One of the most marvelous things about the people I know as friends is that they know things. Little bits of information about interesting topics makes for great conversations. Everyone I know is fun to talk to, I always learn something. This extends to my Facebook family of friends. It is extremely rare that our conversation is base and gossipy — almost never. No one wastes time on the exploits of the rich and famous or the alcoholic uncles or overbearing aunts. My folks are deeper than surface. As I mature? (haha), I discover that I like to laugh and I like to chat, those are probably my favourite things. When I look back on my past self, I see that it was always true…I was trouble for the rule of order in a school classroom, usually making a joke. I teased in church. I have been told by the unamused (mostly ex-spouses) that I am trying to capture the spotlight. Well, yeah, I guess, a little bit? Ha ha. Sadly, the conversation is covid-limited to what electronic devices are capable of. We are separated from each other physically but still try to keep our connections with the cyber-world.
As long as we can chat and make fun, then we are ok…no matter how much food there is or isn’t, how dangerous the political world is or isn’t or how grand our accomodations (though I do like good food and grand accomodation). Trouble with meaningful chatting is, in cyber-space it is difficult to do well. Talking to a moving picture on a back-lit screen is not the same as pouring a cuppa for someone and having their prescence in the room, their realness. In a sense it is the same as the difference between anything analog and it’s digital representation. Digitizing what is analog changes it. To convert a wave of laughter to bits and bytes, then re-create it loses it’s liveliness. The eye and the ear can tell when a thing is re-created, there is the soul of it gone no matter how carefully our machines replicate. Perhaps, when computers add the other elements of conversation, the sensation of being next to someone, their smell, their squeaks, the noises and the colours, the depth perception, it will be different.
Until the little chips in our phones are faster, better, realer, being isolated to Facetime or telephone conversation is a deadly dull thing for me. Of course, without it I am even in worse trouble. I, and the other 7 billion of us, suffer. We need to have what is analog be analog. We can’t ‘sense’ another person from their image on an Ipad screen. The camera catches a lot but the eye is not fooled. I am always left wanting that certain something with each Facetime or telephone conversation. Texting is more trouble yet, with the problems of interpretation when body language is not part of it. Handwritten, cursive letters are also difficult to interpret correctly, although the scent of a perfumed paper does tell something and the lack of uniformity in the shapes of the characters, the flow of penmanship tells even more. They add up to something more real than a crisp Times New Roman could ever be.
Today, this snowy morning, I am hungry. Hungry for a dinner out with friends, hungry to have them sitting on my sofa and telling me stories that make me laugh. I am hungry to sing. I am hungry to disrupt the orderly conduct of a concert with my asides. I miss ‘Pere Steve’ and Norm and Willie and Victoria and Kari and Connie and Dora and Michael and Matthew and Jeremy and Roger and Blanche and having them laugh at wicked things I say. I miss hearing their clever conversations and the things they know that I don’t. I am hungry for that. That hunger is part of my being peckish all the time and I know it. The sensation of warm apple pie and a nice coffee is at least real and is close to the same thing as laying into ‘Ode to Joy’ with full heart. True, that. I am gaining weight just because the refrigerator is not digital. It is analog and filled with the things I can buy at the essential businesses…sausage, cheese, cherry pie, mayonnaise…homemade pickles, et-cet-era. I am ready now, to get dressed, clean off the car and chat through the service window with my lovely friends at Starbucks! Mmmmm.
Robert On The Air 