Only connect

I wondered what it is that I feel disconnected from. Jerry is with me. My dogs are with me. I can call any of my children on the telephone, though the connections are often bad because the call may be routed via satellite. I can call my house sitter, or friends on the island if I want to know the local news there.

If either Jerry or I were to get really sick the EMS worker who lives down the road would summon an airplane to take us to civilization. And she is competent and intelligent. Last summer, when Jerry had some discomfort in his chest, she was on the phone to the cardiac clinic in Bellingham where he goes for treatment.

This place is beautiful and, for me, exotic. I know and like some people here, and I like my little under-furnished house. Most things in it are convenient. There is good public radio to listen to. I hardly ever watch TV, so I hardly ever notice the fact that we forgot to bring a TV

I conclude, then, that it is the internet that I miss the most. The only way I can get on the internet here is to go to the Washeteria, and connecting is always iffy. On the island I check the net 5 or 6 times a day. I look at blogs, email, Google things, read news, buy stuff, arrange travel, and more.

Through my blog I have made friends who matter to me, but who, in many ways, are phantoms of the ether. Some bloggers conceal much about themselves. Little pictures don’t tell what they really look like and I have not heard their voices or watched them move. They have never seen or heard me.

Paradoxically, bloggers often write about their inner feelings and beliefs, so I know them in a way that is more intimate than I ever experience with casual friends. It’s like meeting a stranger on an airplane who tells you his most intimate emotional pain, because he’s sure he will never see you again.

Even when there’s no attempt to conceal, there’s anonymity in posting on the web. People vanish suddenly, leaving an emptiness and questions. Is he dead? Did something terrible happen to her? Or did she just get bored.

Not long ago I read a post by Dick Jones who has been blogging for several years. (I digress to say that because, in this place, I am not connected to the web I can’t just look up the post to see how many years. That bothers me.) Dick wrote that over the years the number of his blog readers has remained more or less constant. Some come, some go, and a loyal core stays with him. He wonders whether it matters that the number of his readers doesn’t grow.

When I first started blogging I guessed that almost nobody read my posts. I haven’t a way of tracking the number of people who read, except for comments. I get between 5 and 10 comments per post. One needs an audience to write for, although for me a large audience isn’t necessary. However, I don’t want to lose the audience I have because of lack of interaction.

I miss my blog friends. Today we went to the Washeteria, where I washed clothes, and we managed to connect. I put up the post I had written, and I checked a few blogs. My computer wasn’t plugged in, so I had to worry about the battery running down, and Jerry wanted to look at bank statements and some political stuff he reads. It took a long time to get on, and then we had to go.

I read the latest post by Duchess Omnium (my daughter: now there’s a blogger I know well. But in her blog in some ways she seems like a different person). It was a sad story about the suicide of the squire in Buckland, and fire in a 500 year old house there. Then I checked on Carter’s Little Pill, the blog of a young woman, Julie, whose husband recently died. She writes wonderfully, and I worry about her. I looked at Ruth Pennebaker’s, another fine writer, with whom I have had brief contact via email, and left a quick comment.

I looked at Dale’s blog, but his last posts were poetry and I can’t read poetry fast. I’ll have to go back to that next time. I wanted to check Dick Jones, Jan, Tessa, Darleen, Time Goes By, the old grey poet and many others, but by this time the clothes were dry and Jerry was tired of reading an old copy of Cosmopolitan which someone had left on the washer (even though it contained an article promising an orgasm every time).

So now I’ve progressed from feeling disconnected to feeling tenuously connected.

It still feels weird.