Feeding the snakes in their heads

Reading some exchanges in chat rooms and message boards over the past several years, I have sometimes felt that the internet was becoming some sort of unruly group therapy. I see extravagant responses by personalities apparently teetering on the frayed edge of personal meltdown, in response to trifling, innocuous comments. The most obsessive and prolific of these posters can, and have, emptied venues that once had lively, interesting and entertaining exchanges.

Dysfunctional personalities are feeding the internet to the snakes in their heads. Participation in the internet has grown exponentially since broad access became available in the mid-nineties. Wonders and portents of more have shaped a whole new culture, the online world. The "mutual consensual hallucination" that William Gibson named "The Matrix" in his book, Neuromancer, has become reality. Some users have grafted onto that reality their own distorted perceptions of truth and fiction.

There be monsters here, watch where you step. Use firewalls, use screen names, do not invite these strange creatures into your lives.

Long Thoughts, Long Memories

I spent an hour tonight in a new bar which is the successor to a legendary dive bar in Chattanooga. Last May, the Stone Lion, a beer bar of epic grunge quotient, closed due to changing property ownership. Now, its sort-of reincarnation is open across a long stretch of town from the former location. A more spacious, still clean and more varied sort of place. Food is available. (The Stone Lion had a small microwave, in which you could heat food you brought in.)

I ran into a man I have known for thirty years, not seen in two or three. Later we were joined by a younger man known to both of us. We two older guys reminisced about past times and one particular past friend, who died of genetically determined heart disease twenty-two years ago. In the age of health-conscious aging boomers, and intolerance of all sorts of chemical and dietary excess, stories about long-ago drinking exploits and self-destructive abuse of one's body are the new taboo. We enjoyed swapping stories of excesses past, unburdened by the watchful eyes of the new morality police.

When people reach the vicinity of six decades of living, sometimes it is good to pore over the distant events that brought you to this point. As we slide down the steepening slope towards mortality, it is good to re-examine our lives, even those parts that seem in retrospect more than a little foolish.