What James Learned on the Internet By Joseph Reed Hayes
J
ames could learn nothing from the Internet.
James's business took him to private farms, some nestled in valleys, sheltered from the extremes of wind and cold that could rip through the middle of Pennsylvania, some high on hillside peaks in Connecticut, basted by long-lingering sun, farms that grew only red ruffled arugula or lion's mane mushrooms or the pearl-shaped tubers called Japanese artichoke. James made the connection between slightly elitist farmers and extremely elitist restaurants, turning a salad or side dish or garnish into an expensive status symbol. Which was how he thought of electronic toys. He owned neither a DVD player or cell phone; in fact, still used a phone service, operated by real live humans answering calls and scribbling down messages. That's how he pictured them, anyway – in reality the hormone-crazed highschool girls and beyond-their-prime voiceover actors locked into their 4x4 cubicles simply shunted the caller to a computer that translated speech into text, often turning "frisee" into "freezing" or "litchis" into "leeches". He still didn't know why anyone would want 35 pounds of leeches, but he resolved to someday fill the order nonetheless. James thought it pretentious to even call himself a Luddite. He simply wanted his life simple, in keeping with the job that he thought connected him with the land. Manual transmissions, corded phones and electric typewriters were good enough for him; they did the job and that's all he wanted, much to the amusement of his friends, particularly Eddie, his partner in the business they called Manicured Greens.
So when Eddie demanded that James get a computer – "It's a new system," he said, visions of what James had read about the Internet flashed into his head: filth, sleaze, unregulated mountains of porn and credit card scams from Nigerians. But Eddie insisted, bringing the unwanted and unwelcome machine to his house the next day, setting up the sleek screen on top of his beloved Victorian writing table like a pair of plastic sunglasses jammed into an exhibit of Tiffany lamps. From that day on, Eddie refused to talk to James in anything other than email, forcing him to turn the machine on and learn what button to push. He started getting spam almost immediately, predators smelling innocent meat. And oddly enough, he loved it. Junk email fascinated him, and although the mechanics of computers held no interest for him, the daily applications of chaos theory made him drive home at breakneck speeds after his rounds in Connecticut or Pennsylvania, on the very likely possibility that more unsolicited garbage would be waiting. The sound of the computer dialing ran an almost sexual thrill through his body. Who are all these people, he asked time and again. Drugs, sex of all imaginable and unimaginable kinds, gambling and free cable TV converters. There must not be a criminal left on the streets. And all those "enlarge your member" emails. If I answered every one of them, he thought, I'd never leave the house. The names in particular delighted him. Somewhere, a program was spitting out aliases, so that mail came from instead of MoFo235@hotmail. They started as and quickly became and and . .
He adored them, these intangible correspondents, would stare at a name like or for hours, imagining who Adell might be when not drifting in her digital domain. Email from arrived one day, so evocative he had to shut the computer off and lie in the dark with a cool cloth on his brow. The next day he laughed for 10 minutes over a note peddling Viagra from .
He collected the random words hidden in the spam, nonsense phrases designed to fool filters. They flowed like poetry, he loved finding their accidental rhythms and undisciplined beauty.
Babcock bilinear expiration.
Skywave biblical nostalgia, alien rhyme, safeguard lament.
Some came as warnings:
Contaminant dirty Chicagoan, peepy glossolalia.
Others were a guidebook to a foreign land, translated from Persian by a Russian speaking Swahili, perhaps.
Tasty mound come countrywide church ... lo, struck amply wreak constitution.
And then the ones that were just poetically bizarre:
bath slip, loud with button bucket cold on sign forward ... need cold ... need division ... paper. rice.
James became an information junkie. The heights of access were dizzying – whatever momentary urge took him, all he had to do was look it up. Always a conservative when it came to music, he suddenly had the world at his hands, and it dazzled and delighted him. There was Mieskuoro Huutajat, the Finnish yelling choir
percussionists from New Guinea, Tuvan throat singing, Indian swing music. He loved voices, the mad gypsies from Romania, brass bands from Benin, solemn dervishes from Turkey.
Another thing, as things do, was led to by one, skipping from one bit of attention deficit-inspired minutia to another. After surveying the world, he came home. James moved on to lost musicians right here in America, forgotten players who dazzled and awed those around them and faded like the wallpaper in some backwater boarding room.
It was because of the filthy sleazy Internet that he knew about the genius of Herbie Nichols. It took James months to find the few recordings that had been etched on a disc, but he never found anything by Eddie Rosner, who they called the "White Louis Armstrong," a ghost musician chased from Germany to Poland to Russia by the Reich, then sent to Siberia by the communists.
James knew about World War II. He was a bit vague on what happened in Russia, the home of his ancestors ... so he looked it up. As Jews returned from the camps, Stalin shipped them to Siberia, saying they had been contaminated by Western culture. For the same reason he also exiled his own soldiers returning from the German front. Exiles. Jews were thrown out of France in the 800's for arrogance. They were kicked out again in 1182, and again in 1306. And 1394, very persistent, the French. In 1290, Jews were exiled from England for more than three and a half centuries. Centuries! In 1492, while Columbus was fulfilling the classroom rhyme, Ferdinand and Isabella sanctified a hatred that had begun 100 years earlier and accused Spaniards of being Jewish because they washed their hands too much or cooked eggplant. He went forward in time, and backwards, following the forced wanderers. Out of Mesopotamia in 597BC, Persia in 485AD, Armenia, 69BC, 16th century Spain (again).
