Unblog

I realized that after a while I started to divide my life into these two categories: the friends I actually see in person from time to time, and my “electronic friends” who exist in my life either entirely, or almost entirely, because they check into this blog, leave comments and engage in discussions. From time to time I might exchange a private email with such a friend, but it’s still an electronically mediated exchange.

Of course there are friends and relatives from my physical-world life, my “unblog”, who also participate in this blog. Many of them know each other, or have worked together, or have shared a drink at a party or two. I also have two physical-world friends who for years have had a seriously intense animosity between them, and yet they each contribute comments here fairly regularly.

I also have two cousins – brothers – two wonderful men, each of whom I adore, and each of whom I see at least once a year, who seem to be separated from each other by something beyond animosity, some mysterious and powerful mutual trauma. They have not spoken to one another for – quite literally – years. And yet they both comment on this blog fairly often.

So there’s the mix: Complex, irrascible, fascinating humans, some in my life physically, and others electronically. But today there was a startling, and quite wonderful, cross-over. I received a Federal Express package, and it turned out to be a holiday gift from a friend I know almost entirely from her comments on this blog. I have grown to like her very much over these months. But I had always, without really thinking about it, placed her in the category of “electronic friend” – that strangely post-millenial disembodied category of being.

But this gift, this lovely old-fashioned wooden puzzle that now sits on the table before me, is so much the antithesis of the electronic, such an affirmation of our underlying physical connection with things. At the end of the day, these minds of ours are not abstract thought machines, but are attached to physical bodies – in all their beauty, strangeness and fragility. And knowing this, really knowing it, is incredibly important.

And so the simple act of receiving a wooden puzzle has made me feel closer to this friend in a way that could never have been achieved by even the most eloquent torrent of electronic words. A doorway has opened between us, in the unblog.

3 thoughts on “Unblog”

  1. hmmm . . . I had always assumed that all the “people” in my computer were figments of my imagination. It seemed strange that there was a wikipedia page for solipsism. Now I feel bad for my behavior on XBox live. . .
    Nice post, as always.

  2. Well Troy, if you’ve realized that much, then I’m sure you also know that the function of the One is now to return to the source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting the program.

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