onto, remember exotic places and friends from back in a time when we were ten feet tall and bulletproof, and get drunk.
He still smokes a bit, but has cut way back - says he doesn't miss it, and it makes it too hard to get anything done, and getting stuff done is pretty much a requirement for people who live like he does in places where snow can be 10 feet deep and last forever.
He thinks the sun rises and sets on his grandchildren - they live in the area and come visit him at his cabin a lot, which they treat pretty much as their own personal treehouse imaginarium. Really, what little kid wouldn't love going to grampa's cabin, where you can roast marshmallows on the wood fire after supper and chase around the woods and explore the pieces and pictures and the odd shrapnel of a life scattered and stacked in secret places and shelves around every corner?
His son, who had his own experiences running with an outlaw biker crew and raising hell, finally settled when HE had kids and actually became something of a "success," or at least as society defines such things, and a tech guy.
When I dropped by my friend's place a couple of years ago, we did the usual hug and slap each other on the back and call each other horrible things - and then he made me come inside, to show me his newest "thing".
There, sitting on what was grandly called the "Kitchen Table" (a chrome and laminate affair from about 1952 covered with a vinyl tablecloth) was a brand new, high-end, shining MacBook Pro.
His son had bought it for him, he told me as he grabbed a bottle of Jack and a couple of glasses out of the cabinet. Only a couple of days before, his son had come over and installed wireless which was fed through a dish on the roof that pointed directly at a tower a couple of miles away.
He has a cleaner internet feed than I do.
"You gotta see this," he said, sitting in front of the machine. He had a sheet of paper his son had written for him - and he followed, step by step, each line ("Click The ENTER Button Now") until the machine chimed and booted up. Then, still glancing at the instructions, he moved the cursor to an icon and carefully double-clicked - and an email account opened up.
He double-clicked on a line, and a message opened - "Hi, Grampa!" it said - and he scrolled down and there was a picture of his granddaughter, a self-portrait which she'd apparently taken with a webcam since it featured a grinning little girl leaning forward to peer into the camera lens with her right eye.
We sat there at that crappy table in a log cabin that needed to be chinked a bit better, the summer insects humming and creaking and getting wound up for the night, the evening breeze starting to distantly whoosh thorough the tops of the pines, a bottle of whiskey between us, and a little girl grinning at us from the glowing monitor.
"Can you fucking believe that shit?" he said, awestruck.
*********************************************
I gave him all the email addresses I had, old friends, people he hadn't heard from in years. And since then, at least a couple of times a month, I get one of those emails from him, every time with another 5 or 10 or so people on the "To:" list.
He's learning how to use graphics and animated GIFs, and has taken to photographing interesting things around him and posting the images on his new blog. He has FaceBook and Twitter and an email "thing" going with a woman in Georgia and another in New Mexico.
And last year he loaded his crappy, creaky van with everything he figured he'd need and, for the first time in 20 years went East of the Mississippi, back home to visit his family who, it turns out, are also on the net.
And he videoblogged the whole trip, uploading entries every night at local hotspots.
I wish I knew how I felt about all this.
In Our Next Episode: SEX. Well, probably not, but it turns out that word and the redheads increase the traffic here.Oooh, which reminds me:
Damn, Sam, when you do storytime ...
ReplyDeleteThat's so cool.
ReplyDeleteI do hate those circular emails though. I get a lot saying "you are a wonderful woman, now pass this on to twenty-seven friends". And an equal number that would never have been sent if anyone had ever bothered to look at Snopes or Hoaxbusters.
Man, do I love good writing! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI understand the ambivalence about your friend's new-found connection back into the world.
There's a reason there are so many pictures of cats draped across computer keyboards: They're trying to tell their owners there are better things to do with their hands than move the mouse pointer to the next link on Digg.
It's a timely reminder for most of us 'net addicts.