I'm goin' back to Cali

There's no feeling quite like stepping out of an airplane and getting hit with a blast of hot air as you make your way down the jetway to the tarmac. It just screams vacation. I hit LA to visit Tripp in the middle of the afternoon last Tuesday. With all he's gone through I was a little nervous that he'd show up at the airport looking all pale and emaciated, ready to collapse in a heap on the sidewalk.

He looked alright though. He might have been a bit skinny, but not so you'd notice if you weren't looking for it and let's face it he was always a pretty pale dude so all in all he looked pretty normal. In fact if it weren't for the fact that he wouln't try to lift anything over 10 pounds it was easy to forget that he'd been sick at all.

The only weird thing about the visit was how normal it felt. There was very little of that "Holy shit it's been so long" kind of vibe which is strange considering we haven't lived in even the same state for the past five years. In that time we've actually hung out maybe once or twice a year. But we're closer friends now than we were when we were both at William and Mary.

I'm probably too much of a technofile, but you can pretty much chalk it all up to broadband in genreal and Instant Messenger and FTP in particular. The way it closes distance is in a way more pervasive than the telephone. You can't underestimate the always-on aspect of it.

There are dozens of things that come up daily that are worth a quick IM note, but not nearly worth a long distance phone call. Case in point: I'm not going to call anyone today to tell them to read the story about the bear that drank 36 beers and passed out in a campsite, but that's IM gold right there.

FTP is big too because it lets two people in distant places share a common experience in real time. It's easy to say, "You need to listen to the track 'Univearth' by DJ Krush right now." That's the basis for about 80% of my online communication and it's really not all that different than what we did at the radio station in college.

I know that none of this is as profound as a late night philosophical conversation, but I don't think that those conversations are the basis of friendships either. Sometime last week Tripp was moaning in a post about how he spends too much time doing things that don't matter like collecting records, comic books, and tv shows when he should be being a better friend to people in his life, but I think this misses the point because interest in these things is what makes him interesting to have as a friend. I'm not saying that we're all defined by the products that we consume, but there is something to be said for spouting off half-cocked (and totally valid) ideas about how videos by Cibo Matto's and Pharcyde are all about multiple points of view and collapsing notions of time and space in narratives. finding new ways to explore space and time and how that relates back to Tripp's thesis.

The DMCA, spyware, and waning attention spans aside, there is something to be said for living on the grid.

PS This began as a vacation recap, but got derailed somehow. Check back for the vacation recap. Tomorrow maybe?