01.23.2002 - I'm Not An Addict

Here's this week's column. Apparently I forgot that humor columns are supposed to have jokes in them. My apologies.

Mainlining the online

My name is Jeff, and I'm addicted to the Internet.

Even though I've been using since I was fourteen years old, it wasn't until my friend found me curled up in the fetal position shivering in the corner of a dark room this past Sunday that I realized I have a problem. I spent the weekend at a remote cabin with no computer in sight and, as a result, I found a deeper understanding of those old public service announcements that ominously intoned "nobody ever says 'I want to be a junkie when I grow up.'"

I got my first fix of the digital demon courtesy of the California public school system. During the winter of my freshman year of high school, my science teacher forced our class to use the Internet as a research tool for a project. He instructed us to open Netscape and poke around wherever we saw fit just to get acquainted with the web. They gave me the first hit for free, but I've spent my life from that point forward paying for it and always craving it more.

Even though I spent a good portion of my free after school hours bathed in the harsh florescent lights of the campus computer labs while feeding my burgeoning addiction, it wasn't until two years later when my family got our first computer that I became a full fledged junkie. Although browsing the web at school seemed satisfying, discovering the beauty of surfing the Internet in the comfort of my own home increased both the level of pleasure amount of time I could spend hooked in. It also proved true my theory that everything is more fun when you don't have to wear pants.

The more I used, however, the worse it got. Shortly after I got my first e- mail address and instant messenger screen name, I came to a simple conclusion: my value as a human being was based entirely on the number of messages I received each day. As a result, I couldn't get the same high that I used to get unless my inbox overflowed and instant messages caused my monitor to flash often enough to induce epileptic seizures. I started signing up for every mailing list from "Hulk Hogan's Daily Cooking Tips" to "Saucy Septuagenarians: Hot Gossip About The Golden Girls" in order to get the e-notes that validated my self worth and gave me the fix that I craved.

Perhaps the most dangerous step in my habit's progress, however, appeared when I decided to start trolling chat rooms to meet "friends" who might instant message me. This proved successful in that I amassed legions of e-quaintences that showered me with the messages I craved, but disastrous because I realized that if I were creative in describing myself, I could be anyone I wanted. E-Jeff was a bronze god and smoother than a tattoo of Billy Dee Williams on a baby's butt. E-Jeff had no problem wrangling the hot e-ladies. After I discovered that the e-ladies E-Jeff wrangled were actually forty year old male burger jockeys living in their mom's basement, however, I found that chatting with people I didn't already know from the three dimensional world couldn't do it for me anymore.

Still, once you've started using, it's difficult to stop. I was forced to start dealing in order to support my habit. Taking what I learned about personality adjustment from my chat sessions, I turned to the sick, sad world of personal web pages and created a shrine to myself that featured a few acceptable pictures of me and some occasional writing about my life. Even though I chose not to directly lie about myself, through the miracle of self-editing, I didn't have to expose the ugly bits of my life that people never fail to notice in the real world. For example, I can be completely truthful, yet on the internet, nobody has to know about my obsession with Canadian teen melodramas like Degrassi Junior High and Ready or Not. This was ultimately successful because people expressed appreciation for a version of the real me. The only problem is that the real Jeff has all but disappeared, and when I get separated from an Internet connection for more than a few hours, I die a little bit.

When I had my withdrawal episode this weekend, I realized I needed to make a change. Rather than go through the difficulty and pain of trying to quit, I've decided to get into computers for a living. No, I don't mean that I'm going to try to compete in the Silicon Valley rat race. I mean I'm going to pack up my belongings and move to the Internet. I'll plug myself into my computer with a USB cable and live my life in ones and zeroes. I'm much more popular on the web than I am in the real world, so why not live there? If you happen to take a thankless graduation job where the only escape from your three-walled cubicle existence is taking advantage of your company's Ethernet and you happen to find yourself wiping cold sweat from your forehead because nobody has e-mailed you in the last half hour, feel free to visit me.

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JEFFY will still need his daily fix until he makes his final move. Support his habit by e-mailing him at jeffy@diaryland.com.

-- Jeffy