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I don't often meet people that I've met online first. Back in the BBS days, whe the online was local, this was more common. One of the large boards had coffees at a local restaurant. Now that was weird as hell: teenagers and young adults and old adults (who I realize now were probably only a few years older than I am now, but were all overweight and smoking [this was pre-smoking-bans] and looked like hell) all getting together and talking and shooting the shit. You could feel the tension between some of them. Who hated who. Who wanted to fuck who. Who already had.
Other stories too. Some good people, and some really troubled. Watching what I say here, but: I shouldn't have met up with everyone. On the positive side, there was the time, at my first summer band camp, I heard from behind me: "You're [username] from FE!" We'd never met before, but had a friend in common. We played inter-BBS Falcon's Eye with a couple other people on a particular board. We carefully planned our actions as a group. We were ruthlessly good. Had some people (me) building for quick strikes and early raids, others building with an eye on the longer term.
I don't think our board ever lost.
After the BBS days, the online got wide. There's an understanding: most people you meet, you'll never meet. I've only had a few exceptions: a doomed relationship from a forum at the turn of the millennium; another player of a MUD I'm active on that lives in the same city as I'm in now; and a friend who I met during my journalling days, with whom I used to exchange letters and mixtapes and long nights in chat.
The last of these I finally got to meet during my doomed PhD year. Our friendship online became a strong friendship offline. She was one of my few friends that year. I look back on that disastrous ten months and can list all the things that went wrong, but I'll always be happy that she was one of my few friends in a very hard year. I've seen her a few times since, always meeting in a dive bar, laughing, catching up. Too long since we last did that. Eleven years since we got drunk at 2pm in a rundown pub in downtown Toronto.
Last night I added one more person to this small list. A Twitter mutual, a fellow poet, in town from the next province over for research. A message out of the blue last night. _Are you free at all the next couple evenings?_ Very thoughtful to reach out. So we met up last night, had supper, chatted outside for hours. Talked about the city, his work, our favourite poets in common (Phyllis Webb). Plans for the future, for vacations, what we've been reading. A stray remark about the smoking ban led him to say that we're probably around the same age. I said my age, and he laughed and nodded. I said my birth month, he said the month before.
It was really nice. A reminder that even with all the awful things going on right now, there are so many good people. That despite all the ways in which corporate interests would make our lives smaller, our lives can be made wider by the company of others. He and I both laughed: we'd barely been out at all since the pandemic. Three years of mostly silence. Then, last night, a break. For each of us, a welcome one.