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[squeevening]

Ghosts in the Machine: on Love and Loss in Digital Spaces

I am mourning a friend. I sobbed myself to sleep last night, which is objectively silly, because my friend hasn’t died. He hasn’t left me; only the digital platform I’ve been living on for close to a decade, but my heart whispers, “Isn’t that kind of the same thing?” and the more I examine why I feel that way, the more melancholy I feel. Because it feels like an ending, and it has felt that way since the very beginning of digital platforms, and I think there’s more truth in that than we know how to talk about. I think maybe we need to talk about it.

So. This is one of those stories that starts, “To tell you this story, I have to start with a different story.” For those of you who are children of the digital age; where “meatspace” has always had a digital counterpart, this will sound impossible, but I am a child of the seventies. When I grew up, in middle school and junior high and high school, there were no cell phones; no internet, no social media. If you were lucky you got to use the telephone, coiling that long, corkscrew cord around your arm under your Mom’s desk, and if you were unlucky like me, your friends played sports and D&D without you, because you weren’t allowed to go. 

We wept when high school ended, my best friend and I, because we knew then what no one seems to understand now; the change in physical geography most of us were about to undertake meant the end of friendships. A fading out, at the very least, or a complete loss, probably, and what we knew in our bones came true as we dispersed like grains of sand to colleges or jobs or parts unknown. We graduated from High School in 1992. Facebook would not be created until twelve years later, in 2004, and by then, at least for me, the recurring dreams about running into lost friends would have been a decade old and still going strong.

I left for college at seventeen, with undiagnosed depression and a childhood of oppressive, controlling home life. At seventeen, I was almost free, and I did what any child might have under the same circumstances; I sought the socialization I had long been denied. I made friends. In-person friends that were up all night, that would play video games with me on my new snazzy computer; a top-of the line four-eighty-SIX with four HUNDRED and twenty five megabytes of disk space. We were free and we were spectacular, and one by one we dropped like flies, invited to depart this fine academic institution if we could not do any better than THIS at our GPA’s. Which just did not seem that important compared to the endless serotonin of friendship and crushing digital opponents all night in an endless slumber party, pairing and repairing in our unchaperoned, co-ed dorms. In those early days, my gaming partner in crime for most of a year had already flunked out and lived nearby in an off-campus apartment.

As you might imagine, I struggled to care about my grades. I lost my scholarship, but I pulled in as much financial aid as it had offered because my family was dirt poor. But I couldn’t stay afloat, and soon I, too, was invited to leave and ended up off-campus, spiraling into depression in a shitty apartment with a roommate I found on a paper flyer with tear-off tabs, where my share of the rent was two hundred and twenty five dollars a month. Which I struggled to pay. Can you imagine? I got a job at a Burger King, over three miles away, and I walked there every night and home at one am every night, and then I logged onto my 486 with it’s terrible non-ergonomic keyboard, pressed the key to dial the numbers on the telephone line with my 14.4 baud modem, and I found my new friends.

Those were heady days, kids, and hard to explain now that the internet is always at our fingertips. You needed an actual phone number, gleaned from chats in these Multi User Dungeons (MUDS), which we called dungeons. They were text-based hangouts, kind of like Discord servers, but each one was run on someone’s home computer, so you were literally calling their house to enter their space and hang out in their room, and that feeling never left me. 

Those kids saved my life, probably, offering friendship at my lowest point, all of us with the kind of made-up names that still persist today - never our real names, always silly aliases invented and kept across multiple platforms so you could recognize your friends and see if they were on, to chat the night away, burning permanent injury into your carpal tunnels on your shitty non-ergonomic keyboards, sharing small intimacies and human connection in these primitive digital spaces. 

These places were where I discovered the indescribable thrill of intimacy to be given the gift of someone’s real name. The way it felt to reveal your name to a new friend, deemed worthy, like a fantasy world where real names hold magical powers, and for us, they did. I spent countless hours hanging out with people whose names I cannot remember now, who meant the world to me, until one day was the last day and none of us knew it, never to see one another again. That feeling never left me either.

Fast forward a few years. There was an administrator at my college who believed in me; who kept my name enrolled by some trick of her computer wizardry, until I got my shit together and went back for my Bachelor’s. I had a boyfriend by then, the one I would eventually marry; depressed Caitlin was always surprisingly skilled at holding down the fort until I could take the reins again. (At least in the ways that mattered, paying rent and maintaining personal relationships - not silly, ephemeral things like grades or classwork.) I graduated with honors, and while the friends I made in the classrooms faded away again as we dispersed, I made other friends that persisted in real life; that I shared Sunday nights with huddled around our television watching the XFiles, and those were heady days again.

