Back in the saddle! It felt good to be back out on the bike. Leaving the fair was a bit of a journey; I had to catch a ride with the family next to me back to Eugene, then the next day get a Greyhound back to Bend, pick up my bike where I’d left it at my friend’s office, then back on the road. Living this way - relying on the generosity of others, and being so exposed in so many ways - has been amazingly instructive and fun. I remember a while back meeting some monks from an order up in Marin county that had sworn - among other things - a particular style of oath of poverty wherein they could not prepare their own meals. They had to eat every meal based on the generosity of others. That’s a terrifying prospect, but the reason they did it, they told me at the time, was to ensure that they stayed connected to others. There’s an aspect of Buddhism that can creep in - one of what they call the “false houses” - which goes by various names but basically translates to apathy, failing to care about others. The thing is, when you know that every meal you eat has to come because someone cares about you, then you make sure you act in a way that ensures people care about you. Being on this trip, I finally get that at a visceral level. It pays to be nice, and it feels good to rely on the generosity of others, to be connected, and then pay it forward. Life is not about creating self-sufficiency, it’s about caring for others. “People who need people are the happiest people”. This night in Prineville I’m once again staying in someone’s house, sleeping a nice warm bed with towels and a shower for free, just because I was nice to someone I met online, and they were nice to me. I care more about those two people now that I ever did about many of the people I know in SF. If either of them had any trouble I’d be one of the first in line to help out.
Anyway, I had a thing about my first day back, I really wanted to pick back up in Sisters since that’s where I’d left off. So I went about 40 miles out of way, just so I could join an imaginary line. (When I die, please inscribe “he was a stubborn coot” on my gravestone).
By the way, this is apropos of nothing, but I’ve now driven/ridden through Sisters, OR three times, and I’ve gotta say: that place is creepy. Gives me the willies. Someone is seriously buried under the courthouse floorboards in that town.
One of the things that has become clear to me on this trip is that I’ve been misusing the information superhighway. Stay with me here while I navigate through some tortured analogies, but this sorta made sense when I was on a bicycle in the heat: online social media (ok cupid, Facebook, twitter, secret, coffee meets bagel, reddit, whatever) is like Photoshop. Photoshop is a great way to take a picture you already took and make it a little bit better: touch it up, tone it down. You could even create a pastiche of different photos. I’ve seen some pretty amazing things done with Photoshop, but the key is that they always start with source material; and, generally speaking, good source material. One of the truisms photographers (at least the ones that are any good) live by that I learned in photography school is that you can make a good photo better with post processing, but you can’t make a bad photo good, and generally speaking, it’s way easier to just take a good photo to start with than to try to somehow polish a turd. So, back to the analogy. Social media is a great way to keep in touch with people you already know, or deepen relationships with people that you’ve already met for some reason. It may even (arguably) be possible to transform relationships; for example by meeting a friend through another person, or turn someone you know in one context into someone you know in another. But what many of these sites - and I’m particularly thinking about online dating here - purport to be able to do is create meaningful relationships whole cloth from nothing; to transmute air into diamonds. And, after a lot of time spent down that hole, I’m just not sure it can be done. Blame it on our brain chemistry, or our roots as animals, but I think we just don’t cement relationships in our mind until we meet someone. That’s especially true for dating, but what I’m realizing is that it’s just true across the board. Ask most people and they’ll tell you that most of their good friends are people they met in real life. It doesn’t have to be an intensely meaningful beginning; it could just be studying next to someone at a coffee shop or even meeting at the grocery store. But I know more about someone in 2 minutes of being in their presence than a whole mountain of online goop will ever tell me, and I suspect I’m not alone. Of course there are always exceptions that prove the rule. I know someone who met somebody online and was engaged to be married to that person 5 days later. But I think that’s like winning the lottery - possible, but not a good plan for the future. I’ve met way more people in person on this trip that I’ve connected with than I have in the last year of living in SF, because my approach is all analog; physically meeting them. Interestingly, a number of the folks I’ve met that I’ve connected best with don’t even do digital social media, or if they do, they use it more like what I’ve described, to keep in touch or to deepen relationships.
