I can remember years ago there used to be talk about how we had lost those episolatory relationships - I'm sure I've misspelled that, friendships through letters, you know. The phone, immediate and intangible had ended letter writing for the most part. But then we got the internet and all that came back. Obviously most of it is OMG!!1! and all that but then 99% of everything is crappy. There's a certain beauty to the tyranny of words here, that struggle to convey meaning. I remember when I first got on the internet reading alt.tv.xfiles and just marvelling at the meritocracy of it, how people were drawn to others purely by their ability to express themselves, at the time it seemed almost utopian to me. There was this one poster I still remember, she was apparently a deli counterperson in the Midwest somewhere but she wrote the most amazing reviews. Why? For her own pleasure and the pleasure of others. Writing-wise, art-wise, it's kind of pure in a way.

I think there is a desire within people for a kind of mediated relationship, sometimes I don't want the immediate, I want to sit back and compose my thoughts. I was actually thinking the other day when I was at a get-together that it was so nice to have a mix of people, close friends and acquaintances, because with the close friends we sit and discuss the details of our lives, with people I don't know as well, we exchange remarks but also can discuss ideas a bit more abstractly. I guess it's all and always about balance, but obviously there is that urge to communicate through writing, because otherwise why do we do what we do?

Maybe all of this, this grand experiment in communication is like the movie The Commitments - some of the characters ended up famous, some of them ended up busking in the streets, some ended up just where they were going before they joined the band, but for all of them being in that band added something to their lives, something a bit more than what they thought they had in them.

And now I must go to bed, rambly...