My life, like the weather, is growing colder, and the days shorter. I keep telling myself to draw more comics or write more of anything like I used to, to make the most of my dwindling time on Earth. Years ago, I had friends who begged me for entertainment, some pulpy levity to distract them from high school lectures. Now, phones have taken that place, and I hear little if any demand. I wonder what I might have accomplished had I been born 40 or 50 years ago, had I reached my prime before high-speed Internet. I shudder to think where I'd be if I were born on a later date. Would I have learned to draw, or would my eyes be perpetually glued to some kind of electronic pad, ignorant of the feel of paper in my hands or the heady thrill of creating an artifact?
When I was younger, friendships were incidental, yet intensely intimate. Every day, I marched next door or across the street to play with my closest friends, valued higher than all else merely because of proximity. I became disproportionately familiar with kids whose last names shared the same first letter as mine (or the next one in the alphabet), only because school corralled us into the same homeroom. Spallone and Schneider and Smith and Taylor, all forever linked thanks to coincidence. Sometimes I can't imagine connecting with anyone else on a deeper level than I once did with these friends, but I guess anyone else in the world could have easily impacted my life with equal strength, if only they sat behind, in front of, or to the immediate left or right of me in class.
This trend may have continued deep into adulthood if it weren't for the prevalence of the Internet allowing us to interact with people other than those physically seated next to us. I'm guilty of spending more time on the Web than I should. In theory, access to people with varied interests all over the world should help us find better matches than the accidental sympaticos I spoke of. But in my case, it's not working. It sort of did when people wrote emails and you could get a feel for their personalities, but now communication has to be via Facebook chat (or something similar), where everything runs in a one-inch-wide column. A wall of text longer than ten words long becomes more imposing to the modern reader than the dense Nathanial Hawthorne novel rotting by my bedside on a pile of good intentions, dog-eared on page 10 for all eternity. Plus, it's near impossible to edit anything and you have to go through this whole special procedure if you want to make paragraph breaks. It just doesn't work for me. I also don't like how the Internet removes all semblance of a mystique, with all unfortunate political views and examples of bad taste flying for all to see. I click on my dearest elementary school buddy's profile and see one rant after another about the current hot political topic, and she's on the opposite side of the fence. I see many unfunny memes shared. Who is this terrible person, I wonder. Why can't we just plop down on the couch and eat junk food and watch the Friday night lineup and enjoy each other's humanity? Why does something that's supposed to make things so simple and facilitate connection now do the exact opposite?
The Internet isn't forever. Jump the Shark has jumped the shark, along with most other sites created in a more innocent time, when people published their writings online for fun and passion instead of ad clicks. For the right price, anyone can sell our memories away. I foolishly type this in a blog that Google might zap into etherea any moment, instead of a brick-and-mortar diary that someone might discover and learn from hundreds of years from now. But even blogs have long become quaint, replaced with online photo posting and telegraphic one-liners that no one has the patience to scroll through beyond the last couple of weeks. Who is keeping a record of our time in a way that future generations can appreciate?
How long can I count on the existence of trading card collectors? When I say I create them, few react with any recognition, let alone enthusiasm. They ask, "What's a trading card?" Do kids collect them anymore? I imagine most are waiting for the next video game to come out, or "falling in love" through emojis and shallow text-speak exchanged with catfish in Internet chatrooms. But I'm grateful for the few die-hards out there who support my old-fashioned art style, and these pieces of paper that will last long after this blog dissolves into, at best, a hidden nugget on archive.org.
Thanks for keeping it old-school. After a while, dystophile.
