I love my mother. Deeply. She’s the person who has been pretty much the only support structure that was constant in my life, and before Julie she was really the only person, at the end of the day, I could trust. She’s often been right– more often than not– in giving me advice. But there are three “parental” things I always tease her about.
One wasn’t her, it was another family member. But when I was an undergraduate, just starting out, I had to quit my job at Wal-Mart because I couldn’t make the hours work. I’d been unemployed for a week when someone said to me “you have to go and find a job– no one is going to just call and offer you one.” Mom didn’t say it, but she reminded me of it. We had a talk about it one day, and no more than two hours after we finished talking, I received a call from a professor I’d taken class with the semester before. She hired me to be a TA and a writing tutor. That was the first of like six jobs I’d take– sometimes all at once– at IU while I was an undergrad. I never applied for it.
The second thing is that Mom — and I’m finding now that a number of other people do this– used to say that I’d gotten something “all over the place” or left my toys or books or games or whatever “all over.” This apparently means concentrated in one spot where something shouldn’t be. The toys all over the floor: a pile in one spot. The games all over the place: again, a pile in one spot. The stains all over the shirt: one big spot. I’ve always been a little bit of a Drax in that I’m a literalist, a trait my mother most famously recounts by telling people about how I once let go of my father’s car door to quickly and slammed it. He sarcastically quipped “could you shut that a little harder?” So I opened it and slammed it with all the power I had. I dented it. Hey, he told me to.
But this last thing is funny, because it became a weird mantra for me. My mother used to think I spent too much time on the computer. The joke is on her, because compared to later generations, I’m a social butterfly. I’m a killer conversationalist. And in spite of the fact that I have sever social anxiety, I am fairly well adjusted around people. I can do my job well. I can sell people on things. I teach for hours on end. I mentor.
One day, I told my mother that I would go to bed in a bit but that I was going to say goodbye to my “friends” in the game I was playing. Mom, stern-faced, took one of her rare occasions to raise her voice at me. She said “those people aren’t real! Those people aren’t your friends!” I finished my chat abruptly and went to my room.
Months later, three of the people I’d been gaming with that night came to visit, from Toronto. I spent a week showing them around Indiana, taking in the super boring sights, etc. Mom chalked that up to “dumb luck,” I think. Another of my friends from the same group came to visit months later. I… well, I dated one of the people I met in a MUD for two years. Long story I won’t tell right here. One of the friends I had from online gaming helped me move the first time I had to come home from college. Another, a famous musician, traded phone messages from me while he was on tour and got me onto guest lists. Another, a music producer, sent me demo reels and outtakes that I managed to trade for other musical rarities to keep from having to spend money in the pre-napster music economy. One of those people, may he rest in peace, was a make-up wearing professional wrestler who gave me my first digital media job, and while I didn’t get credited for it, he let me write the first lines of my own work I’d ever see onscreen. I knew psychologists that helped me deal with my issues. I knew a cryptographer who worked for the organization that cannot be named that traded puzzles with me.
This was the thing my mother never understood, that I only ever told her after I’d finished my dissertation research. See, those virtual people– the ones who weren’t my friends– were the people I spent a year researching to write my dissertation and my first book. I never met any of that set of friends face-to-face, but many of the other people I knew on the net were people I’d met and spent time with. They were my freaks and geeks, my people.
What I never managed to tell my mom until years later, on one of the saddest nights of my life sitting in my furniture-less rental in Oxford, Ohio trying to figure out my career, was that at times those people HAD to be my friends. Because without them… I was all alone.
I grew up with people who very loosely were my friends. I mean I’ve recounted adventures with my few closest buddies, but they all ghosted on me when we graduated and they realized I was a semi-radical liberal, a dreamer and someone who would go on to be the poster child for “social justice warrior.” I wasn’t looking to get married at 20 and have kids by 22. I wanted to flex my mental muscles. I also didn’t come from money like most of them did, so when there was no longer public school, I struggled to keep moving. I had to overcome my mom being left by my step-dad and us being evicted. I had to watch the super hero who protected me my entire life fall into depression, succumb to her PTSD, to become a hermit, for her back to give out on her. I had to carry the weight of being in “the shit” before I was really “supposed” to, if that’s even a thing a person is supposed to do.
No one where I was “got” me. During my undergraduate years the people who passed for my best friends were the mousy poet who everyone thought was smarter than me, the grizzled old professor who had an affair with his student and was hence a pariah, the genius anthropologist with so much wanderlust that he had to maintain an adjunct job. Those were my people.
My friends online kept me from going stir-crazy. Over time, most of them have faded away, too, but I like to think that’s because we all needed each other up until we didn’t, and while I still talk to 90% of them on Facebook or in various games, we all have lives in the real world now, places to go and people to do things with.
Back when we didn’t, when we were all alone in the dark with our flickering screens, I had them, and they had me.
They were the best friends I ever had, save a precious few.
And so now, if I yell at the TV, or if I tell someone “one second, I have to finish this game,” I snicker and tell them that I know those people aren’t my friends. The idea that I’d send messages back and forth with a person I saw on TV, or that I’d talk about life with someone I fought on a video game, or that one of the musicians I was listening to would respond to my fan mail is ridiculous.
That’s not a pair of former NFL players on my XBL friends list.
And I just happen to always get front row seats to see two or three bands because of the chubby Cherokee effect.
And most of all, the weird people who pop into my life now and then and seem like they know me even though they’ve never seen my face and couldn’t tell you where my house is or what color my car is… those are absolutely not my friends.
Nor were the hundreds of people who watched the livestream of Julie and me getting married.
It’s all in my imagination.