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In my late 30s until just into my early 40s, around the turn of the millennium, I experienced becoming a father to my first child (and the only one who isn't a stepdaughter), my first separation and divorce, my first remarriage, my first psychological counseling for anxiety issues, and my last major pay raise as a government employee (we called them "promotions" or "going up a grade"). I discovered zazen practice on my own, and I became aware for the first time of the Internet. I returned to the great vocational love of my life, acting on the amateur community stage, and hit that particular love with full force, making up for almost a decade of lost time caused by some of that first marriage's unpleasantness.
I also discovered USENET and e-mail, through internal mirrors of those services that my Federal agency had and made available to the workforce soon after everyone in it started having computers on their desks. And through that internal copy of USENET and e-mail, I discovered my online voice. That voice gained me new friends whose faces I'd never seen - something I'm awfully used to by now, but it was quite the new brain-tickle back then - and some of us formed a group, and the group had a name. We were all irreverent wits who smirked at upper management idiosyncracies and bureaucratic bungles, and were not afraid to express this in the various internal Newsgroups. We also grew strong personal friendships.
The group took its name from a club formed by the characters in a popular comic strip. I am not sharing it here because some vestige of the group may still exist, and I respect their privacy. There are other reasons having to do with my history with that group that you are about to read. The friendships I enjoyed there were strong and influential - at one point, a few of the members of that group also belonged to The Rude Mechanicals, and I acted in Shakespearean plays with them onstage.
I joined the informal, slightly and humorously secret group, divorced my first wife, and married my second wife all in the same bunch of years. My second wife also wanted to be a part of the group, and my new group of close friends already liked her from Newsgroup posts they had seen. None of us were such hard, industrious workers that we did not also have plenty of time to e-mail each other all through the day, sharing funny, creative flights of fancy that sometimes got rather elaborate. I invented an ASCII-Symbol-drawn character and named him Bimp, and pretty soon he and I were the same person. "Bimp" or "Bimpie" was my nickname. It was simply who I was to the other members of the group. Even my new wife used that as my name most of the time.
The group grew larger, and times got harder for all of our online friendships. Like I said, I turned 40 during that time. Some of our daily e-mail discussions were not just about silly things or Agency bureaucracy. We would talk about our personal lives. In retrospect, I think - and I believe most of those who were in the group then would definitely not disagree - that I did not handle talking about my personal life with them very well. In my defense, I don't think I was alone in this - but that's the only defense I am going to give of it, and I'm going to drop taking that tack right now. I am no longer friends with anybody in that group, and there is nothing to be gained or lost by dwelling on who was right or wrong.
Let me be more honest here: I began to envy some of the others in the group, especially those who sometimes would post frankly about their very happy sex lives. Mine was not as good as I felt it should have been at the time, and I would sometimes let the group know. My wife had gone on to become a Federal contractor, and so quite often these e-mails from me to the group, long dossiers of my sexual unhappiness and frustration, would be trimmed of her e-mail address in the To: line.
You can see how that would put a strain on any group dynamic. I did have friends, still my friends now, who told me frankly that I was not the only problem with the group dynamic. But my look back now shows me a version of myself that matches with what this group of friends, now embarrassed probably very badly by my "true confessions" about someone who was also their good friend, thought of me. I was a jerk in that way at least. As one member put it in a e-mail addressed only to me, I had used the group e-mails to become a "bottomless vortex of need" to these friends.
My second marriage outlasted my membership in the group by a few years. I left the group of my own choosing, but had already generated plenty of hostility and negativity by the way I was acting. And when I divorced my second wife, and later when she died in an accidental fire in the townhouse where we had lived as a couple, I did not even try to contact any of these former friends. I could feel their dormant hatred of me would have flared back into something more active, more angry, if I had tried. I still believe I am cast as a villain in most of their minds. Sometimes I even think of them thinking of my second wife's decline into poorer health after we parted, and how that may have related to her death. I don't enjoy thinking about how they may consider me in relation to those events. And yet I do think about it. None of them have tried to contact me, and I have returned that favor.
So why am I writing this article? I don't do it to seek forgiveness or to presume to administer it. They didn't do anything wrong, at least not disproportionately to the way I misused our friendships or the group dynamic or the e-mail medium. At the same time, I also know I became known as over-apologetic among that group, and I also do not feel I want to continue that now. This is not an attempt to say I'm sorry. They won't read this, or if they do, I don't really care. But these were deep friendships, and this was a big part of my life experience back then, and now I'm 60, and what I did and felt then is still something I carry with me now. You who saw the link to this article on my Facebook Timeline or my Twitter feed, you are the one who encounters me now, you are the one who matters. And you may have needed to know this about my history. The past is the past, I know, and some things are better left behind, but it came to me that I could talk about it to my current online friends group now, at last, and maybe there is a need or benefit in it as well. Who knows?
