Rick James Says...

The internet is a hell of a drug.

A while back, I remember reading someone protesting about how unbalanced online IQ tests are, that most people seem to test quite highly. The solution to that mystery was that the average computer user was likely to be of above average intelligence. Makes sense, in a cartoonish, caricature-style, largely outdated sort of stereotyped way, if you imagine the average computer user to be a glasses-wearing programmer egghead who speaks in binary code.

Unfortunately, as social networking and photo sharing sites show us, nothing could be less true.

Idiots are swarming in the millions to take part in the great Internet Collage, and I have become one of them.

When the internet first came out for public use, I was allergic to it. Hives, rashes, persistent cough, fever, soft stools, the works. I must have been about 14 years old when our school library first introduced online terminals. You had to take home a piece of paper absolving the school of any blame for whatever filth you might find in the internet to your parents and get their signatures before you could use them. The kids whose parents signed the waiver would just be clickety-clack, clickety-clacking away on their little internets, while those whose parents were Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses or nudists or vegetarians or whatever, and therefore were not allowed to do anything any of the other reindeer were allowed to do, flipped through library catalogue cards and slogged through the massive paper labrynth in order to complete their projects. I, having neither bothered to take home the waiver, as I had less than no interest in the internet, nor having any particular fancy toward library catalogue systems (still not really sure how they work/ed), would sit reading a comic book or writing a story, wondering how on earth those kids could do homework during class time. Everyone knows that the only time to get homework done is three hours before the assignment is due, regardless of how many weeks you have been given to complete the project.

So at first, the internet just seemed like a sneaky way of tricking unsuspecting doofuses into doing work when they should have been reading comic books, and I forgot about it for another five or six years.

In the late 90s I became addicted to yahoo chat for about three months, and then my computer stopped working. So I quit.

In the mid 2000s I had access to a friend's computer in which time I re-addicted myself to

yahoo chat, for another two months.

In the late mid 2000s I lived in Canada and was forced by this same friend to open a MySpace account in order to keep in contact with my friends back in Seattle. While I only had limited access to any computer, I was fully addicted to the MySpace.

In the late-mid/early-late 2000s I moved to Germany and was able to dedicate myself full-time to an internet addiction and have been here ever since.

But I wish I were addicted to something edifying, or even porn. You know? You meet these other internet nerds and they're all smart with their little world news and politics and who the fuck is Ann Coulter? I still don't know who Nancy Pelosi is. I have heard that a man named Barack Obama is the president of the United States and that he is in the party I regularly voted for back home, but I do not know him on a first-name basis as many of my countrymen feel they do.

Some people use the internet to further their hobbies, or develop their interests. My partner uses the internet to learn about martial art, for example. You can look up stuff about planes or carpentry or anything you want.

But me? I'm like Jerry Seinfeld's fake tv dad, the one who calls the expensive electronic organizer Jerry gives him, a "tip calculator". Jerry keeps insisting that there are a multitude of things that can be done with the organizer but Pops just keeps referring to it as the tip calculator, because that's all he knows how or cares to do with it.

Me? I use the internet to obsessively look up the latest guess the weather guessers are guessing about the weather, read personal blogs written by people I do not know and have never met, maintain contact with friends, see what celebrities used to look like before €400,000,000 worth of plastic surgery and of course keep up my end of my internet arguments--and it's making me stupider by the minute. I can hardly finish a thought without using an emoticon or an abbreviation, I'm annoyed that I have to speak in full sentences.

The scary thing about internet addiction is you don't realize you're doing anything but having a good time, you don't recognize the signs of compulsion and excess, until you're already too deep in to pull yourself out of the Information Superquagmire.

I don't really have a solution to my problem, as I can't imagine giving up the internet cold turkey, but I can do something about my stupidity problem, and that is by remembering to freshen up the old blog every once in a while, because, here, of all places, I wouldn't want to be caught dead not communicating with full sentences.

right im out k peace bye

;)