All My Living Friends

I have recently become infatuated with my past. No, not my ancestral beginnings in Ireland or Japan or wherever the hell I'm from... but in the relatively recent era of what I am calling my "Party Days." We are talking about a brief era circa 1980 through about 1990 (yes, I understand that the era in question - the Party Days - lasted 10 years. I know math.) roughly encompassing my years as an undergraduate college doofus at the University of Colorado in Boulder through my weary years after graduation from San Francisco Art Institute. This would also include my stint in Los Angeles right before my decision to "do something" and making the life-altering decision to return to Colorado. Yeah, that era.

Those of us who grew up in the days where you had to maintain what cultural anthropologists refer to as "address books," those thick, tattered bricks of paper bound together with tape, paperclips and rubberbands, bursting with folded envelopes and napkins, business cards and other various scraps of paper which, due to a certain "I-gotta-organize-this-thing-someday" mentality, never actually was organized, that the we-before-outlook (WBO) crowd relied on for all-inclusive personal information management (PIM), quickly became an obsolete piece of memorabilia the second your friends changed addresses or got a new phone. Yes, the analog PIM was destined for a trash can once you realized that every friend worth keeping that you at some point in the history of the friendship, raised glasses and high-five'd in a mutual BFF ritual that was a verbal contract of sorts, resulted in a process of said friend's name written in some well-meaning attempt at alphabetical ordering and followed by a list of scratched out former apartment numbers, cities and zip codes, and the corresponding multiple phone numbers that ultimately - if you did things correctly - had the most recent number at the bottom of the obsolete pile of useless information above it.

It has been nearly 10 years since I have had a physical manifestation of an address book. I had long-ago lost or failed to "update" that growing list of former addresses and phone numbers for nearly everyone who I had BFF'd and swore contact allegiance to. Many of my former BFFs simply disappeared. Lost. Gone. We all seemed to move on. Lives progressed, marriages took place, children were born, marriages dissolved, homes were bought, second marriages took place... and time did what it does.

Enter the Internet. Enter email. Enter Outlook and Google and mostly, enter Social Networking.

I am jealous of college students today. Now, you meet in school, exchange email and that's all there is to it. BFFs forever (redundant, I know). Tracking via pencil and paper is a thing of the past. Add a few social sites and some profile pictures and you will never be lost again. Now, you are a digital presence that is forever traceable, trackable, and locatable.

That said, my generation - not being complete technical slouches, unlike my mom, who still gets all fluttery when she hears "You've got mail!" mysteriously emanate from that box-thing she begrudgingly purchased 12 years ago at the insistence of her children who, at the time, thought that email might be a good way to communicate with mom if she would only check it once in awhile - has finally incorporated these new social networking tools by backwards-adapting to what is now just a common tool in your human-functioning arsenal. We are now savvy at SEO (fucking hate that term) and blogging and social computing and because of this, Google has now found all our lost souls. We are emerging from the postal wasteland and are now indexed and ranked, logged in and available.

A straight Google search might hit the target if your friend still has the same name or has a website or a fairly up-to-date blog or has done something cool, but that is still a shot in the dark. Facebook and LinkedIn seem to have become the more acceptable tools for finding our lost contacts. Classmates.com is just annoying, sending obnoxious come-ons to entice you to activate your "Gold Membership." MySpace is kind of dorky for anyone over 40 unless you are an actor or musician or somehow involved in Entertainment. Other than that, let's be honest, the days of sparkly profiles blasting annoying sounds at you are numbered. I am getting off-message....

Here is the gist: Thanks to our new connectivity, I found those lost friends. Those BFFs who never left, who only changed addresses but, in doing so, effectively dropped off the face of the planet, have been found alive and well. Party Days aside and the fond lack of memories I don't seem to retain from that hazy, late-night era, I am delighted I found them. We can now write on each others' walls and share the photos and send dumb birthday cake icons and show each other our kids and families. All that crap. And, truth be told, I don't feel stupid either. A bonus.





Yeah... we all get there. My kids will read this post eventually and probably just think, "Douchebag."