2018-01-25 - 2:51 p.m.

I'm of the age where, when I left home at 18 for college, that marked precisely the line between no-internet and internet. I had used the internet before my freshman year exactly once, in the high school library, and I used to, for some reason, look up my dad's name. The search returned one hit.

At orientation, I was assigned an email address. I remember it went like this: [email protected]. I don't know what the "gl" meant. The email system was called Pine and I remember that, every time you opened it, it reminded you that it had been developed by the University of Washington. You had to do a combination of keys--Control F or whatever--to forward something, for example. I remember a lot of forwards. Essentially chain letters. A lot of quizzes--have you had sex in this way and in this way?--and in that regard the internet hasn't changed much at all.

But I remember, too, in those early internet days, its scarcity, or, rather, its whatever-the-opposite-of-omnipresence-is. How you had to walk to a computer lab to tap into the world of everything-all-the-time. How you still used The Sun or The City Paper to find out what times movies played. How you read magazines. How you couldn't just look up anything from anywhere. How you made bets of six-packs of beers over whether it's Bill Paxton or Bill Pullman. How you went to bed and talked or read or masturbated or whatever you did but what you did not do was stare at a screen that turned your face blue.

I'm not angry about it. It's here and I use it plenty, too, the internet-in-your-pocket. And I don't want to say, you know, that life was simpler and somehow better without the internet. But it was something, and while Facebook and Twitter and sports scores and what's the biggest dinosaur and pornography have been gained, something for sure's been lost, too.

I remember a huge blizzard when I was in the tenth grade. They canceled school for two straight weeks. I stayed up late, sure in the knowledge that I didn't need to wake up until noon if I wanted to, just reading a book. Not a good book, but a book, GO 106.1 on low, playing The Cranberries' "Linger," and of course it's not that I remember not checking a screen every 15 minutes but I remember instead what the mind could do without that screen: thinking of girls, thinking about the book, thinking about its Arctic setting, thinking about whatever it was, all of it up there, mixed in with the boredom, free.

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