I’ll admit it, right away; I used to surf craiglist like crazy, and not just a tiny part of it. I surfed the personals, especially those that didn’t apply to me. m4m is especially intriguing, and then especially those that post short sharp blurbs, sometimes consisting of less than a sentence, and attached is a giant .jpg of their penis, made horrific by its closeup detail, zoomed in, sometimes grainy, rarely with body attached, and almost never with a face. This must work... right?... because people haven’t stopped doing it. It amuses me to think of two bodyless penises meeting up for a drink. Knocking on doors, sticking through holes. And they would recognize each other immediately.

m4m may be the most prolific section, but the personals in general never have a blank day. Women who bemoan the lack of a lesbian ‘scene’, who want to find one, but don’t really want to start one. Men who longwindedly list the requirements for an ideal ad respondent - my favorite ones are the ones who list clearly intellectual/habitual/ emotional bullet points, then at the end sign off with a warning: no pic, no response. My favorite of those favorites, because that’s a surprisingly big subsection, is those in which the poster does not include a photo. People who admit to being lonely, even people who beg, shyly bring up depression, past lost loves, the cruel bare walls of their apartments. On the other side of it, people who shun craigslist, shun the people who use it – these are the people who will invariably start their ads with ‘I would normally never do something like this, but...’ or ‘my friends dared me to...’ – and then act throughout like they couldn’t care less whether someone responds. That or they act like they’re expecting so many responses that they’ll have to screen them.

All these people, lounging in their boxes somewhere, thousands of other people in their little boxes within less than a square mile, probably less than half a square mile, and they’re typing these pleas onto a screen in order to try and entice the right person into the fresh air. Why do we have so much trouble with this? Humanity teems, seethes, around us, and we shun it, try to leave buffer seats on the bus and the train, keep our eyes studiously averted from people we pass on the street... we actively do these things!

I see this, I do this, I write about this as if it’s far removed from me, but it isn’t, and though I can’t explain it, it’s knee-jerk. You’re walking along a fairly empty sidewalk in the afternoon, alone. In the distance, you see someone walking alone as well, in the opposite direction as you. You’re getting closer. You think, when is the right moment to acknowledge this person? Ten feet? Fifteen feet? Less? Maybe four? You obsess over it, fail to come up with an acceptable norm... how should you put your face? Toothy smiles, close mouthed smile? Words, no words?... and you decide, fuck it, I’ll just look at the ground as if some extremely fascinating caterpillar is crawling along in the shrubbery beside me, and keep looking until they have passed. Then there are no bizarre social decisions to make. But, oh, wait. Wait. Is this person a different race than me? Shit, because now... if I don’t acknowledge them, they might think I’m racist! Am I racist? If I weren’t racist, I wouldn’t have even thought about their race, would I have? I would have just registered them as just another human being... right? Shit.

And maybe they’re ugly, and if I don’t look at them, they’ll think I’m averting my eyes to be kind. Or maybe they’re drop-dead gorgeous and if I look at them they’ll think I’m checking them out, hitting on them, flirting with them, ogling them, and they’ll think I’m some sort of rapist.

Racist, rapist – all the terrible things it’s so easy to be wrongly perceived as when you pass a stranger on the sidewalk!

So, as a compromise, and as a safeguard, you pass the person and you make that tight little anus of a smile that every normal American makes in this situation, a barely perceptible upturn of the lips, although ‘upturn’ may be a generous word for the kind of grimacing that I’ve seen go on. (I called it the ‘bule smile’ in Indonesia, because Indonesians don’t do it.) The other person does the same. pass, and you think, ‘was that awkward? That was awkward.

You shiver yourself free of this feeling and are suddenly overcome with a crushing loneliness. And you go home and write an ad. People, please, please, people. Strangers, even. So long as you’re people. I’ll be nonchalant, I’ll pretend I don’t need you, I’ll pretend this is frivolous. I’ll make up engagements, time constraints, an inflated schedule. “Oh, I can only meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays because of dance class.” “Oh, weekends are tight for me, usually I’ve got friends coming up to the city.” You have nothing, actually, but you can’t admit that, or this stranger that you’ve managed to entice from their box might think you’re pathetic and reject you.

