The Nature of the Net

Once, upon a time, I spoke to Neil Gaiman on the phone for three hours.

There’s a point to this, beside name dropping.

Today I read my LJ…his blog is in my feed, and I found out that his dog, Cabal, died. I felt terrible…I’d had dogs, my last one had had a long illness that I could do nothing about, and it was heart breaking, knowing any day that I went out to feed her, she could be dead. And death, in general, is a tender subject for me right now.

So I felt moved to write him a note. I have his email, that I used to write businessy emails to him. And without actually thinking, I wrote a pretty, delicate, kind note.

(And so I say now, I am so sorry. I’m not dumb enough to think this will ever be read, but still, I am so sorry.)

And I deleted it immediately. For a few moments, he’d been a human I knew. He’s on my LJ, he’s on my Facebook…I have a ton of friends on these, many of which whose voices I’d never heard in my ear. I’d read his blogs, just like I read their’s. Any one of them, I’d have written them, in comments, in an email, in an FB message, without a second thought.

The beauty of the internet is that you can reach out and be kind to people you’ve never met.

But…Neil’s in a different place. He’s a celebrity. Anyone else, I would have been judged as a person who was kind. (Well, not anyone else…but you get it…) but in someone I have called one of my favorite authors I would be judged less kindly.

So. I will forgo being kind, today. I tell myself the same thing I told myself when I hit the discard button…who am I? He’s marvelously kind, and he probably remembers me because I am the girl who does this sort of thing for his webpage, but really, in the end, I am not so vain as to believe that I would not be intrusive on his sorrow…because we aren’t friends.

And that, I think, is something the internet makes everyone forget sometimes.

So, who do you feel worse for? The people who forget, or those who are considered celebrities, and therefore must be considered differently?