RIP, <famous person>!

It really hits me how powerful words are, and the internet. As a boy growing up in a mean little village, I looked to music, TV, and books for signs of intelligence in the world.  I was an audience, a receiver of expression. Although I could write and, later, make music well, I never felt there was any way to be part of a community. My words and music would fall on deaf ears as fashions and politics changed.  The isolation of my location combined with the lack of available extended family and a complete lack of trust in my peers meant all my kicks were solitary. Where could an intelligent leftist atheist young man turn?

There's a good chance that, had the internet been available when I was growing up, my life would have turned out differently. There would have been an audience for my words, and there would have been a supporting response for the ideas I expressed.  I wouldn't have felt so intellectually alone, and with an audience I may have grown an audience for whatever creative impulse I had.

But maybe it wouldn't have gone like that.  My basic temperament wouldn't have been any different. I've inherited from the Dutch side of my family the need to understand and empathize with other worldviews while trying to build a workable consensus. As a salesman I am constantly harping that nobody, nobody, NOBODY knows how to negotiate anymore. That involves understanding what's important to you, what's important to the other side, and finding a way to work together.  As a creative person, I see the markets for such things are carved up into a vanishing middle which many dismiss as bland and into inflexible extremes.  Because things are so new, these markets change shape quickly with each technological advance, and entire media are extinguished.  Goodbye newspapers, goodbye Top 40 music.

Look at the monster which is Facebook. It has reduced us to being wannabe greeting card writers, wannabe headline writers, wanna be stand-up comedians. Less than 20 years on we've been sent to our corners where we can be marketed. For the advertisers it's a network, but for the rest of us it's an immense set of closets. I've been shown the faces of the people I grew up with, and we've slammed doors in each other's faces all over again.

So instead of Beatles, instead of Star Wars (the original), instead of M*A*S*H, we have an unending line of cult favorites (OK, there's Harry Potter, the one true mass break-through, unless you consider book-reading a cult activity).  And we have the internet.

So here I am babbling on a site where maybe twelve people will see my words, late for work.  It's still better than writing in a diary.  idiotking and I shared at least three things - the love of pop culture, the need to spout off about it, and the responsibility of caring for a mother. I suspect that the recurring feelings of isolation are also in common - it's one of the curses of the thinking human's condition, right?  But he allowed his feelings to guide him to reckless words, words which may not have directly harmed people but which we imagine may have set an uncomfortable, aggressive tone in some places, both the real world and in the virtual.

If I had been a real-world friend of idiotking , I would have pushed him to make a proper apology. Or maybe I wouldn't have had the patience with his amping up conflict. I don't know. I do know that he loved participating in these communities. He was hurt when he was rejected, but not enough adjust how he wrote.  I hope he found peace in what was truly important to him. I'm sad to hear how his life ended.  His picture on Disqus shows him smiling next to his dog.  Now I'll remember him that way.

Gotta go to work now.  In the real world.