Thoughts on Blogging and the Death of Old Friends

If Rob’s death had occurred ten years earlier, while we were still best friends stuck in high school, I wouldn’t have learned of it online. This has nothing to do with Rob’s lack of notoriety in those days, but with the desolation of cyberspace in its nascent stages: The Internet was still nothing more than a loose network of virtual bulletin boards and military mainframes, a finite and relatively unknown world not yet a glimpse of the viral mirror to reality we have come to know. There simply would not have been anywhere online to announce the death. Not that Rob would have protested – at least not too much.

Rob was a classic naysayer, if he lacked the experience to give any substance or balance to his doubt. No sooner had we arrived, separately, at the small Midwestern boarding school that would be our home for our last couple of years of high school, both of us nearly two weeks late, than Rob began proselytizing me with his vision of our new milieu: our schoolmates were a gang of fey, over-privileged kids whose sole motivator was intramural popularity. He maintained that multiplex attitude toward private school students even as their gestures toward him ignored that attitude. Handsome enough to attract girls while almost actively working not to – he resembled a young James Spader with dark hair and eyes – Rob stayed faithful to his girlfriend back home, who nevertheless called Rob with tales of her shenanigans backstage at every hard rock show that came to town. “You just want to be like everyone else,” he scoffed at me, after I’d copied someone’s Jimi Hendrix tape, as if this really were a sign of mindless conformity. At a school where under-dressing was the norm, Rob was self-consciously proud to wear to class white canvas dock shoes, thing ties like a convenience store clerk might sport behind the register, and casual shirts that seemed to have become permanently wrinkled traveling through a time warp from the early eighties. (Predictably or not, Rob was turned off by The Great Gatsby, when we read it junior year; I would have liked to witness his reaction to The Catcher in the Rye, to see whether or not he understood that Holden’s lament against phonies was also autobiographical.) Yet Rob’s scorn was most easily stoked by schoolmates’ posturing, whether in dark trench coats or preppy sweaters. His scorn wasn’t reserved for anyone in particular, though: the drill team and the chronic masturbators, the aspirant druggies and the overachievers – other people’s quirks damned them, in his eyes. It was the first time I’d had so much social contact with such a young person whose worldview was so dark.

Of course, it’s unfair to hold a pose against a teenager, taboo to speak ill of the dead. On the other hand, were Rob alive today and still in his adolescence, no doubt he would be raging against YouTube celebrity, Facebook popularity, and the rest of the Web’s detours to cultural cache that did not exist when we were of the target age to be bowled over such achievements.

Whether or not his raging truly would be insincere is another matter. I do remember that his displays of disdain for seeking others’ approval were sometimes elaborate enough to make me question whether they were only displays. Once he ditched an all-school awards assembly, at which he was supposed to receive a certification for his selections to one of the all-conference hockey teams. Another time, after we sneaked into the lone movie theater in town, he spotted one of the school cooks, an enormous, lumbering man who always wore a couple of days’ growth of his dull blond beard and kept a plug of chew bulging against the lower corner of his mouth. To the cook’s surprise, Rob greeted him from across the theater, and we took two of the empty seats next to him. Over the next few weeks, Rob began wandering back into the school kitchen, where he and the big cook would make small talk about the prairie cold and amateur hockey. Eventually, Rob would bring his hockey sticks back there to customize their blades over the open-flame burners on the institutional stoves. The cook would bring him extra helpings of the plebeian grub the kitchen served our small mass.

Rob’s volunteering at the local food bank was either his most conspicuous reaction against what he perceived as the school culture, his most selfless activity in the years I knew him, or both. Early every Saturday morning, the school’s guidance counselor drove a van down to the town’s food bank, where a small group from the school would work with other volunteers stuffing brown paper grocery bags with donated food for poor families. The volunteer activity was famous around the school for its low attendance among students, with no one but the guidance counselor’s family and a few sedulous members of the student vestry ever even signing up. “We’ve got everything,” Rob said, with uncharacteristic earnestness, “and there are people in town who can’t even pay for food.” He didn’t try to make it seem as if he’d made an original observation on human inequality. For a string of Saturdays probably shorter than I now remember, I joined Rob and the other volunteers stuffing grocery bags in the bleary-eyed discomfort of an indistinct box of a pantry, rushing to put the bags together before the poor families arrived and could be shamed by the sight. His volunteer work rivaled the anonymity of anyone’s MySpace comments.

Rob’s life after high school remains something of a mystery to me. He majored in computer science, for the purely pragmatic reason of the job market’s prevailing forces. Just to be like everyone else, in some sense. He got engaged to a girl he’d met in their university’s library. She eventually broke it off, possibly because of parental pressure. But Rob had given up our email correspondence by that time, and I got the news from a mutual friend.

So I don’t know how much time or what events in Rob’s life interceded between our last conversation and his death. The last time we spoke, though, his tone so pointlessly bitter I imagined all his bile had metastasized in his voice. I was on a road trip through the Northeast, where he lived at the time, stopped for the night at the cheapest motel I could find within striking distance of New York City. I’d looked up his number on a whim, and dialed it on one too. And while I don’t remember many of the details of our conversation or its course, I can’t forget its rhythm. I went through the usual greeting and ice-breakers. Rob’s responses, a grumbled word or two at a time, came only after awkward pauses, after each of my attempts at small talk had died out. He started letting out long, letting out long, annoyed breaths through his nose as I continued. Then he started firing back. It was stupid to take a road trip. Stupider to stay at a cheap motel. And why on earth had I looked up his number? Why did I call? Did I think we were going to meet up? There was no way he was going to…

I hung up on Rob before he could finish some thought.
After the shock of that exchange had worn off, I didn’t think much about it until a former classmate of ours called (on a land line) five years later with the news of Rob’s death. When I asked the inevitable “How do you know?” the classmate shot back, a bit smugly, “It’s online.” The randomness of it all gave me the uncomfortable sense that he was right: Who ever thinks the last he’ll hear of his old best friend will be a bafflingly hostile voice coming over the phone in some fleabag motel room? I bit my tongue and let the classmate, five hundred-plus miles away, direct me to the school’s website, through registering for an account, and finally to our class’s page. Beside Rob’s name were the letters “DC,” the site’s impersonal shorthand for “deceased.” Once I’d ended the call, I spent the next hour scouring the Internet for an obituary. Having been a minor schoolboy hockey star and a collegiate player, I figured, would guarantee Rob some published notice of his death. It did not. Or, if there was something written about him, somewhere online, I couldn’t find it among the millions of web pages whose text included Rob’s almost satirically common full name.

“Everything is online,” the classmate had once told me, with all the unchecked wonder of a cub cable news reporter. But there was no other sign of Rob on the Internet, among the millions of profiles detailing their posters’ pop cultural savvy and exhaustive social networks, the Balkanized multimedia fiefdoms spliced together by overambitious would-be wunderkinds, the Babel-like paperless trail of rants and raves on everything under the sun, and the electronic ticker tape of the major news media.

The obvious refutation didn’t occur to me at that moment.