On the Road at the Optimistic Dawn of the Internet Age

[mnaz]

Note: from circa 17 years ago, pre-"smart phones."

I dropped into the California desert, outrunning a massive cloud. The Bradshaw Trail descended past a bombing range, where well-armed outlaws are known to salvage bomb material even as bombs are falling . . . on down into desperate depths, until I beheld a vast blue mirage . . . except it wasn't a mirage, it was forty miles of brine named Salton Sea, a dumbfounding vision born a hundred years ago when irrigation channels overflowed. Its blue existence in barren, bombed out hills made no sense at all. Hollywood found it in the '50s and built a yacht club, but freak storms in the '70s flooded the shore, followed by a mass exodus, and things were left to rot in salty muck, such as trailers corroded down to ribs, and that half-eaten delivery van, still resting where it was half-submerged.
........It was a world of headless palms and baked squalor of rubble, salt-encrusted docks exposed by a receding shoreline. At times the wind carried a stench of dead fish and a dust of pesticides lifted from the old sea floor, but no ill wind could deter the last eccentrics living along the Salton Sea from casting lines into their bright blue pond. So don't write off the dead sea just yet. Reverend Leonard used to pray for it on his Salvation Mountain, a brightly painted mound on the south shore adorned with religious symbols in a land starved for them, out where hot, dry flats are known to fill with watery shimmer, at times miraculously crossed on foot by far off travelers . . . But then that damn gray cloud crept over a ridge, and it started to rain again.
........I was almost to Mexico when I remembered Ned. Texas Ned, desert sage of Zen. That was it, of course! I had to go see him and his wife Sharon, because in the Eastern desert it never rains. I could even go to Marfa, to see the weird little lights visible across a playa beside town, like little dancing fireballs at night. No one has been able to explain them. Sharon said her great grandfather discovered them. He thought they were Apache campfires at first.
........But who was Ned? Well Ned was a hard man to describe. He looked like Charles Bronson with a goatee, and he ran a dredge operation for the subconscious in his bunker beneath a mountain in West Texas, and in that creation chamber he made paintings in streams of image fragments; bits of beaks and snakes and eyes surfacing in portals of being, woven into topographies and geometries colliding and dovetailing, although I'm sure he'd never describe it that way, because Zen isn't complicated.
........On the road I'd bullshitted for hours on the phone with Ned, every other week; Ned and his drawl, and his meandering thoughts all cut up and reglued at random, master of tangents and stretcher of calls, though sometimes he was laconic, right to the point, as if recharging for the next round . . . Ned, and his cool no-mind Zen, of the yin-yang balance wheel. Yet it was odd how he could shift so quickly into burning politics of the day. Like the time he was explaining The Garden . . . because you can't understand anything until you understand The Garden, a place where there was once nothing to understand.
........"Fear and desire guard the gate."
........"Can we get back to the garden?"
........"Buddha passed right through to the tree."
........"I think he's still sitting there."
........"Man I'm so sick of Congress, did you hear what that prick did? . . ."

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........By extraordinary coincidence, a New World was dawning back then, a huge breakthrough called the World Wide Web, which as an entirely new way to view the world . . . It was the New Screen, which was not like the Old Screen your dad fell asleep to on his favorite recliner. No, this New Screen was different, because you could talk back to it.
........It was our big shift, of physical into digital; our centuries of tangible grime, gears, levers, pulleys, books, scrolls and warm wooden vibrations, washed over by a shiny-sharp digital glaze and cyber tide; the long-prophesied rise of machines with a singular purpose of locking our life blood in countless blocks of bloodless digits.
........I fell for this nascent revolution. When I found a library on the road, I ignored the shelves and went straight for the New Screen, which could give me everything I desired at the touch of a button. It was war, wisdom, food, art and propaganda all rolled in one glorious mess . . . "755,157 results, time: 0.11 seconds." A miracle of astounding proportions. Everything was wired; even the far desert was wired. We were all wired up to boxes back in some big city, whole warehouses full of boxes, all hooked together in sheer data lust, and no one knew where was it all headed, this amazing, fearsome new geyser of data. The main thing was, we would finally have our say.
........The odd thing about the New Screen back in those days was that it was filled with pixelated artists and poets. They logged in with handles like "Whitebird," or "AxDeath," and typed anything imaginable in text boxes . . . wild freakout, quiet glory, nihilist doom, transcendence, survival, tendrils of the absurd, theories crashing theories, and much adolescent gushing . . . "My tears are raindrops on your dusty moon." A billion screams in the machine.
........The New Screen is where I had met Ned, ten months earlier, when I saw his pixelated paintings and drove out to West Texas to meet him. It seemed like I'd known him forever, though I'd only met him face to face one time . . . I remember the place on the Web where we met, but I don't remember how I got there. Maybe I happened onto it one day when I was trying to get the weather.
........That must be it. I was scrolling one day and stumbled onto a crazy poet place, where poets wrote bits of poems back and forth to each other in long strings that tangled and branched; where poets sang and knocked each other in the head, and swam muddy rivers, and bathed in light and roamed back canyons of mind. At times they fell into pointless debates on the nature of reality, but always returned to paint their words, or ask why horns stopped blowing on records like they did on all those jagged jazz streams of cool Dada fury coming off blown fronts. It was a big, bawdy, oceanic bash; a frothy, breaking wave; and it was where I first read Ned's words onscreen.
........Take all your words
........and spill 'em in space
........Watch them swirl
........like constellations

[sasha]

The Wild West days of the Internet - winsock, Netscape, Dogpile - the Interactive Poetry Pages, QuickMail, MySpace... My brother likened web surfing to driving cross-country in 1910. I very foolishly prophesized that electronic mail would revive the lost art of letter writing. Never saw that it would do just the opposite....... lol, U no wut I mean?

[mnaz]

roflol, yes I do. All my writings began with pen or pencil in hand, and I really had to TRAIN myself to accept the word processor-- but now of course I can't imagine life without it. What would some of the great authors have accomplished with word processing? Anyway, just felt like a much more optimistic attitude back then, for such an astounding tech advance as wiring everything together, than it feels like now.

[sasha]

I also started with pen & paper - not quite old enough for quill & foolscap, but old enough to include an intermediate stop with a Smith-Corona clackity-clack acoustic typewriter. Like you, I wouldn't give up my word processor now any more than I'd go back to a slide rule.

I kind of see parallels between the creative use of this tech failing to keep up with the tech itself, specifically in the evolution of audio. I was heavy into reel-to-reel back in the day, and somewhat dismissive of 8-track & cassette recorders, prefering sound fidelity & editing flexibility to the convenience of just popping a cartridge into a player. But convenience took the market by storm, and artistry took the hit. Kids these days...

[mnaz]

This is actually a true (only slightly embellished!) story of being on the road, drifting, and going to meet 2 people I first encountered on the Web, on a "crazy poet" website . . . and a reminiscence of a general feeling of optimism about the great connectivity and possibilities of this new tech; a feeling that has taken a beating in the years since, unfortunately.

This is snipped from a longer story, with a nod (lament) to "my special power to make it endlessly rain in the desert," recurring throughout the journey to Texas and back (2005 was an extraordinarily rainy winter and spring in the desert SW). The "optimistic" part was the fantastic possibilities of the (still relatively new) Internet. My persistent rain-making power? Not so much.