My boyfriend and I got married. We moved out to a house we could afford 45 minutes away from college while I pursued my Master’s, and friendship went a little digital again, this time with a little window on my desktop. My sister came to stay with us when we lost my younger brother, and we all clung to our shitty internet like we were drowning, which, in a lot of ways, we were. No program ever went fullscreen on my computer, because even with the shitty satellite internet out in the rambling farmland of Vermont (BURN IN HELL, HUGHESNET), there was always that little box I kept my husband in, on my computer screen. 

Facebook became a thing, and I was delighted. It was too download-heavy for our internet but I used it enough to find my High School friends and put a welcome end to those recurring dreams of running into them, now that they were a decade older and none of the pictures looked like the people I remembered anyway. I found some of my college friends in it. My sister and I talked to my other brother who had gone to college in the far South on it. I felt like we were all keeping in touch, and I remember vividly the feeling of rejection when my brother quit facebook. It was the room we hung out in; the space we shared our status updates, and he didn’t want to talk to us anymore.

We wheedled. He made an account that he checked now and then on work days. He rejected the internet at his new home to commune better with nature and keep his kids from getting addicted, and closed the door on that era of close ties; a downgrading of that connection. For a while he kept a blog about how his kids were doing, but eventually he turned off the rss push, I don’t remember why, and those update emails stopped coming.

The blog is still up, he protested. Check it! But it obviously wasn’t meant for me, since it didn’t send me messages anymore, and my undiagnosed ADHD forgot it existed; another downgrading of the relationship.

A decade ago, you could pop out message boxes from most websites, another loss I grieve today but I’m getting ahead of myself. I found the show Supernatural, and I watched it, alone on my treadmill, until I chatted with an acquaintance at a wedding we were both attending, who also happened to be in the same SEASON, some six or seven years into the show. We bonded. I went to her house to watch it. Another little chat box joined my desktop, with her in it, for about two years. My best friend from college lived in the same town as my new friend; I harangued her until she watched Supernatural too. We both went to my new friend’s to watch. Another little box joined my desktop, and now I had an embarrassment of riches. Those little boxes kept me company for years while I worked from home, alone in my downstairs office on my shitty internet. Like the old days.

Supernatural slowly helped me grieve the brother I had lost ten years prior to suicide, but that’s another story. I slowly unlocked the box I’d stored my humanity in, and started to grow as a person, something that had stalled for ten years. My friends and I did GISH. Gish made me join twitter, and I found a new room to replace the side windows, a wonderful room, a room I could hang out with a bunch of friends with and bond over this show, and I suppose fight over this show too, in all the ways we do even now, with our show undead and refusing to be gone.

All my little boxes that wouldn't pop out anymore anyway became that one big box, with all of my friends in it, just like in the early nineties. Some of the stars and writers of Supernatural would sometimes come into the room, and you could send them love, unheard of in my XFiles days. It was magical and heady and I wasted a ton of time in there - or it was time well spent, who can say - building friendships, one hundred and forty characters at a time. 

But every now and then, you log in and you don’t know it, but it’s the last time you will ever see one of the little lights in that box. The people you love wink out. We’ve had a pandemic going for two years. You don’t know if those lights are gone forever or taking a mental health break - sometimes they just don’t show up anymore. 

And now we’re caught up. It’s been three plus years since I started writing stories and posting them online, a magical time for me that has been creatively very fulfilling, but also led to several friendships I deeply treasure. There’s a column in my twitter interface for direct messages, and those are the tiny windows on my monitor; chat histories spanning literal years. Intimacies and secrets whispered, bonds built, sentence by sentence. Over a pandemic, even, in which I’ve clung to the sparks in those little boxes so hard I feared wringing them dry.

My first writing partner on twitter needed space. She had a lot going on at home and in my clumsy attempts to be understanding I pulled back too hard and gave her too much space and now I don’t know how to fix it, and I grieve. She’s not in that room anymore.

Eight years after joining twitter I was invited to my first writer’s chat room. It was a lovely six weeks or thereabouts, I think, before we outgrew the space, and they all moved to Discord. I sobbed like a baby. A few weeks later I installed the program and poked around in it, with its dozens of rooms, nothing like that one room we’d all banged around in all together for weeks. I’m trying really hard to stay connected, but they are in a different tab now, that I have to remember to check, and it’s not the same and it will never be the same.

