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. 

I didn’t go to church when I was a kid (which probably explains my moral laxity in many matters). My mother and father were lapsed Catholics and Protestants, respectively, and agreed on at least one thing: that their children should never have to endure the heaven-and-hell dissertations that made their Sundays so tedious. 

But every now and then I go to a Protestant church with my wife, who’s sort of an occasional Christian herself (though I am sure she would object to being described that way). She became a member of the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights before we adopted our daughter, 15 years ago, and it has seen us through some difficult days since. We went the Sunday after 9.11 and the reverend gave the service over to the congregation, who took turns picking song from the hymnals. “America the Beautiful” was in there and I remember choking back the tears as we sang. (I also remember describing that moment to one of my Salon friends in SF who had written to ask how we were doing in the wake of that disaster. I think the combination of church and patriotism scared her off and I never heard from her again — the cultural divide in microcosm.)

Today seemed such a day, for all the right reasons; we wanted to share some of that overwhelming emotion we’ve all been experiencing since Tuesday but, seeing as how we were running late in typical Sunday fashion, we attended services at the Lafayette Presbyterian Church around the corner from us in Fort Greene. It’s a church with a lot of history: founding pastor Theodore Ledyard Cuyler was a militant abolitionist in the days before the Civil War, and Cuyler later invited a woman, the Quaker preacher Sarah Smiley, to preach from his pulpit. It was a first for a Presbyterian church and Cuyler was accused of heresy. It’s still a multiracial, multi-cultural kind of church and sure enough, Obama’s name was mentioned from the pulpit and the pews.

I never know what I’m looking for when I go to church so I’m always surprised when it finds me. Today it was while singing the old slave spiritual, “There Is a Balm In Gilead” — “Sometimes I feel discouraged/And think my work’s in vain…” Sometimes I do, too — about once a day, usually, and it’s worse on weekends when I have to go to dinner parties and listen to the stories of other people’s success. But having been one of the millions who labored to help get Obama elected — volunteering, blogging, talking about him to anyone who would listen for about a year now — I could feel, for once, that my work had not been in vain. We finally have a president we can be proud of. 

Of course, not all congregations were so happy today.  My niece Emily, who goes to college in Texas, has a roommate who was very upset. Her mom told her to finish school quickly and head home because the abomination of an Obama nation was a sure sign that “The End of Days is at hand!” But wait — isn’t that supposed to be a good thing? Doesn’t that herald the return of Christ? Someone needs to explain that to me. In the meanwhile, I’ll keep swaying and clapping, singing with the choir.