We are now a culture that is alone together. We look into each other’s eyes through panes of electronic glass. Our sense of the natural world and work is replaced with a very shallow two dimensional reflection. Life has become just an LED.

Years and years ago I crumpled up Facebook like a piece of notebook paper and tossed it into the garbage can. Not that little receptacle at the bottom corner of the screen, a real garbage can albeit metaphorical. I walked away. I walked away from the division I was beginning to see in friends and relatives. I walked away because I felt manipulated by advertisers who knew without my consent what web pages I had visited. I walked away because what started as an amusing way to engage had turned into a burning shit-bush, bible reference intended.

And here I come crawling back. Like a suplicant child on my knees my head bowed, shaking and weak crawling to the table for meanger scraps of what my life used to feel like. I pulled out the chair and sat at the table just to find out that nothing has changed. The times we live in require a quicker reflex to turn away from the fear and hate that we see reflexively on display from both our own and our others. Click. Unfriend. Just that easy. We are alone together.

We no longer breath the same air. We can’t stand in the same lines, the ease that we once felt is absent in our lives. Every second, every moment is moving to the next uncomforatble moment. There is no meaningful dialogue, rather we have been reduced to articulating radically divergent points of view that simply have nothing in common. We are us. They are not. We are alone together.

When I was a kid I used to wonder if the way off future was something that I would ever see. Dates like 2000 and 2020 were Kurt Vonegut’s. Now I wonder if I will see the year 2030 which still feels like science fiction but for different reasons. In the real bricks and morter world I may simply not live that long. And when, for a moment I reflect on the world that I have left my children I realize that to my shame, I have left them alone. Together.

We went to the park yesterday. Even though there isn’t a trout stream for 200 miles, I took my fly rod and cast my line at daisys just to make sure my muscles still remembered. They did. It was like playing a weird game of frizbee with myself. Catch and release. Miss Chicapee was there on her blanket with her book, in the shade of the tree. The sky was beautiful and clear, the birds were still singing, but I couldn’t shake the idea that this was no longer the real world. That this was something artificial, something that was manufactured, not organic. Organic is now a word I only associate with the grocery store – which I never go into. I know there are those that do. I know my wife does. She travels the isles with the other 2D travelers alone together.

The only thing that is real is the very personal notion for me, that one other person shares my life. It is not lonely, it is not hollow. It is changed, it is surely different, but knowing that there is another human being whose hand I can hold. With whom I can cross the street and sit under a tree, cast a fly line and read a book. With whom no words need to be spoken, but meaning is deep and real makes me realize that in the new absence there can still be intense presence in being alone together.