Hello, Internet. Or should I
say, hello again? Yes, I’m back. It’s been a while. What’d I miss?
Okay, it’s not exactly
accurate to say I’ve been away from the web all this time. I’ve surfed, I’ve
lurked, I’ve Facebooked (regrettably). I was content lingering on the fringes
of cyberspace. Then something my therapist said (yeah, I’ll get to that bit,
give me a moment) started the wheels spinning a couple months ago. Spinning in
mud, really, until last weekend. She said, and I’m paraphrasing, we’re all
social beings, and deep down we all need to connect, but the way most of us do
is so unhealthy we’d be better off unplugging and staring at our toenails.
Social media should come with warnings about all the side effects, just like
medications you see advertised on television. “May cause paranoia, rage, and
suicidal thoughts.” She was speaking generally, not about my reactions
specifically. My side effects could better be summed up as disdain for my
fellow man. You’ve probably been there.
Her advice was to never seek
connection in short soundbites. Facebook and Twitter have robbed us of the ways
we used to communicate, in long form. We try to be witty and sharp and wind up
missing the mark more often than not. We obsess over how many Likes and
Retweets we get, instead of sharing our authentic selves. This all came up
after an incident at work over the summer. A stupid, inconsequential incident
that blew up into a four-alarm inferno, thanks to a comment I posted on
Facebook. My last ever FB comment, actually. I deleted my account the next day.
I haven’t missed it for a second.
But I have missed … this.
Stringing thoughts together into paragraphs, and paragraphs into posts. I loved
blogging once upon a time, even if it did feel mildly narcissistic on occasion.
I still have them all. The night I killed my blog, I archived it all—every
post, every picture—on a thumb drive. Just in case I changed my mind. I
honestly thought I would. I figured I could just repost it all and not say
anything and no one would even notice it had been missing.
So why’d I quit? Too many
snarky comments. Not on my blog. About my blog. From Rob. (Oh, in the
unlikely event anyone stumbles onto this who’s not familiar with my family
dynamic, Rob is my dad, Janice is my mom, and for reasons that took 2 1/2
sessions and still never seemed to quite satisfy my therapist, I call them by
their first names and have for so long I can no longer recall for sure why I
began.) I got tired of explaining things to him, most of which didn’t even
directly involve him. I moved my blog twice to keep ahead of him, and he always
caught up, eventually. I could have taken it underground and required some kind
of password, but that seemed like it would have defeated the point of blogging
in the first place. So I endured. Until he started threatening to withhold tuition
my freshman year of college. And by tuition, we’re really talking text book
money, because what he contributed never added up to much more than a
semester’s worth of books. Even that ran dry by my junior year. He blamed my
brother Shane (technically, my half brother). After venting and deleting half a
dozen posts within a two-week period, I zapped the entire site. Three and a
half years’ worth of posts, erased from the internet, overnight. Or however
long it takes to actually delete something from the internet. Hell, it’s
probably all still out there somewhere. It will resurface someday if I ever
decide to run for office. (I never will, don’t worry; just using that as an
extreme example.)
Shane has actually been a major
catalyst in my decision to get back at it. He’s now experiencing a lot of the
shit I had to endure back in the day. I was 17 when he was born. He turned 13
this spring. He’s finally getting to an age where we can talk, man to man,
about how abnormal it all is. That’s what put me back in therapy. (I was out
for a while.) Sometimes when you’re living it, you don’t realize just how
fucked up your family life is. You just deal. You laugh it off. You write
emails to your friends about your dad offering you the dusty condom he’s been
carrying in his wallet since you were too blissfully ignorant to even know what
one was. I owe it to Shane to prep him for his teen years as best I can.
My therapist has encouraged me
to open up to Shane. She says helping him will help me as well. That got me
thinking, maybe I can help other kids. Maybe there are lessons in my youth that
would be relevant. So I started digging through my old thumb drives, poring
through some of the emails I wrote, and received. (I’m kind of a cyber hoarder,
if you haven’t caught on yet. It doesn’t manifest in the physical world,
however. I’ve moved too many times.) The memories came flooding back, big
style. I stayed up until 2 a.m. every night for a week, writing and rewriting
the first chapter of a memoir. In the end I gave up on that approach. I decided
instead just to publish the original emails. I did ask permission of a couple
of the major contributors, including my buddy Drew, who is still, after all
these years, my closest friend. And for the past 18 months, my roommate. I
changed a couple of names. I won’t say which ones, because that would invite
speculation about some of the others. My close friends will know which ones had
to be altered, and they can probably guess why.
This is all a long and winding
way of saying I have a book coming out. Well, not a “book” book. An ebook. For
now. We’ll see how this goes and maybe there will be an old-fashioned paper
copy in time. Not that kids even read paper books any more. And this is for
them. If the events resonate with even one kid, it’ll be worth the effort. And
if it doesn’t help, maybe at least it will entertain. I mean, some of it was
funny. Even if it happened to me. I can laugh now. Sometimes.
Stay tuned for details on the
release. There are still a few things I have to work out. Like how to make an
ebook, for starters. Can’t be that hard, can it? Once I get that part worked
out, I’ll let you know about the rest. But it will be soon. And when I say
soon, I mean within weeks, not months or years or whatever. And it’s really
going to happen. Oh, it's going to be called The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo (h/t: Drew). Guess that's kind of an important detail. So tell all your friends, and keep checking here for updates.
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