All those beautiful countries, all those ugly things. Is that why Jews keep ending up in the desert, over and over again? 40 years, 400 years, 4000 years. Because everyone else wanted the beautiful, green countries? He tried to imagine his mother, packing a small bag for the millionth time: You go ahead, have Tuscany and Budapest, both Buda and Pest, I had green once, I think it was in a salad. Instead of pests, why can't we be Buddhists? Have Buddhists ever started a war? He didn’t think so ... but they had a god of war, and death.
He looked it up.
Shiva, James read, the third deity of the Hindu triad of great gods, the Trimurti. Shiva, called the Destroyer, has also the aspect of regeneration. As destroyer he is dark and terrible, appearing as a naked ascetic accompanied by a train of hideous demons, encircled with serpents and necklaces of skulls. As auspicious and reproductive power, he is worshipped in the form of the Linga, or phallus.
He started to look up Linga, but thought better of it, Shiva knows the last thing he needed was more email, and he thought there would be only so many things said about them.
Lots of people, however, had things to say about God.
He looked it up.
Steven King wrote: "When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off." There were hundreds of quotes, each line leading him from one side of belief to the other: Zora Neale Hurston said, "Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens." "Every people have gods to suit their circumstances," wrote Henry David Thoreau. "God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist." Baudelaire. "If God does not exist we have nothing to lose by believing. If there is a God, we have everything to lose by not believing." Blaise Pascal.
"Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on the weekend." Woody Allen.
James wasn't ashamed to admit in public that he still enjoyed Allen, but he hastened to add a quote from one of Woody's own: "Only the early, funny ones."
It was on his electro-philosophical wanderings that he stumbled into the ultimate online resource: People. The concept of a chatroom never entered his mind. Computers were for facts and communication at a remove... why would people talk to each other online when there were telephones and letters and bars? Eddie, on a visit to reinstall something James had innocently deleted, said, "Come look at this." It was a chatroom, a gathering place of foodies, people who gathered restaurants like some collected stamps. As Eddie typed, the names and words scrolled by so fast that James felt carsick and reached over his partner's shoulder to hit the off button. Eddie just smiled. "You'll be back" was all he said. That weekend, uninspired by his usual hangouts and with nothing in the fridge except a wooden box of morel mushrooms and half a beer, James remembered the Foodie Room, and hesitantly signed on. Over the course of an hour, he watched people typing at each other, making horrible puns about practically anything, greeting incoming names with flurries of punctuation, and treat each other with odd combinations of disdain, joy and unbridled affection. He jumped every time a window popped up on his screen, someone in the room asking him "Who are you? Join in!", and when he turned the screen off he could still see the words dashing across his brain, and when he turned the computer on the next day, before checking his email, before firing up his music player, he opened up the chatroom, and was greeted with a flurry of punctuation. Over the following weeks, he dabbled in cybersex, reopened some old wounds by searching for the names of ex-girlfriends, tried to pay his phone bill online and ended up paying it twice, ordered books and videos and even a nice hunk of artesian goat cheese. But he kept coming back to "The Room" as he now thought of it, laughed and got outraged and traded insults and jokes with this far-flung group with a common need to be connected, and connected he was. When yet another girlfriend became uninspired by James, it was the women of undisclosed age who took James to their World Wide Web enhanced bosoms and made sure he felt beloved and desired, showering him with asterisk-kisses. In this safe, electronic world, he was free to accept.
One day he went to work, his scheduled time at the office, where he filled in forms – by hand – and caught up on the office camaraderie. Such as it is. Eddie asked with a wink how the "online thing" was going, and James replied "Oh, man, I don’t have time to fool around with that." His habit, as he drove away from the office, was to stop at a particular corner, because that's where the traffic light is. The corner is frequented by an old man, dressed in a florescent orange vest, the kind highway construction workers wear. The old man is there because that's where the cars are stopped, and he walks up and down the block, offering to wipe a worse-for-wear squeegee across the odd window for the odd bit of change. There have been occasions where he's given the old man a dollar or two, because it seems like something a good, uninvolved person would do from the safety of his car when faced with an old man begging on the corner. But this day, as the florescent figure approached, he thought, this could be Herbie Nichols, alone and mad with his unrecognized genius, this could be Eddie Rosner, on the way from the hell of persecution to another hell of imprisonment. This could be God. James reached his hand out the car window and said, "Hey brother, you hungry? Can I get you a sandwich?" The old man reached back, with just a hint of contact between their fingers, and he replied, "Yeah, sure, I could use a sandwich, sure." "I'm gonna drive right across the street to that 7-11, you see it, okay? You wait right here, I'll be back." And the man said, "Don't you forget now, I'll be here, don't you forget."
He drove across the intersection and picked up a plastic-wrapped sandwich, roast beef and cheese, and for the first time in a very long time he thought of food as food and not a commodity, and he grabbed a sweet iced tea on the way out, and circled around the block and came back to the old man, still waiting on the corner like they'd both agreed. James passed the brown bag out the window, and the old man took it and said, "I'm gonna eat my lunch now," and walked to the left as the cars pulled away to the right.
He wept as he drove away. Later, when he talked about the experience, he wept again. Because ... that's all it takes. Politicians will keep on taxing and lying and sending children to war, because that's what they do, and oppressed people will continue to rise up until they too can do to others the things that they themselves found oppressive. Not much we can do about that. The thing we can strive for, every now and then, is simple human contact, a touch or a look in the eye, a piece of punctuation or an imagined hug. Or a sandwich. That's all it takes to create a moment of happiness.
And that's what James learned on the Internet.
What James Learned on the Internet Š 2008 Joseph Reed Hayes www.josephreedhayes.com