But, alas, I’ve yet to find any way to achieve that state without actually, oh… WRITING.

Hire a ghost writer.

Everybody wins! You’re friends and family are impressed with the book you “wrote”, you get to “have written” a book, and the writer gets to “eat”.

My rates for ghost work are very reasonable, BTW.

Um. Yeah. Don’t trust anyone on the internet, because we’re all pedophile sharks out to steal your money and leave LOLcat graffiti across your bank accounts as we steal your identity while trafficking Ecstasy to Honolulu, just before we take over the banking infrastructure via botnets wired back to your IP address.

All of us. Yes.

I suppose I’d better get a cat first.

So? People have also made real friendships by writing letters. But those letter writers have generally not been part of a larger infrastructure which is hungrily devouring as much information about the participants as possible, for the overriding pursuit of profit. Or darker goals, but let’s leave them aside for now – one Stasi reference per poster per thread is probably enough.

Again – friends may be made through the Internet, but I stand by my old fashioned belief that a real friend is a real person, with a real presence in one’s real life – which pretty much precludes the idea of an Internet only friendship, while allowing for the fact that ‘friendship’ is not exactly a rigorously defined term. (Unlike other terms involving intimacy, but this is best left unexplored here.)

Obviously, maintaining an already existing friendship is eminently practical using the Internet. And finding friends through the Internet is equally practical. But believing that the words on a screen (or sound/images) one experiences sitting alone in front of that screen are your friend, without ever having actually been in that person’s presence, seems hard for me to imagine as meaning friend in any meaningful sense.

As for 3 year olds and friends – well, if your children and their friends live in the same place for much of their life, you just might find that 3 year olds are quite capable of developing friendships that last at least over a decade. Maybe I’ll write a blog about it – all my Internet friends will be heartily welcome to experience words on the screen, along with images and sounds, and they can all imagine they are actually participating in someone’s life, instead of merely sitting alone in front of a screen.

Which is fine, by the way – sitting alone reading is the same, regardless of whether it is a book or a display. (My children spend much more time reading books than they do in front of their completely unfiltered Internet connection – and we don’t have a TV.) Calling books friends is understandable – but they aren’t people either, and thus fail the real test of friendship. This is neither denigrating books, nor those who read them.

Or not. I started my blog because I write compulsively. I don’t post as often as I would like because after I started my blog I got a paid writing gig, and after I meet my quota and deadline every day, my need to write for the day is often sated. Even if it isn’t, I have a life. I work on other writing projects that are more important than my blog; I knit; I spend time with friends; I have to clean the house occasionally.

Even though I’m a writer, my blog is a hobby. If people read it, great. They’re quite welcome, and if they drop a comment I’ll generally respond to it. But if they don’t want to read it, that’s fine as well. And if they don’t like that sometimes a month goes by between posts, oh well. I never expected that the blog would make me rich or famous. Although, I have to note, it was posts I wrote on a science fiction/fantasy fourm that got me invited into my current paid writing gig.

Which I have to get back to now.

While I’m here, John … I thought of you when I saw a link on the New Republic’s home page to a slide show titled “100 Years of Bacon” … only it turned out to be Francis Bacon, the painter. Pfui. To me “Francis Bacon” will always mean the Renaissance philosopher and statesman, and “Bacon” without a first name will always mean the stuff you tape to cats.

I think “passive-aggressive” really does sum up the NYT’s attitude. “Blogs aren’t making newspapers irrelevant because because because… nobody blogs any more! Now come back and love us again!”