BY THE TIME i had been on aol for two weeks i just knew that the potential for getting online girlfriends was enormous, and that distance didn't matter, and i was fired up. Fired up, and naive as hell, even at the not so tender age of forty five.
Suddenly, it seemed as if all the women i'd never had were about to be mine. what an idiot. thinking with the small head, as they say, rather crudely but accurately. To this day, i still believe that people i met on aol were real, although in most case i have no proo of it.
most of them i always wanted to meet in person, but never did. oh well. i wonder what they'r doing now. Babes who were in their late twenties in the year 2000 must be past fory now. is the world filling up with people who wonder whatever happened to such and suh internet friend from ten or fifteen years ago? It must be.
my friend from shanghai china told me he was amazed at how much time americans seem to spend alon, how lonley they seem to him, and unsocial to the point they seem to prefer the company of their dogs and cats to that of other people.
he talked about how in china people always gathered together in groups to drink, or to do almost anything else, and that when they drink they always eat, unlike americans, whos eem adverse to mixing the two pleasures.
The aol chatrooms were ostensible a good way to rebuild some semblance of community in america, in the wake of the demise of civic organizations, churches, and so forth. electronic community building, after all the communities technology ruined.
But ti didn't work out that way. Chatrooms largely vanished, and now we have facebook, which, despite all the initial hoopla, seems to have peaked, and revealed its limitations. Those of us who bought facebvook IPO at around forty are of course hoping for a facebook comeback.
The most interesting thing that happened to me on aol was my construction of a marriage. There's no other way to describe it. I met a wonderful lady online who was dating and in love with a guy hundreds of miles away from her, a guy who suddenly dropped out of her life, for no apparent reason, leaving her devastated.
I kept listening to her talk about it, inadvertantly gathering information and constructing theories.At length I became convinced that not only did i understand exactly what was going on, but that the situation could be repaired to the lady's satisfaction; if the right strategy were used.
my friend Brenda was very pessimistic about getting back together with this man, and very unhappy about losing him, so i had to shoot off my big mouth and tell her that she could get the man to marry her if she played her cards right. Doom fell when she listened to me.
Thus i spent the next six months, or at least thirty minuts a day of it, trading instant message with a lady five hundred miles away from me, dictating strategy. I should write a book about it.
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