Worlds Colliding

Yesterday I got to meet in the real world folks who only previously existed in electronic form: More Than a Minivan Mom and St. Richard, and also Lisa. It was great to meet you and your kids and see you in 3-D for a change. Thumper even got to second base with Tracey, twice. And she didn't seem to mind.

Though blogging has been a wholly different experience, meeting Tracey and Rich and Lisa brought to mind the first time we ever met in real life our internet friends. In the mid-90's, Mrs.Rodius discovered this thing called a "chat room." This was the days when people still talked about their baud rate, we regularly lost our dial-up connection, and the internet was new and shiny. I was working second shift, and I came home one night to her enthusiastic description of this place she had discovered called "The Tunnel of Love," where she was someone called Aerie. Soon I'd joined in, becoming Horatio. We quickly became part of the core regular users of the room who called themselves the Tunnel Rats.

A lot of people used the room to find cybersex partners. I dabbled in it here and there, but it quickly became boring and repetitive. For me, the appeal was the camaradarie of the group. I'd never really been part of the cool cliques when I was in school, and I revelled in it in the chat room. The most entertaining sport was brutally ridiculing newcomers. In a forum where a person was defined solely by the words they used, it was astounding how inarticulate many of the cybersex seekers were. They were downright pathetic much of the time, and engaging them in verbal sparring was endlessly giggle-producing.

Eventually the core group decided to meet in New York. We were mostly from across the United States, with a few from England and Australia. As we got to know each other better, it became clear that many of the regulars were middle-aged divorced people seeking and finding new loves online. There were many long-distance couples, like Sarah in Rhode Island and Stroke in Houston. We were by far the youngest of the group, and we were the only couple who actually lived not only in the same state, but in the same apartment.

So we went to New York for twenty-four hours, taking pictures of each other with the Statue of Liberty over our shoulders and spending a lot of time drinking and laughing in hotel rooms. Though we'd learned vital stats and ages of most of the attendees and seen pictures of some of them, it was a little surreal putting actual faces and voices to our text-based friends. We did keep up a more regular friendship with Sarah in Rhode Island for awhile (she talked us into getting tattoos in Newport, but after we'd both done ours, she chickened out), but I think the New York trip was the beginning of the end of the appeal of the chat room for me. It started seeming a little shabby, a little seedy, a little too like a soap opera, with the desperate people in their forties and fifties, with dual custody of teenage kids, getting together and breaking up, and falling madly, passionately, forever in love over and over again with people they'd never met. But I still recall fondly the feeling of being one of the cool kids picking on the losers.