When people like this meet other people like this, how does anything at all of substance bubble to the surface? You can’t mix nothing and nothing and get something. There are probably a couple of dates to be spent making fun of society. But society can’t be made fun of forever. (Okay, it can. But bitterness can’t be sustained as attractive for that long, I don’t think.) And if either person were the type to subvert the dominant paradigm, no matter how likely it is that that person is the type to use phrases like ‘subvert the dominant paradigm’ in everyday conversation, they’d be out subverting it, and not in a bland, safe-meeting-place coffeehouse talking about it. And not in their house using craigslist to try and find subverting partners either.

No, dominant paradigm-subverting comes from, when you pass that stranger on the sidewalk, pasting on the most giant smile that your jaw can handle, grabbing their hand, pumping it up and down, and introducing yourself. Maybe inviting them out for a fun-filled day of shopping-cart racing down at the Safeway, or a night of dumpster diving. And even this is a relatively mild paradigm shift – people do have the context to understand you if you do this, even if they will almost always think you’re drunk or on LSD or ectasy – but it happens rarely enough that I can’t believe anyone would expect to find that perfect, quirky, lifesaving person on a network of people who spend all of their time on that network.

That’s what we want, right? For the heavens to somehow align and to find someone who will assimilate us into their full, satisfying, perfect life, and we won’t have to make an effort to build that life ourselves. Because someone leading a full satisfying life will surely, SURELY, be posting ads on craigslist. There are hundreds of people in your city who have everything they want – a wonderful group of friends, enriching hobbies – but just lack that ‘someone special’ to share it with.
There are if you believe all of those qualifying first sentences: ‘I wouldn’t normally do this, but...’ Do you believe these sentences? Have you ever looked at the other ‘social’ sections of craigslist? Activities. Community. Events. Nobody’s posting there. Because everyone who already has a community won’t bother with craigslist unless there’s money/publicity to be had. Why would they? Their circle is complete. Their needs are met. And if they’re not, and I’m sure that, sometimes, they’re not, well, then they seek help from their living, breathing social circle. That’s what social circles are for.

And that’s what craigslist is trying to be to people. It’s succeeding, I think, in the sense that people are using it as such. There’s no doubt that there is a new virtual social circle emerging, where online personas can replace proximity of physical bodies, where discussions can be had, discoveries collectively made, without the participants ever having actually met. I don’t think anyone is arguing anymore about that. But are online social circles enough to keep the loneliness that comes from physical isolation at bay? I don’t think so, or else the personals section would be obsolete. Which it most certainly is not.

People who claim to be fulfilled in every other way are still pleading online for contact while ignoring strangers on the street. This is what comes from this bizarre mishmosh of virtual and real contact, where social mores are completely different in each. If you sit next to a stranger on the bus and start talking about how lonely you are, that’s crazy, that’s unacceptable, that’s pathetic. Post it in a personal, though, and it’s fine. Countless sympathetic comments and emails will appear in your inbox. From this perspective, it seems like online contact would be enough... you’re getting responses, feedback, validation. It’s warm and fuzzy, or seems that way, anyway.

But have you noticed that it’s never enough? Angsty 14-year-olds with livejournals who whine about the most mundane things are only encouraged, when given sympathy, to do it more, and seek more, and more, as if sympathy were a drug. It’s expected, that you’ll get frowny faces and emoticon hugs and a virtual outpouring of virtual support. It’s expected.
If you were to whine like that to a stranger on the bus, however, and got the same response? That would be a landmark day. You’d be driven to tears, unable to believe your luck. Fate. Destiny! You’ve met one of those kind strangers you read about in books but never thought existed in real life! Your life has been forever changed!

A comment, though, an email – even if the exact same words were written/uttered – that’s just normal. That’s just online. It doesn’t count. If it did count, online sympathy would be enough. But it’s not.

That’s why people use craigslist. It’s an attempt to use the world with the less threatening, less nerve-wracking social mores, to get a companion in the world where companionship actually feels like it means something. Does that work? Can you really take the easy way out like that? I don’t think so, but I’d welcome argument.