Doctored, Strange Love (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The 'Net) - Part One
"Please take these words and do with them what you would like. It's a dream I had, drove me mad. It's just your time, it's just my fucking life."
It was loneliness and curiosity that first drove me to the internet. This was back in the heady days of '97, not long after my studies took me away from home for the first time. Seven years of experience makes it hard for me to recall exactly how I felt back then, but I know I was having a bad time. I was struggling to extricate myself from a long-term relationship with a girl I believed I loved, and my odyssey into the world of further education was not going well. A clerical error by UCAS (the body responsible for processing university applications) had sent me to a college in the hateful little town of King's Lynn, Norfolk. It had taken me three months of phonecalls to discover the reason why I was the only person on my course who was a) from out of town, and b) under 40. By the time I actually got to Cambridge, my fellow first years had already gone through the orientation and accompanying pub crawls. They'd found their cliques and chosen the people they were going to sit next to for the rest of the semester. Having just spent three months alone in King's Lynn, I quickly realised that my arrival in Cambridge wasn't going to change much.
Which, in a nutshell, was how I came to spend my time wandering around campus like a lost soul, filling the gaps between lectures by exploring the area and people-watching, forever scribbling my observations in a small notebook that was never far from my hands.
That notebook was what took me into the IT building, now that I come to think about it. I'm ambidextrous, but whichever hand I use, my writing is awful. Being PC-literate and a reasonably quick typist, I decided it would be easier if I spent a couple of hours at the end of each day bringing my scribblings together in a more legible form.
And so it was that I came to have a password, a pocketful of floppy disks, and an appointment with a bizarre new social life.
That first phase didn't last too long. I started exchanging e-mails with my friends back home and discovered an online community called The Globe (which no longer exists). The university computers didn't allow access to chat servers, but I got myself quite heavily involved in the forums there, masquerading under the username of HappyHarry (a reference to Happy Harry Hard-On, the DJ played by Christian Slater in the movie Pump Up The Volume). After a few months of this, my romance with the internet was rudely interrupted by real life. I'd been steadily making friends and getting into the university scene, and things between my girlfriend and I had improved.
Then she cheated on me.
Well, what could I do but reciprocate? I slept with her best friend, introduced myself to Mr. Jack, and then went on a insane drinking binge that drained what was left of my funds and left me in such a state that I had to borrow money from one of my new friends in order to be able to pay my train fare home once our exams were over.
It was about five months after this that I finally said goodbye to university forever. A friend of mine was killed in a car accident and, having returned home for the funeral, I decided it was pointless going back.
I got a job in a cinema, and my writing became the focal point of my life. I was working on screenplays back then, writing everything in my cramped and painful longhand. Looking back now, it seems incredible to me that I was able to churn out pages and pages of this stuff, spending my breaks and my nights off scribbling frantically in yet another of my many notebooks.
It probably seemed incredible to my mother, too. I believe to this day that the main reason she brought a PC was so that she wouldn't have to watch me hunched over the table, obviously in pain, working feverishly on whatever my masterpiece was that week.
That was my first and only PC. The computer that delivered me from the pain of my writing difficulties is the very same one I'm now using to tell you this story. The only things that are different are the keyboard and the mouse. That's one of the reasons I'm so reluctant to buy a new one. Me and this old thing have sort of a sentimental relationship.
For this story, though, the most important thing about having my own PC was that I finally had access to chat. I made a triumphant return to the forums at The Globe, and quickly became addicted to the accompanying chat rooms where - as the months went by - I began spending more and more time. My main hang-out was The Rainbow Room. It was meant to be a gay room, but the vast majority of the people who frequented it were either straight or bi. As a chat newbie, I liked it because it was the friendliest place I'd encountered.
I soon realised that the internet gave me freedoms I didn't have in real life. I was a quick and fluent typist with a better grasp of language and grammar than most. In a chat room, that conferred a kind of authority over the people that spoke in shorthand or couldn't write in the same way they could speak. I became a fixture in The Rainbow Room, one of a few that were expected to be there for several hours every night. I was always greeted warmly and people listened to what I had to say. They laughed at my jokes and offered advice about my problems. As HappyHarry, I felt like a different person. Like my namesake, when hiding behind the relevant media, I found I could talk.
