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This interweb thingy is a strange thing.
In my entire life, before 'social media', I doubt I have known the full names of more than twenty non-family members. I'm serious. I can look through my high school yearbook and recognize photos as people I interacted with regularly, but for the life of me I can not say that I knew their names.
I remember dating a girl for an entire summer and not knowing her last name. The only thing I had to go on was a scrap of paper with her first name and a phone number. After the fourth week of our 'relationship' I spent a weekend scouring the school yearbook for her photo only to find out that she was a transfer student from an all girls catholic school and didn't have a senior photo. Three months later, I ended up resorting to picking through her family's mail and getting her last name off of a gas bill. Problem solved!
Entire friendships were founded upon a warm 'HEY YOU' or a thoughtful 'HEY DUDE'. I've had countless conversations with 'close' friends and never known or used their actual names. They knew my name but, to this day, I never knew their name. Once in a while I would get lucky and someone would say something like "Frank, are you going to Burger King?" and I would then have something to hang my hat on. Other times I would encounter the nightmare of a nameless friend meeting another one of my nameless friends and inquiring "So, Topher, are you going to introduce me to your friend?". That was like dancing in a fucking minefield. Usually, if we were in a nightclub or some other loud environment, I would lean over and mumble some unintelligible thing in their ear. Other times I would just make some lame assed joke to change the subject.
The internet changed all of that.
...OK, it didn't change it real fast.
Way back in 1993, I was so excited to have a 14.4k modem and a brand new AOL account. The idea of meeting new and interesting people from around the world seemed so exciting. I still remember the first time I engaged in sex-chat. She was tan0045 and I was lumpy001 and it was a Wednesday night. We had met in a chat room and quickly moved to our own 'private' chat room. We had began chating about Twilight Zone episodes, moved eventually towards spicy sexual innuendo and then we both exploded into a pornographic rant that would make last month's Penthouse Forum blush. Needless to say, I needed a fresh pair of underpants when all was said and done.
It wasn't until several months later that I learned that lonely men were masquerading as women in AOL chat-rooms and enticing heterosexuals into quasi-homosexual sex-chats. I doubt that tan0045 was a guy because she knew sexual things that only women knew, but news of the whole homo thing ended my run of sex-chats pretty quickly.
Regardless of sexual orientation though, I realized that I still did not know tan0045's full name. Tan0045 was only a screen name and I had not moved any further from my habits of anonymous friendships. But, at least I had now moved on to faceless anonymous friendships with a happy ending.
Over time, AOL evolved and I matured. Looking back, AOL and all of it's awkward, anonymous and messy sexual encounters, best represented my early teens. The time between AOL and Myspace could best be represented as my mid to late twenties. You know what I mean, a lonely Saturday night spent with rented VHS porn and a jar of Vaseline.
Yep, life back then pretty much sucked.
While Myspace seemed pretty good at the time and could best represent my late twenties and early thirties, the dawning of Facebook was a complete game changer and truly represents my life as I am today and who I have always wanted to be. I now have over 500 Facebook friends and if I want to know any of their names, all I have to do is click their picture. It's all there for me and easy as pie. I can see their high school prom pictures, how hot their teen-aged daughters are, what movies they like, where they work, where they eat and who they are sleeping with. How easy is that?
I also love getting friend requests and seeing that it is a nameless someone from my past who I used to know.The excitement, of looking over their Facebook photo albums to see if I recognize them from my past and clicking around their profile to see what they have been up to since 1986, is epic.
Well, that fantastic journey can sometimes be a one way street that is not shared by both parties.
"Why do you post stuff like that? You're weird"
The above message was posted to my Facebook wall by someone I had a major crush on in high school. She was a cute girl who's name I never knew, until she became my Facebook friend. Her post was in response to my sharing of a wonderful photograph of a couple of Hooter's waitress's enjoying each others company. At first I was intrigued by her post and excited with the slim hope that she was masking her own wonderful fascination with Hooter's style pantyhose with a healthy dose of theatrical disgust at my post.
Boy I was wrong.
While we ended up 'chatting' back and forth via Facebook for a couple weeks and I found out that she was now a divorced mother raising three wonderful children, her disgust at my public fascination for the female form encased in pantyhose became to much for her handle and she felt the need to tell me.
Almost every one of my Hooter's posts would get a message from her. Until....
It was a week night and I was in my studio when I first noticed that I was at 499 friends. Someone had dropped me, but who was it? A quick stroll through my 'inbox' answered that question. I could see her messages to me, but the her name was now listed as 'Facebook user' and her picture was that generic gray silhouette against a baby blue background. When I clicked on her picture, Facebook told me that her account was not available. A quick Google for some answers and I found out that she had probably de-friended and blocked me. The crush was over.
Maybe it was for the best? The person who had that crush way back then was a very shy and private person. I am as different now from who I was way back then as AOL is different from Facebook. Now I'm public and out there shaking it free and in the breeze; like a guy with a closed head injury who now doesn't know the difference between 'inside the head' thoughts and 'outside the head' thoughts. Facebook allows me to be the man I have always wanted to be; unafraid to post my hopes and dreams for all to see. If little miss-divorced with three kids and hates pantyhose doesn't like what I post, well fuck her. I have 499 other, very close friends, who DO like to read my posts regarding Hooter's waitress' encased in sheer suntan hue pantyhose.
