Thoreau was right ...

A friend with whom I'd performed many years ago, and with whom I'd recently reconnected decades later via Facebook, emailed me earlier this week about some of life's travails that were getting at her recently -- both personal and global, such as the recent horrific oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She then felt she was sounding like "Debbie Downer." And I, in turn, shared the following with her, which I think may be applicable to many of us:

Friday, I downloaded a "free" upgrade to my anti-virus program, and it wiped out all virus protection and blocked my email access. No phone number on any of its literature and, of course, I couldn't find one online because I couldn't get online, so I had to rush over to the library to use their computers (thank God, we have a fabulous business resource branch which is a boon to small business owners). Murphy's Law in full force, I still couldn't find a viable phone number on line(!) Finally went to my email site and located an old email from them with a phone number and got through to someone for whom English was a second language. Picture me gritting my teeth as I'm conversing with her, or trying to, anyway.

After several hours of that nonsense, I thought everything was intact, but yesterday afternoon, the updated virus protection was blocking my access to Facebook, so I called tech support again, and this time attempted a rapport with someone who only spoke Klingon (computer nomenclature). I kept saying, "I don't understand what you're telling me," and he would repeat himself, thinking somehow I'd get it the 2nd or 3rd time. Another example of semantic aphasia. Outside of computer language, the guy had a sum total of several dozen words in his vocabulary, and simply could not say, in English, what I needed to know. When did our country have this incredible breakdown in communication?

So Klingon is doing everything he can to "help" fix whatever Dingleberry screwed up the day before, and each time the problem remained, and I kept hearing, "Hmmmm, wow, well let's try this instead." In the midst of this, with him ON LINE WITH ME, a viral attack is made by a site called (and I am not making this up) "Fucking Threesomes." (I hesitated to write that, but even the eloquent Father Andrew Greeley has been known to use the word in his writings, when no other will suffice). So I, of course, panic a little, and ask the guy what the hell just happened, because when I had the old version of my anti-virus protection, nothing like that ever happened, and with the new and improved version, I'm an immediate target?

Then I read this morning in a recent Time magazine (3/39/10 edition) that Elmore Leonard writes every single word of his work longhand, and then transfers it to his 20-year-old typewriter. The man has no computer, does not email, etc. And in the same magazine, I read that Twyla Tharp does not own a TV. And I'm starting to think that perhaps all of this CRAP is sucking the life out of us. At the same time, it's what allowed me to reconnect with people like my long lost performing friend. But see how paralyzed we become when something we rely on this heavily goes wrong?

I'm thinking back now when 23 years ago -- feeling this incredible calling, especially after my enchantment with Steinbeck's "Travels With Charley," and all of the successive books of that genre -- I stored, tossed or donated everything I had, and took off in my Honda Civic, which I also eventually ditched, for a several-year odyssey of working my way through the U.S. Took a variety of jobs, from being a grunt on a log cabin crew, to working on air with John Walsh on "America's Most Wanted," to fitting women with "foundations," as intimate apparel was once called. And I kept a MANUAL record of the people I'd met, and periodically mailed out newsletters to them and got letters back. Most of them handwritten. Wonderful stuff. All before email, and it meant so much, that exchange of real paper. I did not have a cell phone or a computer. I typed my newsletters on a borrowed word processor, and cut and pasted with photos, and photocopied it all and handwrote the envelopes. And it was fun! Barely a generation ago.

What have we wrought with our technical advances? We've made zippity do dah progress with the space program. We still don't have those cars "run by the sun" as depicted in films presented to us in elementary school. Cancer hasn't been cured -- sure, we can detect the little bugger in a woman's breast more easily, but we can't agree on what put it there. Despite all the fitness equipment with a million bells and whistles, hawked on QVC, HSN, and every other darned shopping network acronym, we are the fattest people in the world, for whom bariatric surgery is becoming as common as removal of an ingrown toenail. We can put books on Kindle and the like, but we can't light a match under most people's butts to get them to read and comprehend. (Don't believe me? Just look at the crap substituting for the English language in comments posted by the common people underneath any print news story). And it's becoming increasingly evident, even to skeptics, that cell phones are frying the brains and destroying the hearing of their youngest users.

But hey, with the advance of email and Facebook, at least we can commiserate about all of this stuff. Some progress ...