More later, or tomorrow.
It was loneliness and curiosity that first drove me to the internet. This was back in the heady days of '97, not long after my studies took me away from home for the first time. Seven years of experience makes it hard for me to recall exactly how I felt back then, but I know I was having a bad time. I was struggling to extricate myself from a long-term relationship with a girl I believed I loved, and my odyssey into the world of further education was not going well. A clerical error by UCAS (the body responsible for processing university applications) had sent me to a college in the hateful little town of King's Lynn, Norfolk. It had taken me three months of phonecalls to discover the reason why I was the only person on my course who was a) from out of town, and b) under 40. By the time I actually got to Cambridge, my fellow first years had already gone through the orientation and accompanying pub crawls. They'd found their cliques and chosen the people they were going to sit next to for the rest of the semester. Having just spent three months alone in King's Lynn, I quickly realised that my arrival in Cambridge wasn't going to change much.
Which, in a nutshell, was how I came to spend my time wandering around campus like a lost soul, filling the gaps between lectures by exploring the area and people-watching, forever scribbling my observations in a small notebook that was never far from my hands.
That notebook was what took me into the IT building, now that I come to think about it. I'm ambidextrous, but whichever hand I use, my writing is awful. Being PC-literate and a reasonably quick typist, I decided it would be easier if I spent a couple of hours at the end of each day bringing my scribblings together in a more legible form.
And so it was that I came to have a password, a pocketful of floppy disks, and an appointment with a bizarre new social life.
That first phase didn't last too long. I started exchanging e-mails with my friends back home and discovered an online community called The Globe (which no longer exists). The university computers didn't allow access to chat servers, but I got myself quite heavily involved in the forums there, masquerading under the username of HappyHarry (a reference to Happy Harry Hard-On, the DJ played by Christian Slater in the movie Pump Up The Volume). After a few months of this, my romance with the internet was rudely interrupted by real life. I'd been steadily making friends and getting into the university scene, and things between my girlfriend and I had improved.
Then she cheated on me.
Well, what could I do but reciprocate? I slept with her best friend, introduced myself to Mr. Jack, and then went on a insane drinking binge that drained what was left of my funds and left me in such a state that I had to borrow money from one of my new friends in order to be able to pay my train fare home once our exams were over.
It was about five months after this that I finally said goodbye to university forever. A friend of mine was killed in a car accident and, having returned home for the funeral, I decided it was pointless going back.
I got a job in a cinema, and my writing became the focal point of my life. I was working on screenplays back then, writing everything in my cramped and painful longhand. Looking back now, it seems incredible to me that I was able to churn out pages and pages of this stuff, spending my breaks and my nights off scribbling frantically in yet another of my many notebooks.
It probably seemed incredible to my mother, too. I believe to this day that the main reason she brought a PC was so that she wouldn't have to watch me hunched over the table, obviously in pain, working feverishly on whatever my masterpiece was that week.
That was my first and only PC. The computer that delivered me from the pain of my writing difficulties is the very same one I'm now using to tell you this story. The only things that are different are the keyboard and the mouse. That's one of the reasons I'm so reluctant to buy a new one. Me and this old thing have sort of a sentimental relationship.
For this story, though, the most important thing about having my own PC was that I finally had access to chat. I made a triumphant return to the forums at The Globe, and quickly became addicted to the accompanying chat rooms where - as the months went by - I began spending more and more time. My main hang-out was The Rainbow Room. It was meant to be a gay room, but the vast majority of the people who frequented it were either straight or bi. As a chat newbie, I liked it because it was the friendliest place I'd encountered.
I soon realised that the internet gave me freedoms I didn't have in real life. I was a quick and fluent typist with a better grasp of language and grammar than most. In a chat room, that conferred a kind of authority over the people that spoke in shorthand or couldn't write in the same way they could speak. I became a fixture in The Rainbow Room, one of a few that were expected to be there for several hours every night. I was always greeted warmly and people listened to what I had to say. They laughed at my jokes and offered advice about my problems. As HappyHarry, I felt like a different person. Like my namesake, when hiding behind the relevant media, I found I could talk.
More later, or tomorrow.
posted by Michael at 1:17 PM
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