Holocaust
Besides the porn-smorgasboard, and dialing in your own personal fetish-triggers, what most people do eventually if they're looking at an online screen and have some time, they look up people they've lost contact with. I did that. I found some of 'em too. Some I didn't.
One day I typed in this friend of mine. He was a herpetologist. He was one of the too rare people I've known that could make me nervous about my intelligence. When I first knew him we became roomates and then fast friends. It was an odd time, a dark time overall, just after the bright afternoon of the late 60's. He had some snakes in a vivarium, getting high and watching the snakes eat live mice was a lesson in a lot of things, controlling the urge to vicarious sadism being one, accepting the transfer of nutrients from one life to another without judgement was another. The last time I saw him he was living in a college town in northern California, strung out on coke pretty much.Living in the country, had a lot of snakes still, and an old Triumph motorcycle. We got all hopped up and stoned and he asked me if I wanted to take the bike out. And I did. It was a part of the county very near where somebody had shot somebody back in the early 70's. The somebody that got shot had been sodomizing a five year old. The other somebody ended up with a reputation for a lot of other things besides that. I wasn't thinking about that so much as the Sheriff's Rifle Range I kept flying by, with the throttle wide open and my pulse as calm as a birthday cake. I was still young then, so was he, more than just about anyone he was kind and generous to me, not with things but with regard, we shared a lot of the same views of the world, his knowledge of zoology and biology meant he was containing a lot of rage. It's all put away now, but there were lots of voices raised even then, even before. So we lost touch. I helped his ex-old lady get to Ireland right around the same time. They lost touch too. You'd expect this to be about his eventual death in a crack-lab somewhere, with AIDS and TB or something, or his recovery and 12-step religious conversion and a regular job and life, but it didn't go that way.
I had no idea really, no preconceived notion. And I learned a little about the distant-ness of online information. The flat perspective of a web site with its do-your-best design and presentation.
Scott was my age, brave, strange, brilliant, and he played the flute, and I never gave that enough credit somehow. It still feels like a thing I could have done differently. For the rest I never felt like I fucked him over, never betrayed his trust in me, because it was realistic, he knew something was going on.
He was a 22 year old Jewish kid from Chicago by way of LA when I met him. Last time I saw him he was a coked-up biologist with a trust fund and a PHD. But he kept changing. I'm proud to have known him as well as I did.
http://training.fws.gov/history/maness.html