I also discovered USENET and e-mail, through internal mirrors of those services that my Federal agency had and made available to the workforce soon after everyone in it started having computers on their desks. And through that internal copy of USENET and e-mail, I discovered my online voice. That voice gained me new friends whose faces I'd never seen - something I'm awfully used to by now, but it was quite the new brain-tickle back then - and some of us formed a group, and the group had a name. We were all irreverent wits who smirked at upper management idiosyncracies and bureaucratic bungles, and were not afraid to express this in the various internal Newsgroups. We also grew strong personal friendships.
The group took its name from a club formed by the characters in a popular comic strip. I am not sharing it here because some vestige of the group may still exist, and I respect their privacy. There are other reasons having to do with my history with that group that you are about to read. The friendships I enjoyed there were strong and influential - at one point, a few of the members of that group also belonged to The Rude Mechanicals, and I acted in Shakespearean plays with them onstage.
I joined the informal, slightly and humorously secret group, divorced my first wife, and married my second wife all in the same bunch of years. My second wife also wanted to be a part of the group, and my new group of close friends already liked her from Newsgroup posts they had seen. None of us were such hard, industrious workers that we did not also have plenty of time to e-mail each other all through the day, sharing funny, creative flights of fancy that sometimes got rather elaborate. I invented an ASCII-Symbol-drawn character and named him Bimp, and pretty soon he and I were the same person. "Bimp" or "Bimpie" was my nickname. It was simply who I was to the other members of the group. Even my new wife used that as my name most of the time.
The group grew larger, and times got harder for all of our online friendships. Like I said, I turned 40 during that time. Some of our daily e-mail discussions were not just about silly things or Agency bureaucracy. We would talk about our personal lives. In retrospect, I think - and I believe most of those who were in the group then would definitely not disagree - that I did not handle talking about my personal life with them very well. In my defense, I don't think I was alone in this - but that's the only defense I am going to give of it, and I'm going to drop taking that tack right now. I am no longer friends with anybody in that group, and there is nothing to be gained or lost by dwelling on who was right or wrong.
Let me be more honest here: I began to envy some of the others in the group, especially those who sometimes would post frankly about their very happy sex lives. Mine was not as good as I felt it should have been at the time, and I would sometimes let the group know. My wife had gone on to become a Federal contractor, and so quite often these e-mails from me to the group, long dossiers of my sexual unhappiness and frustration, would be trimmed of her e-mail address in the To: line.
You can see how that would put a strain on any group dynamic. I did have friends, still my friends now, who told me frankly that I was not the only problem with the group dynamic. But my look back now shows me a version of myself that matches with what this group of friends, now embarrassed probably very badly by my "true confessions" about someone who was also their good friend, thought of me. I was a jerk in that way at least. As one member put it in a e-mail addressed only to me, I had used the group e-mails to become a "bottomless vortex of need" to these friends.
My second marriage outlasted my membership in the group by a few years. I left the group of my own choosing, but had already generated plenty of hostility and negativity by the way I was acting. And when I divorced my second wife, and later when she died in an accidental fire in the townhouse where we had lived as a couple, I did not even try to contact any of these former friends. I could feel their dormant hatred of me would have flared back into something more active, more angry, if I had tried. I still believe I am cast as a villain in most of their minds. Sometimes I even think of them thinking of my second wife's decline into poorer health after we parted, and how that may have related to her death. I don't enjoy thinking about how they may consider me in relation to those events. And yet I do think about it. None of them have tried to contact me, and I have returned that favor.
So why am I writing this article? I don't do it to seek forgiveness or to presume to administer it. They didn't do anything wrong, at least not disproportionately to the way I misused our friendships or the group dynamic or the e-mail medium. At the same time, I also know I became known as over-apologetic among that group, and I also do not feel I want to continue that now. This is not an attempt to say I'm sorry. They won't read this, or if they do, I don't really care. But these were deep friendships, and this was a big part of my life experience back then, and now I'm 60, and what I did and felt then is still something I carry with me now. You who saw the link to this article on my Facebook Timeline or my Twitter feed, you are the one who encounters me now, you are the one who matters. And you may have needed to know this about my history. The past is the past, I know, and some things are better left behind, but it came to me that I could talk about it to my current online friends group now, at last, and maybe there is a need or benefit in it as well. Who knows?
