as if the internet is not the most amazing thing ever. as if google is not the 2nd coming of jesus with their idealistic ethos and willingness to weigh on all things to try to set the world right and those freaking spiders speeding around through imaginary tubes and wires to democratize the world of information. as if yahoo is not like the world wide web's pants, so basic but necessary. and yet, there is still more.
we live in the age of facebook and myspace, the two heavyweight monsters of internet networking, and no one is safe. if you are alive, eating and breathing and shedding dead skin cells, then i bet i can find you because you are there. right? admit it. you're on one of these sites if not both of them.
last night i dreamt, ("that somebody loved me, ooh-ooh-oooooohhhhh,"-just kidding, i digress,) i dreamt of an old friend of mine. in my dream i was at an airport, like an international airport where one must pass through customs, and my old friend, tim, was approaching me and we both had sheepish grins on our faces. so coolly i waited as he snaked through a line and passed a checkpoint turnstile until at last i was able to walk right up to him and greet him. at that point he seemed to become cross. i guided him over to a place to sit and stuck my hand out to shake his and tim refused. his hand laid limply on his armrest and i asked him what was up. i went right into a monologue about how i had tried to find him and even sent him an invitation to my wedding two years ago to an address i found online in st. louis on a street called maryland heights. recognition of the street name showed on his face and he sort of indicated perhaps he believed me. right about then my two-year-old son, mark, who was sleeping in the bed with me started kicking me in the head like kimbo slice. end of dream.
it was 6:20am so in fact i had just been allotted an extra 20 minutes of sleep time by mark who rules my nights, mornings, sleep patterns, moods and several other facets of life. i got up and put him in front of the doodlebops, who really should not air at that time of the morning because, (and i can only speak for me on this but,) they cause a lot of anger to well up inside of people so that one might want to kick a tv or hurl a cereal box across a kitchen. next i opened up my laptop, waited for it to find my signal and connect to this vast network that is everyone and everything in the entire freaking galaxy, and i went directly to myspace.
from there i clicked on find and simply put in my former friend's last name. i have tried to find tim before but to no avail. this time i just had this sense that i would find him and when i clicked find i immediately saw that there would be only seven pages to wade through. (see? not the most common last name in the book.) around the fifth page i found a kid in st. louis who looked like tim and it occurred to me this was tim's little brother. when i last saw him he was maybe 15, but i was pretty sure this kid whose myspace moniker was something like m 4 mustard, (or something,) was tim's little brother. (i guess the name is a reference to some sort of nerve agent or something, or maybe the kid just likes to spread a little sunshine on his sandwiches.)
in any case, i clicked mustard's pictures and lo and behold, there was one in the maybe 100 pictures with the caption below it of, "the last name brothers." on the left, right next to mustard, clad in a spanking red st. louis cardinals jacket, was tim. wow. i was slightly dumbfounded.
tim looked mostly the same. it's been about 15 years since i last saw him so it's not like i was expecting one day he was johnny depp and the next he was johnny grant but his face looked just the same in the photo. i backed out of mustard's pictures to see if i might find tim's own space in mustard's friends and sure enough, he was there. jackpot, baby, you just can't hide from me. i'm serious. if i want to find you, i will. take it to the bank.
tim's myspace page was not set to private so i was able, (later in the day when i had some time,) to get an eye-full of his kids at the st. louis arch in matching, green tee-shirts for st. paddy's day. (they're adorable.) i discovered that tim hunts. many of tim's comments were all tim. for example, myspace asks one to list: music? tim put: yes please, with testosterone. vintage tim.
i requested tim to add me as his friend. so next time he signs on to his space he should see a familiar face from his past. and for all of this, the fact that i could find tim so easily and from the comfort of my living room while the ridiculous doodlebops were on the tv and sane people remained asleep, amazes me anew nearly every day.
tim moved back to st. louis in 1992, i think. we were in contact for a season there and he came back for a visit and caught up with me one night at my dad's probably in '93 but it was a strange and difficult time for me. i remember he was excited to tell me about his daughter and while i was happy for him, i could not relate at all.so we lost touch. i had an address and phone number for him but at some point those things changed and i sent him a piece of mail and it came back to me. i tried 411 at some point in time but he was not listed.
somewhere around '96 or more likely, '97, i got online. i had a little macintosh apple se and i signed up with earthlink, (a local pasadena company i felt really great about supporting in those days,) and voile i was dialing up to the world wide web, which was so much smaller than it is now. the dial-up connection took about five minutes to load most pages. it was exciting though and i loved it.
i definitely tried to find tim using the internet over the years. usually i ended up looking at an advertisement from some detective agency telling me they knew a tim in some suburb or st. louis and if i would just pony up the necessary $30 subscription fee i could find all the people i wanted to for three whole months. needless to say, i was never willing to do that. then even in 2006 i sent tim an invitation to my wedding to an address i had caught a glimpse of somewhere online but that invitation was returned to sender.
last week my hockey team was in st. louis to play the blues. whether it is the dodgers or the kings or the raiders whenever one of my teams is in st. louis i think of tim. i always just imagine he is there living the good family life, probably going to church, still listening to u2 and delivering packages. briefly i thought of tim last week when the kings were beating the blues, (and tim and i used to spend some evenings drinking some beers and playing colecovision hockey,) but those thoughts are more and more fleeting as time goes by. however, when tim showed up in a dream, i was just compelled to go find the guy. and this time, as the world wide web just gets bigger and bigger, and more of us have some sort of footprint on it, i found him.
