Chris Preston and New Aquarius Online

For Christmas, I took some much deserved time off. I got to relax a little. I even read a book. The cool thing about my little vacation was that I didn’t check e-mail much and spent almost no time online. I even forgot a password to a site I visit often! I couldn’t keep from recording some tracks, but that’s the only work I really did last week.

As I started to revisit some of my routines last night, I had occasion to view some sites that I’d been away from for more than a week. I found that my perspective had changed dramatically. Facebook was suddenly more boring than I had ever realized before and looking over my page, I discovered in fairly short order that absolutely nothing of any interest had occurred there since I last fired it up. Every vapid status entry I read, despite their limited character count, was a struggle to get through! I couldn’t read Facebook status posts without hearing in my head, “Whatever, man.”

What a fantastic event! It never took much consideration to deem most online activities a waste of time, but having been away from them for a week, my brain went back into a more productive and authentic pattern. Monitoring posts had become more unpleasant and stressful than I realized. I was subconsciously seeking mental stimulation. Without knowing it, I was starving my brain with internet clutter!

The closest metaphor I can conjure for this is fast food. If you’re hungry and you grab fast food, it seems like you’re responding appropriately (despite the health hit). You’re eating, which is what your body is telling you to do. You are chewing. A short while later, the hunger pang dissipates. However, you’ve gotten very little in the way of actual nutrients from the food. You haven’t truly given your body what it required. You were only faking it out by putting it through the motions. If you eat enough fast food, chances are that you’ll wake up eventually and notice that you just feel terrible. With any luck, it’ll occur to you that maybe you should just stop eating such lousy food.

I woke up last night to find that in a certain sense, with internet activity, I was eating really lousy brain food. Reading blogs and monitoring the updates of my friends in my down time became a habit, but while I wasn’t watching, I started to feel a certain level of stress. Not getting the mental stimulation that I was really after had the effect of winding me up. So much so that I started to feel cross when engaged in that activity!

We all know that fast food is garbage. However, it always tastes the same, and the experience is quite predictable. Learning to cook is better. Facebook and stuff like that seem like you’re interacting dynamically. It too always tastes the same, and the experience is quite predictable. It might feel as if you’re watching the lives of your friends as they unfold. As an observer and contributor, you might even feel like you’re achieving some level of connectedness. But that doesn’t happen online in a sustainable way.

So what am I really doing? What am I really thinking about? What’s worth sharing? What isn’t? I feel like the initial phase of online social interaction is over. I’m now convinced. It’s been proven to me over and over that the mundane is a part of life that makes us all the same. I don’t need any more reminders. We don’t have to talk about that anymore. I want amazing. I want inspirational. I want to experience the true energy of being alive. I want to hear about that. That’s what I want to share. Even with the more methodical and organized online contributors, I can spot “content” a mile away. I’m done.

It’s great to be silent until you really have something to say. How can anything be extraordinary if it’s expressed on the same humming party line as everything else? Facebook and online life has become decidedly black and white. I’m ready for color.

I had a peculiar thought last week. It occurred to me that I have been an adult for longer than I was ever a child. By child, I mean in the purely chronological and legal sense. I find more often now that I can use expressions like “20 years ago…” and be referring honestly to some bit of personal experience. I’ve begun to take more notice when my friends and acquaintances talk about “getting old.” This condition is still not something that I consciously claim. Perhaps it’s because my health is not failing and I still have all of this hair, but it might also be that I’ve yet to give up on my life and its untapped potentials. When I hear someone my age talking about “getting old,” I immediately leap, perhaps erroneously, to thinking how that person must be seeking affirmation, even forgiveness, for accepting his lot.

Far from accepting my lot, I’m loathe to think of any condition as my lot. Nor have I ever been one to state that I’m “getting old” while I shake my head ruefully about something that I perceive to be outside of my control. I don’t believe I’ve ever claimed that I was “getting too old” for anything. I’m not in denial, for surely enough, I’ve aged, but the expression has not leaked into my personal lexicon. It’s as alien to me as it would be to preface a sentence with “Back when I would take on rabid black bears three at a time…”

My attitude on having lived almost two score years is never more than whatever wisdom I’ve managed to accrue. I’m much more likely to say something like, “I’ve come too far” to be averted by some odd situation or “after everything I’ve learned” I can’t possibly be discouraged by this or that. I can ease most losses of my innocence by reminding myself that I still have no idea what a beer costs. When I consider symptoms of age that may affect me on a primal level, the most prominent is probably a waning sense of invincibility. Perhaps that’s part of the wisdom too.

I was considering writing about these contemplations last week. Then, by what could only be described as a cosmic tidal wave of the universal mind, I received a message through Facebook. It was a “friend request” from a woman I didn’t know. I went to the page and tried to find out what I could by looking at the tiny profile picture. Had I met this person on a gig or something? We shared a single friend, someone I went to grade school with. When I glanced down at her other friends, I saw her sister’s name. That name was very distinctive. I hadn’t heard it since her sister was born, when I was around 9 or 10. The requestor was using her married name. When I discovered who it was, I felt for a moment the same way you feel atop the largest hill in a roller coaster, when the car is creeping over the crest and you feel your weight shift.

This was a girl I knew back in the 70s. (I can actually say that. It refers to real experience.) She was literally the girl next door. (OK, she lived behind my house, but you get the idea.) She is the first friend I can remember whom I believe in some small way influenced the adult I became. I could speculate for volumes, but suffice it to say that she was the first girl of which I was constantly aware. We had not communicated for almost 30 years (another real number), because her family moved to California in the early 80s. Being from Jersey, I never had occasion to drop in.

In my mind for the last few decades, this woman has been nine years old. So as we wrote back and forth tossing about amusing memories, it was difficult not to visualize her as the little girl I remembered. That cloudy timeline suddenly had an endpoint, but the start of it was still quite vivid. I tried to think of defining events in my life that my old friend pre-dated. Nearly all of them. How incredible! All through the vagaries of my childhood experiences, into high school and beyond, hearing now from this person I knew for a comparatively short period of time brought me a rare joy. This overwhelming exercise in reflection might cause someone else to feel “old,” but I found instead that I experienced a kind of compression of time. More recent events seemed far more dusty and distant.

I hesitate to conclude that I had been considering my life in two phases, before and after my friend moved, but what was it that made my nine year old mind capable of preserving experiences with a sparkling newness when my twenty nine year old mind seemed more content to overstuff a very large closet? In the mounting wisdom of my age, I think I’ve arrived at the lesson, though it wouldn’t be accurate to call it a revelation: Nothing is mundane at nine, so maybe we get off cheap then, but with age, we have to make a greater effort to preserve what we want to remember and we must actively choose what we allow to shape us. The next time I sit back and contemplate my lifetime as a gestalt, maybe I won’t be so surprised.

I was so glad to hear that my old friend was doing well, and as I wrote to her mother days later, I knew her family was out there somewhere. I was happy to have been remembered fondly and as a “passionate” person at the age of nine. Though I may never fill in all the blanks on that timeline I mentioned earlier, I’m fairly confident that I won’t “get old.” I’ll change. And I won’t.