07-19-2005, 12:00 AM
So I'd made another start. Darn, it was still the same old story though, the same old one I kept feeling compelled to tell, but now I'd been at it for seven years, and still I'd never finished telling it. Did it even have an ending?
Yes, I'd lost my marriage, but that was only the beginning, surely. And no, it wasn't because my wife had discovered me flirting on the Internet, although I guess that's what I'd been doing after all. 'Wanking' is what she'd called it, and that's what everyone did on the Internet, according to her. She had a very low opinion of the Internet, and it might make one wonder why she wasn't on 'my side' when it came to havin' a computer at all. I'd been dead set against it, and had stated flatly when we got the damn thing as a Christmas present from her parents that it spelled the beginning of the end of our family. What a grump I'd become. I'd ranted and raved against all these stupid contraptions, the microwave oven, the television, the 'Nintendo'... the 'Play-station'... All to no avail, and now I was just *pissed*. I wanted nothing to do with any of them, and if my family was going to embrace this stuff, then *fuc*k them, I thought, they can all go to hell.
And I moved into the loft above my workshop and avoided them all for six months. It was my son who created an account for me in the name of 'Carlitos Crow' and found me my first Castaneda-oriented 'newsgroup' to post to, and showed me how to post. But I'd already died by that time, and when I got on the Internet I crowed long and loud about that, and how I'd returned ... as a kind of ghost. And I got addicted. I did precious little else but send post after post after post. I even went out and bought myself an 'iMac' which I set up in the loft, which of course only further upset our already strained relations, but by then I just couldn't have cared less. The family was 'history' so far as I was concerned, and I set out to prove it.
Yes, I'd lost my marriage, but that was only the beginning, surely. And no, it wasn't because my wife had discovered me flirting on the Internet, although I guess that's what I'd been doing after all. 'Wanking' is what she'd called it, and that's what everyone did on the Internet, according to her. She had a very low opinion of the Internet, and it might make one wonder why she wasn't on 'my side' when it came to havin' a computer at all. I'd been dead set against it, and had stated flatly when we got the damn thing as a Christmas present from her parents that it spelled the beginning of the end of our family. What a grump I'd become. I'd ranted and raved against all these stupid contraptions, the microwave oven, the television, the 'Nintendo'... the 'Play-station'... All to no avail, and now I was just *pissed*. I wanted nothing to do with any of them, and if my family was going to embrace this stuff, then *fuc*k them, I thought, they can all go to hell.
And I moved into the loft above my workshop and avoided them all for six months. It was my son who created an account for me in the name of 'Carlitos Crow' and found me my first Castaneda-oriented 'newsgroup' to post to, and showed me how to post. But I'd already died by that time, and when I got on the Internet I crowed long and loud about that, and how I'd returned ... as a kind of ghost. And I got addicted. I did precious little else but send post after post after post. I even went out and bought myself an 'iMac' which I set up in the loft, which of course only further upset our already strained relations, but by then I just couldn't have cared less. The family was 'history' so far as I was concerned, and I set out to prove it.