On the wide Sargasso sea that is the internet we are free to send messages in bottles, hoping they will arrive and be read by particular people, perhaps even total strangers, Some prefer to send off Molotov cocktails, I guess just to prove that they, the sender, really exist. 

I got an email from a stranger last week (let’s call her Susan Dollinger, since that’s her name) of the latter type. Susan said she had come upon my site “by accident” (statistically improbable but whatever) and went on to say that she had read a bit, concluded that we were the same age, and then said, “Did you ever get a life? You seem like one of the lost men of our generation.”

I know, you’re supposed to delete such random bits of venom but instead I let it rile me up and blow on my already hot coals of insecurity. I looked at my last few posts — was she a Catholic? A Republican? Then I thought maybe she had been reading some of the memoir pieces, filled as they are with tales of drugs & despair, alcoholism & blarney — until I realized what a fool I had been. 

Random venom is the cancer of the internet; it flows through its blood stream along with porn and the spam, seeking a vulnerable, neurotic target like me. Sometimes, because of the ageless nature of everything online, people will write about things I wrote decades ago. A piece I did for Salon on Bobby Blue Bland just prompted a snarky message from someone who seemed to think I was condescending to the man, and I wanted to write and say that he’d missed the point — until I remembered the nice note I had received from Bland’s manager back then, saying how well he thought I had captured the singer’s appeal. 

We choose in this life: pick up the dead flowers or leave them where they lay. For every crank out there looking to spread his misery around there is always someone else who took something good away from what you wrote. My favorite was from a guy who read a piece in Glamour I had written about my daughter eleven years ago. It was a crazy bit of father hysteria driven by that sense of loss we all anticipate as parents: I know you’re going to leave me! He’d been so impressed with it that he kept the clip all these years, not because he was an editor or a fellow writer but rather another father, trying to understand the mystery of their bond. 

“I worry about her going to college and moving on to live her own life and I worry about how much I’m going to miss her,” he wrote, and then added, “I think that I’m going to put away your article for a while…  I know that it will make me smile yet again and hopefully, it will keep me from worrying too much.”

This is why we write, I thought; to make that connection, have that message in the bottle read. It may not seem like much of a life but it makes me feel a little less stranded, knowing there are others on islands like me, every bit as lost.