One of the online goes off

As I write this, I am not online. “Ah-ah-ah, there’s no such thing as an offline blog, Sir Knight,” the loyal reader retorts, “It’s a web-log, it has to be online.” But that, loyal reader, is where you and I must agree to disagree, for you see, I will no longer write posts for this blog while connected to the internet.

We are told in a hundred news stories a year about the “internet-generation,” those young squyeres and ladies who’ve see a score of winters, perhaps a few more, and seem to eat breathe and shit connectivity. If we are not checking the status of our “friends” on facebook, we are either updating our blogs, dropping our iPhones down the toilet, or trying to start a flash-mob in the nearest public square. Not only do we try to run our lives from the intent, our lives are on the internet in a very real sense.

Recently, after packing our cart with all our worldly possessions, hooking up the trusty steed, driving to our new castle and rearranging all the trestle-tables, fire-irons and torch-brackets, my new castle-mate and I lacked the energy to immediately call up our internet provider, well known as one of the peskiest companies in the realm. Two weeks passed, and while each of us repeated vague allusions to distant plans to have the service renewed, neither of us wanted to hack and slash our way through the web of customer service robots and representatives in order to make that happen. Last week, we each came out with what the other had been contemplating: perhaps we need not have an internet connection in our castle. “What a good idea!” we both said.

Here’s the thing: I spend most of my day at work staring at a computer screen. My email program is always running, my web-browser is always open, and my eyes are always glued to that screen. In part, it’s a necessity of my job. Thus, I have all the information a Knight could ever want right at my fingertips, and by the end of the day I want none of it. Before this revelation I would go home and fire up the computer, read the sites that were to involved for work, look at my news-feeds, and generally consume a lot of time wading through the soup of internet frivolities that seem now to have integrated themselves so thoroughly into modern culture. And slowly but surely, my castle started to feel like my office. I did the same things. My productivity at work flagged because I was stuck in a cycle of checking my favorite sites all the time, no matter where I was.

But, I’m proud to report, on June 1^st I stopped. I no longer care about the new iPhone. And when I’m home I blissfully, ecstatically do not know what’s going on. I’m writing this (first draft) with pen and paper, I will type it up during lunch tomorrow. I’m listening to a concerto by a man named Bach on the radio. Maybe you’ve heard of his music, it’s very avant-garde. Do you know what I’m going to do later? Read from a book. Sorry, I won’t be available to chat.

This doesn’t spell the end for Verecundia, not hardly. It does mean that my posts will be less frequent (not that I’ve been a paragon of regularity), but I also hope it means that these posts will be better; more carefully written, more interesting, and longer. I will still check the comments a couple of times a week, and I’ll still be on email during the day, but at five o’clock every weekday, I will officially renounce my status as one of the well-connected. No longer will long hours on a computer be voluntarily extended.

It’s time for me to go outside. Perhaps it’s time for you to join me.