And now my dearest friend has quit twitter, I think for good this time, and it’s almost impossible to describe the devastation I’m feeling. The room feels so empty without him. The chat box no longer keeps me company on my monitor; I can’t pretend he’s inside it.  We’ve written several books together, and I’ve clung to him harder than I probably should have, and now I’m facing that downgrade of a digital friendship again and I don’t know how to get through it this time.

He has a discord. I made a tab just for him and I tried to connect with him there, but on this last Friday, a publishing day, one I anticipated for months, he never happened to come online. I worried, and then I ached, and then I grieved.

He’s alright, he just never logged into the work computer he has discord on. I found him by text message, and he said that’s the best way to reach him, so I guess he lives inside my phone now. The phone with barely any reception in my office. The one without a keyboard, that I can’t cut and paste into; the one that takes me ages to type into with my thumbs. The little room on my monitor is empty, and my heart is empty, and when I write I feel alone, for the first time since I met him.

I don’t know how to explain it in a way that makes a lick of sense. But I felt it when my brother quit facebook and I feel it every time someone leaves the digital room I’m in and it feels ineffable. Unrecoverable. A downgrading of an intimacy, from friends who once sat in the room with me all day every day, at least in my mind, to old friends who won’t know what I’ve been talking about or thinking about, people I still love but who sit in a different room now, one I’m not in; one across the hall, maybe. We’ll yell to each other from our different rooms for a while, probably, but it’ll become less and less frequent, and less and less specific. Until that intimacy fades away, and that name slips down my list of most recent interactions until it fades out of sight, off the bottom of that browser window.

So I am grieving; a loss that no one else will see or understand as a loss, a loss I can’t even really explain. But I can feel it coming, and this one hurts.  

This one’s killing me.

[squeevening]

Caitlin’s Review of Frank Turner’s “Be More Kind”

I downloaded Frank Turner’s new album “Be More Kind” onto my phone, pulled on headphones, collected my Ferocious Mountain Poodles, & the four of us went for a mountain walk. This is my favorite way to open any artist’s proffered gift of new music. I will save favorite musician’s albums for months sometimes, waiting for the winter to be over.

I have never heard anything by Frank Turner. I head into this completely without expectation. I am not a critic by trade, I don’t know the language of the discipline. But I do know the language of my heart.

I find Frank’s voice pleasant, friendly, his accent endearing. The first couple songs have a nice beat, they are fun to walk to, they have an eversoslightly punk flavor. Listening this intimately to the lyrics, by the time I have gotten through Little Changes & Be More Kind I am gently chiding Frank that I prefer my anthems a little less literal, maybe a little less admonishment & a little more encouragement. I shush myself - this is Frank’s voice & I am here to accept his perspective, not tell him what I prefer.

I get to “Make America Great Again” & find myself grinning & maybe snickering just a little. This is charming & funny, & pretty catchy besides. Again I find the verse lyrics just too literal to be something I would add to my rotation, but I am enjoying the take & the song is just. Fun.

I listen to the next half dozen songs without too much commentary. I snarkily enjoy the song about wedgies (“I’ll be in there like swimwear”), Brave Face has some nice imagery but I’m not finding myself terribly compelled, There She Is I find sweet, 21st Century Survival Blues & Blackout teach me that Frank really doesn’t care for cell phone culture.  Common Ground I just can’t get into, the lyrics are just so literal & it’s not terribly melodic & my enthusiasm starts to wane.

OK so then I get to the gem on this album, “The Lifeboat”. Now we’re talking. This is the song that makes this album for me. The guitar & strings are lovely, the lyrics are beautiful and timeless and evocative without mention of cell phones or canned goods, & Frank’s voice on this song is the most beautiful I’ve heard it on this album. The harmony is lovely.  I don’t know what genre of music this album is meant to be but this one song is folk in the best sense of what that word means to me - human voice lifted in song with maybe some gentle guitar & visuals that can mean almost anything you need them to. Songs that transport me to a campfire where flames dance, reflected in eyes and in hearts.  This is the one for me Frank, I listened to it several more times on the walk back.

There was one more song but I listened and not gonna lie I went back to play The Lifeboat instead. :-)   Give this album a listen friends, it is well worth your hour, and surely you are not nearly as much of a picky brat as this old Lady. :-D

Thank you Frank. I will explore your back catalog. <3

[squeevening]

Show me your hearts my Loves,  & I will treasure you.

