Drama, at The Speed of Internet

Earlier today a friend and I had a fight. I said I would be late for her event because I had another event I had forgotten about, and she said you always do this. She said, “You only like me . . . ” (“for my looks” “for my money” “for my apartment” “because I’m famous” “because you like my family” “for my tits” ”because you want me to work on your website” “for one reason” ”because you’re attracted to exotic women and things you can’t have”). I told her that wasn’t true, that thing she mentioned being the only reason I liked her, and my feelings were hurt. She said her feelings were hurt too. I said I had to close my office door and cry for a moment. I got so sad because I was certain I was about to lose her. In another time I would have been sad for a week. She wrote me back using only her thumbs. She said she was just jealous of the other event I was performing at when I said I would be with her. I said she didn’t have to be jealous of a table full of old Jews (I was trying to be funny; there will also be young Jews, but it’s a Jewish museum thing, so table full of Jews was reasonably accurate). Then I told her I would be more responsible with my planning, and she said she was just emotional because she was moving. I said I loved her; she said she loved me too.

pictures by Zak Smith

Afterward I felt happy. I had been at my computer, and she had been on her iPhone. It all took less than an hour. When it was over we were closer than we were before. We crossed a relationship bridge in Internet time.

**

I think I really like Twitter, but I’m only comfortable “twittering” on behalf of The Rumpus, where I’m kind of anonymous, because I’m not the only person Rumpus twittering. But I read something today about the “twitter generation” and a t-shirt that says, “Never trust anyone under 140 words,” and I thought it was hilarious.

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This week there were a lot of good stories on The Rumpus, but sometimes the best stories don’t get read as much as they should. Flannery on the Couch is an example of an article that deserves more readers than it got. People link to interviews and  clever stuff that we find and then they link and they’re all like “via!” and we’re like “via back!” But then we run this beautiful book review/essay about Flannery O’Connor and nobody links to it and then I wonder if the Internet hates literature.

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Don’t tell Elissa about my twitter habit.

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Speaking of clever, or the intersection of clever and awesome, did you see Jesse’s interview with Tucker Nichols, founder of Anonymous Postcard? It’s done on anonymous postcards. We then embedded the interview as a flickr photo-set. We did this without having a single technical person on staff. We did this without staff.

**

Speaking of twitter, I was browsing through twitters and there was the twitter of a woman I wanted to sleep with, twittering about having “sex” (whatever that means) with someone else. This is not the woman I had fought with earlier. And it wasn’t just someone I wanted to sleep with, it was someone I did sleep with, “sleep” being a euphemism that means different things to different people. I slept with her once and then never again. Every time I was in her apartment I thought we would, but we didn’t, and then finally I asked and said she didn’t like it when I asked. She would rather do it when she wanted, but I wondered when that would be? I had waited years as it dawned on me there wouldn’t be a second time.

I read through her twitters. It was like a being stabbed in the heart with a TinyURL. It was an instant message in the shape of a small, sharp knife. I could smell her fingers brushing the keyboard. Erotic pain at 140 words or less.

**

But enough about twitter, back to The Rumpus. Did you notice that Jerry Stahl is back on the blog stick? Jerry was the second blogger to come onboard the good ship Rumpus. The first being Rick Moody. It was the same day though, I think. I had just started this thing, this Rumpus, it was the first week in December, or the second, and The Rumpus was nothing but a WordPress beneath a flat blue sky. The Rumpus was basically an idea that got out of hand. This is our history. And then Jerry Stahl and Rick Moody stepped up, and then Bitchy Jones, and Ryan Boudinot, and then Sugar. And then I knew The Rumpus had to grow to accommodate their talent. The Rumpus was no longer an idea or an option. I didn’t even have Internet at home. I still don’t; I steal the neighbor’s, perching my computer on the edge of the kitchen table, hoping to catch their passing signal, stepping in popcorn my roommate left on the floor yesterday. I’m trying to think of a suitable analogy to the growth of The Rumpus, and I keep coming up with Detroit, but that’s a bad analogy. Detroit expanded to accommodate the automobile, fought efforts at reform, and is in the process of returning to the earth. The Rumpus will grow in a sustainable way. We will never borrow money, never spend more than we make. The Rumpus doesn’t have credit cards, or even a good credit rating. The Rumpus is not Detroit, with it’s beautiful dying homes. And it’s definitely not New York, which is in the process of selling everything that’s good about itself and turning Manhattan into the same mall you would drive to on the outskirts of Minneapolis. We are neither poor and disappearing, nor rich but losing our soul. And we’re definitely not HarperCollins, starting up new imprints with the explicit purpose of publishing trash, ostensibly to fund real literature. We would never lie to you like that.

The point of all this is that I love Jerry and I love Jerry’s blog. Jerry and Rick convinced me The Rumpus was the right thing to do.

**

I wrote her. I said, “Your twitters are killing me.” She didn’t respond.* I wonder if twitter isn’t just a fantasy, another brand of long-distance relationship, messages from far away keeping us from the person sitting across from the table. An infinite distraction fueled by longing. But what if no one is sitting across from you? What if you go to the park and you see that not only are there more people in groups of two or more, but there are more groups than individuals. It makes me think of my time as a waiter, which was a period of my life that lasted as long or longer than just about any other. I remember feeling sorry for people who were eating alone. I would give them free side orders.

I don’t know what any of that has to do with twitter, or what relation where we were has to where we are now, except sometimes everything reminds me of everything else.

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*She did respond.

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