#004 - Melanie & The Internet Wasteland
When people praise my capacity to remember random factoids of variable importance, I always tell them the same thing: my mind is an internet wasteland.
Chuck Klosterman said once that our era will be remembered in the future for one thing only: the invention of the internet. Whether you like it or not, I believe this claim is indisputable. If you’re old enough to remember living in a world without it, you know that internet changed everything about the way we live. For better or worse. Although I have my qualms with the way it evolved over the years, the internet made my life considerably better.
I would not be the person I am today without it and I believe it’s foregone conclusion that I would be a considerably more unhappy person had it never existed. We only had a connection at home in 1998, but I was an internet person before I even knew what it was. I would learn the name of every player from every team in the NHL in the Saturday papers. Memorize what songs were charting on MTV. Browse the aisles of my local video store over and over. I was a receptacle for knowledge no one I knew had any use for.
The internet changed that, but it’s not the only nor the most important thing it changed for me. My first experience with internet chatrooms made me understand I was a much more seductive person in writing. It became my highway to self-expression. At first through weird (sometimes horny) fantasy roleplaying on mIRC. Sometimes I would be me. Sometimes I would be an idealized version of me. Sometimes I would be the man my crush of the moment needed me to be. I was the worst.
Whether I was honest or not didn’t matter. For the first time in my life, I felt in control of who I was and how I came across to people. For the first time in my life, I felt power. The internet and I were both too young, horny and confused to understand what it meant, though. But that understanding would eventually come *.
I seduced my first girlfriend through mIRC. It was an accident, really. She was a sweet girl named Melanie who moved like a succubus on the dance floor. I did not plan to seduce her, but she thought my words were seducing. We ended up dancing together to N 2 Gether Now by Limp Bizkit and Method Man (most nineties thing ever, I know) at a house party and making out on a bed afterwards. To this day, this is some one the most passionate and technically adequate kissing I ever remember.
They’ll never take that from you, Melanie.
But it went downhill as soon as I started being myself around her. Too clingy. Too intense. Wanting to go too fast and do everything all at once. We started dating on a Friday and our relationship was cooked and done the following Saturday. My real self freaked her out. She wouldn’t be the first, nor the last. Back to the internet I went. Where everything was possible and nothing really mattered. Although its customs are changing over time, internet is a place where you can keep the stakes low and become someone else.
Almost overnight, there was a place where I could be wherever I want and a demand for whatever random knowledge I accumulated inside my head. It had no cohesive structure to speak of, but it didn’t matter. Melanie opened the gates to the the internet wasteland: after consuming the very short fuse of our passion, I had found purpose. I didn’t know that I did then, but I do now. There was a marketplace for who I was and the things that consumed me. Life became instantly better and still is.
* Pun intended
