The internet serves the unique purpose of providing everyone who has access to a computer with a voice, creating channels of communication that we couldn’t even have imagined twenty years ago. It’s incredible. We can speak to each other through cyberspace with a freedom that’s never been achieved in verbal discussion. The only problem is that there’s a fine line between absorbing new perspectives and losing faith in our species. The more we learn about each other, the less we want to know. Take this recent email as an example:

“your blog is fucking boring now, it was much more interesting when you
were doing something you hated in life, ironic isn’t it?

If you write a book, I would not buy it. I would only peruse through it at
the bookstore to reaffirm that you don’t have anything interesting to say.

but you are pretty. Im sorry your life is so dull now. and you are a good
writer, except your stories suck.”

Sent to my account at 12:38 A.M. on the Saturday night of Easter/Passover weekend. I read this and I’m instantly sad; it reminds me how empty life can be, and how close we all are to ending up crouched in front of a computer in the middle of the night reading blogs, terrified of the external world, permanently documenting our fear and rage to total strangers, clinging to an insubstantial identity in a universe that will never love us back. But still, I can’t stop thinking about the whole scene, what it must have looked like early Sunday morning in the dark of this guy’s living room, the computer screen’s anesthetic glow illuminating his damaged isolation.

The thing is, I like damaged people - like seeks like, as it were. Damaged people burn, as Kerouac would say; they emit a broken madness that’s hopelessly compelling. They do and say things that far surpass those stubbornly cloaked in normalcy, and their secrets are more intriguing. Take my weekend correspondent. What was his childhood like? How does his mind work? What are his dark places? I can certainly wager an educated guess. His banal and unimaginative writing gives much away, disappointingly - the fascinating nutcases are necessarily smart. Reading a chat room comment, email or blog post, you can learn to identify intelligence in seconds- the smarties bleed mutilated humanity in semi-coherent sentences that baffle and amaze. This guy’s an amateur, lacking the wit or creativity to make something of his unresolved angst. But angst there is, regardless of the inability to understand or express it. So he joins the millions of men (yes, they are overwhelmingly men, it’s been stated numerous times by people who sound authoritative) dumping their formerly-clenched internal mess into cyberspace. It can be depressing to contemplate, all that human misery tossed into a bottomless technological landfill of written words. Nonetheless, given one of those absurd absolutist hypotheticals, I’d take this guy over an effortlessly cliche WASP posterchild on the desert island any day. At minimum, he would guarantee some interesting conversation.