Saddest Status Update Ever

“Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” 

One of the many horrific aspects of the suicide of the Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi was the fact that he posted his intentions as a Status Update on Facebook. To me this act epitomized the very worst of the distancing effect that the web has had, not just between one person and another, but a person and his or her true self. 

It's impossible to track the thought process that caused him to pause between the decision and the act long enough to type that up for all his friends in such an impersonal/personal forum. Did he want someone to find and stop him, as they say with many suicide attempts? Or did he simply decide to get the most attention for it, paying back his tormenters in the same public way? (They are now facing criminal charges). 

Tonight I attended  a screening of The Social Network, followed by a Q&A with my longtime friend, sometime employer, and unparalleled writer Aaron Sorkin. 

As the credits rolled, with the theater still dark, little flashes of light started popping up all over the room. People had whipped out their BlackBerrys and iPhones to see what messages they had missed during the one hour-57-minute running time. (Actually, one woman couldn't even wait that long; she took out her phone and started texting during the last five minutes of the movie. I went over to her seat and told her it was distracting. She seemed amazed at MY gumption.) 

Aaron entered at the back of the theater, and I pointed out the sea of phonescreens, and he said "I know. What's become of us?" 

Aaron kept his personal feelings about the Internet out of the movie

The Fall of Fall TV

Considering how few channels there were when I was a kid, I watched an unhealthy amount of television. When Batman switched from black-and-white to color, the kids in my neighborhood worked out a whole rotation so we could go to houses with color TVs.

And when Fall rolled around, I didn't care about falling leaves or back to school, but the new TV shows. I waited for TV Guide's Fall Preview with the same avidity guys now pine for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. For a few years, I even compiled my own scrapbook of daily ads from the New York Times, organized by network, with a hand-drawn grid of what my favorites were.

I was thinking about that era this fall, because,

Reverse-Commute Jew

"I was inside that place when it was for sale," a woman announced about my parents' former house as we drove past today, not knowing who she was talking to. "Total tear-down."

Uncharacteristically, I decided not to respond. Because it was Yom Kippur -- the Jewish day of atonement, forgiveness and compassion; and because the woman and I were riding on a parking-lot shuttle bus with my girlfriend and daughter to my childhood synagogue, to attend a "family service," despite the fact that our family members who belonged there died 18 and 36 months ago.

Canon Holes

Until I brought my daughter to see the stripped-down, genius production of Our Town that just ended a marathon run at the Barrow Street Theater, I had never read or seen the play. Which is kind of amazing. But all too common.

I went to a good high school and a good college (one that imposed a "core curriculum" in which we were supposedly exposed to the basics) and was even a History and Literature major, yet I missed out

Nine-Eleven Skies

One day this spring, the New York sky was so shockingly blue and cloud-free, I commented to some friends, "It's a 9/11 sky." They groaned and told me I had ruined a perfectly nice day. Still "too soon," I guess. But the fact is, that's my strongest memory of the day, how disarmingly perfect it had seemed.

Well, it's another day like that today.

And I find myself thinking again about the Flitcraft Parable,

Swimming Hole Story

Maine, despite recent troubling encroachments by McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts, still looks and feels pretty much the way it did when I first landed there as an 11-year-old sleepaway camper, and its unspoiled waters and cheap lobsters have been drawing me back for more than half the summers of my life.

On the road to the rental cabin, we'd pass foxes, wild turkeys, deer, and a barn selling fresh eggs by the honor system (leave $3.50 in a can); on the lake we saw loons, cormorants, and a bald eagle. The local county fair, despite the increasingly generic greasy food stalls and carny rides, still has 4H quilt and produce displays, smash-up derby, and poultry and livestock barns filled with glorious ribbon-worthy specimens like this ostrichy rooster [right].

But this summer's quintessential Maine experience happened at the local swimming hole,

Tree Clearing

I took the above photo during a bike ride around the Central Park loop last September, because I felt some kinship with the trees.

During the previous year-plus