Couch Surfing
Dear John,
I’ve been trying for several days to figure out how to express some of the ideas I’ve been pulling together lately. I get where you’re coming from about the Internet, and I don’t entirely disagree, but I think you’re a bit stuck in the past. During our discussion, I felt pretty emphatically that there is a value to the Internet, despite the elements of our society it seems to be destroying. But it wasn’t until this trip that I began to understand why. So let me see if I can explain.
Throughout this trip I’ve been doing this thing called couch surfing. Here’s how it works; you’re planning a trip, and instead of staying at a hotel or campground, wouldn’t it be fun to stay with someone local to the area? Well, thanks to this social networking site, you can. You upload some basic information about yourself, maybe some pictures, and then find people willing to host you in the area you’re looking to travel. You have a little online discussion and if they’re willing, they’ll let you sleep on their couch or sometimes in a spare bedroom if they have one. The practical advantages here are sort of obvious, getting free lodging and a knowledgeable guide, but there’s also something going on that’s sort of fascinating.
My first couch surfing host was a teacher at a local university in Indiana where I was passing through. I had sifted through twenty or so other people on the site in that area, reading their profiles and trying to make the deceptively complex decision of who’s house I wanted to sleep in. There’s something very personal about sleeping in someone’s house. It’s sort of like when you watch a movie with someone, and after it’s over you feel a heightened sense of connection to whoever you just saw the movie with because you know that both of you just went through the exact same experience together. Well, sleep is kind of like that movie. You wake up the next day and eat breakfast and there’s the understanding that both of you just went through a very vulnerable human process together, and you are at least that much closer together than you were before. But is this really someone I want a closeness with? It’s a tricky decision, because you’re not just looking for a good couch, you’re looking for someone who’s worthy of this relationship, however trivial it ultimately is.
So in picking a host, I would take whatever information they decided to post and use that to construct the image of a person in my head. Who is Bob Sampson? He says he likes sushi bars and bird watching, reading Sci-fi novels and baking bread. He was well built before middle age, but now he’s balding and it looks like he hasn’t been handling it well. He teaches Ornithology at the community college. He has a wife and a daughter. I bet he’s a pretty meek guy, conciliatory on good days and aloof on his bad days, but always wry enough to deliver a memorable line here and there. I would imagine he recognized early the futility of some of his pursuits and has come to terms with that as best he can, though subconsciously it weighs on him. Probably a good husband and father. I think, sure, this could work, he seems like a good guy, I could sleep there. And he agrees.
Now, here’s the fun part, on the stoop, just after the doorbell has been rung and you hear him coming down the stairs. It’s instantly a game show in which you, the contestant, have chosen Door Number 1, and behind Door Number 1 is, you hope, Bob Sampson, the man you have created inside your head, based on things this man has said about himself. The door knob turns and all you can think is, was I right? Did I guess right? Is this person opening the door Bob Sampson? The door swings open and you hear him say, hello.
But this is not Bob Sampson. This is a man who calls himself Bob Sampson, but he is not the man you made in your mind. Far from it actually. In fact, Bob isn’t passive at all, but aggressively paranoid. He can see the truth, man, that the Sci-fi books are telling us, and he’s convinced that the government is using birds to spy on him. When the world ends, everyone will have to know how to fish and bake bread. His wife and his daughter ignore him, irritated at being connected to such an idiot, but too merciful to cut him loose into the ruthless world of abandonment. And I, I will be sleeping in the guest bedroom down the hall.
Fuck. I just got that feeling, the fork in the road where I have to decide whether to blindly cling to the idea that Mental Bob and Physical Bob are still the same person, and I hadn’t miscalculated, I hadn’t just placed myself into the awkward situation of sleeping in the house of a wackadoodle, OR, to admit the reality, that everything that I had believed to be true up to that point was now shown to be terribly, terribly wrong. This is, coincidentally, the line along which religionists and atheists are divided, and the difference between sleeping easy, and sleeping with one eye open.
The most illuminating element in all of this is the fact that my Mental Bob was originally based on Bob’s Mental Bob. Our relationship existed in a completely sterilized world in which the image I projected and the image he projected, and the circumstances in which we projected ourselves, were completely manmade and controlled. In this world, I would sleep in Bob’s spare bedroom. But, as it turns out, in the real world, I would really rather not sleep in Bob’s spare bedroom, because there is a gap between what I had imagined the world to be, and what the world actually was. And I think the beauty of the Internet is its ability to foster this type of experience, to make the relationship between these two worlds explicit and pervasive. Not because it’s going to improve us as human beings, but because it’s entertaining as shit. As long as you have a healthy dose of humility and a sense of humor, that is, and appreciate the ridiculous situation you’ve put yourself in. This Bob is crazier than you thought.
So maybe the Internet is destroying and degrading some forms of communication we’ve had forever, but I don’t see it as a purely destructive force like you do, John. Every person I’ve stayed with so far has been a unique and colorful character that far surpassed the stick figure sketch I’d drawn of them, and because of that I appreciate even more how little I know of this vast, complex, and fucked up planet we live on.
That’s what I felt during our discussion, but maybe I’ve made a little bit of progress in articulating it? Let me know your thoughts, I’m sure I’m missing points here and there, and you always seem to find them, asshole. I’m headed to bed for now, waking up early tomorrow to hike through the Black Hills. I have to say, they look better than the pictures.
Cheers,
Lewis
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