Years ago, a person told me he was an artist, a title I have coveted my whole life, & then proceeded to draw something not. very. good.

I mean, I could easily draw something much better. Of course I was kind & said nothing but I think about that moment sometimes.

I've always felt there is an arbitrary level of worthy work necessary before I can claim a title. But what if there isn't? 

What if I only have to write one sentence to be a writer? One poem to be a poet? One mediocre drawing to be an artist?

What if we are all writers and poets and artists? How much richer would this world be if we believed as we tell children. All art is worthy.

I believe it. If art can move another human to have a feeling they didn't have before they saw it, I think it has value.

What I mean to say is, with all my heart, I beg us all, create. You, me, all of us. In whatever way moves you. Share your heart.

We are brief sparks, but we have this ability to feel, and to make each other feel. Let's do more of that, while our flames burn bright.

I will love your art from your first stick figure. I have no children. My fridge is bare. Show me your hearts my loves, & I will treasure U.

[squeevening]

Caitlin’s #E4K Bedazzleathon Exit Essay

This was a first for me. I don't like asking people for anything on my social media. I almost never retweet gofundme links (although I do give to them I just don't like making the ask) & I have often said outright that I want my Tweeties' affection, I want their joy, perhaps to share an emotional burden -  peace love & squee - explicitly never anything wallet related. But Misha inspires the everloving Bejeezus out of me. His spark burns so bright & I find the way he doggedly uses his powers for good deeply moving. If anything would get me out of my comfort zone for a good cause, it's that inspiration. Because Holy Crap was this out of my comfort zone. 

My family was dead broke growing up but I was fed & housed & grew up smart & articulate. I got an education & a skill I can sell & I married someone who does OK, we do alright, I haven't had to ask for help in this way. But throughout my Shenanigans I could feel the edge of how awful asking out of need feels. These last weeks as I went through this journey of being a jackass & just throwing myself into wheedling & figuring out perks that would open *my* fangirl wallet & sharing what the experience felt like with my Tweeties, there was this arc of experience, this nugget of understanding of this new gofundme economy the kids are doing. It's how this generation lifts someone up when they need it & then they repay the favor when someone else loses their job. It's actually beautiful now that I understand it & while I  give a little here & there, I now feel like I want to do more.

Last year I split $50 between five different #E4K participants & couldn't really think of a way I could participate beyond donating. This year I was watching Misha's video about #E4K & bemoaning my complete lack of athletic stamina when I realized "Hey! I know a thing that I like to do that hurts a lot, *bedazzling*!  I can bedazzle stuff!" So, with a really painfully acute level of self-awareness I embarked on an exceptionally uncomfortable couple of weeks of making a complete nuisance of myself egregiously begging my friends on twitter to support this endeavor.  I discovered a fabulous a loophole for the fanart law in that there was no rule against decorating licensed collectibles properly purchased & therefore added expensive items from my collection to the offer. Tweeties decided I should bedazzle orange underpants in Misha's "honor", so orange underpants were procured. I decided I would blaspheme & bedazzle one of my prized SammyPlaids as a prize. Friends donated prizes for ruination. I made ridiculous marketing materials. I obtained permission from & bantered with fan fave @astroglide about bedazzling & regifting a bottle of lube. I angled every possible non-copyrighted bedazzle idea I could think up. I prepped designs for a week before when my sweet husband bought me a template cutter & I just about died of excitement.  I essentially sold dazzle futures I am still fulfilling & mailing. I did a 13 hour stint on periscope Saturday, failed a fair amount & thought up new techniques, did 6 more exhausted hours on Sunday & I probably have 50 hours into this total but it doesn't feel like work it feels more like making presents for friends.   

I am too old to ask my family for money & my fandom mystifies them anyway. Every donation came from friends in & out of the fandom or SPNFamily moved by my writeup or I traded other #E4Kers donations here & there. None of my perks were really that valuable in any way.  I am completely aware that every donation was an act of love. It felt like love. It was love. The number on it didn't matter, the support was for my enthusiasm. I picture us all bringing Misha our buckets of our lives' ransoms, as big a bucket as we each can spare, while he points us at a fire to put out.  I find this image so beautiful.  The world is on fire - I don't know what to do I feel helpless and useless - & here's Misha gently saying "This fire. This little one over here. Let's put out this one." 

I have thrown myself into the arms of my #SPNFamily & they have loved me back. This fandom has become my home. I am so grateful.