Networking 2

I don't want to sound crass here, but one of the oddest things about poverty is that it's put me back in touch with a lot of people. I don't mean to hit them up for money or anything, but when you find yourself in a truly dark cave, you call out, to try and find the back of it. The wall you can't see. And sometimes a voice calls back, and a face appears out of the dark - the dark of the deep past.

Social networking - the new-media kind - is supposed to obliviate all of this, all the dropped connections, by never letting you not be in touch with other people. Everyone you know, or think you know, in fact. It's like having a party strapped to your head. But in the bad old days, five, ten years ago, you just lost touch. No one can explain it - I couldn't.

I had a drink last night with an old friend. She is the woman who prompted my guilt to begin this blog again, by the simple act of admiring what I do. (see below.) Why does it take such dirty fuel, like shame or guilt or anger, to drive the engines of personal progress?

I hadn't spoken to Jennifer in perhaps twenty five years. Stories I would tell about her always involved her young children, who are now adults living in Brooklyn. Jennifer and I met through a close friend to each of us, who later died, and at some point, after marriage and family and the rest, our friendship became a memory too, like our dead friend.

Then, because in my freelancing/unemployment I decided one day that I needed all the new apparatus of social networking - the technological tenacles that would secure me, like strong suction to a rock, to the wide new world of possibility being built by social networking businesses - I opened a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a Tumblr account, etc.

That unlosed a whirling torrent of souls, like the unresolved dead in Dante. People who had apparently spent several purgatorial millenia wondering if we were friends, what I had done since high school, whatever had happened to Chris and Mike, did I know 'I have a show up in' wherever. It was a real advertisement for losing touch with people - the old-school way. You just forget to ever speak to them again.

But a month or two later, after the vortex of ghosts flew back into the sky, a message appeared from Jennifer, asking if I was me, the person she had known twenty five years ago.

And I realized that I was still here. And that Jennifer and I were still friends.

We talked for three hours last night, at a bar, over drinks - lovely, old-fashioned social networking. A translucent parasol of pleasure, not a satellite dish. At some point it involved the man sitting next to us, who worked for a big liquor company, which moved him to New York, where he was making the rounds of the places that matter to big liquor companies: the right watering holes with the right vegetation and night-life; select oases of young people who spend money on going out, in nice clothes, to see their friends, and form enviable aggregates of lifestyle that big liquor companies can flay like pickled frogs in order to invent new products to sell to young people when they go out in nice clothes and spend money. The man next to us was wearing a pork-pie hat and a figured black shirt (bar-scene spy gear) and talked about his stills (he makes his own liquor, improbably, given the fact that a big liquor company picks up his tab), his fifty-odd acres in Wyoming (his trust fund paid for it), and his plan to sub-divide and built yurts on it ($18,000 each) for back-to-the-land Boomer-hippies. A world-famous energy consultant who dated his mom is going to help him with a zero-footprint wind turbine plan. She's buying horses for him - land has to have horses. The big liquor company hadn't provided him with business cards because they don't want him to be traceable to them, for tax reasons, or lifestyle espionage reasons, I can't remember. I was on my second cilantro jalapeno margarita. Maybe he was never there.

Jennifer paid for my drinks - the employed vs. unemployed rule, as she put it, as though it were a page in Emily Post. She works for a nineteenth-century photography dealer.

We hugged; we went home, she to the south, me to the north, stepping back out of the boat that had sat, rocking and empty, for twenty five years, waiting for us to step into it and float us down-river for a few hours, talking and lightly trailing our hands in the depths of each other's lives.