Damien Galeone

What a productive Sunday, well, E-friend and E-acquaintance-wise. I have written emails to three friends, a thing I do at random to see if I get responses (7 months/34 emails sent/3 responses). I have linked up with two professionals I have never met on LinkedIn, but they have nice faces.

I have accepted two E-vites to parties. I have commented on three Facebook photos depicting recent get-togethers I wouldn’t have attended if the hosts had pointed a rifle at my genitals. I am thrilled to find that I have two new followers on Twitter…two new followers that I wouldn’t be able to identify in a crowd of three.

Oh, to be hyper-connected!

After sifting through my inbox, which contains two one-sentence, no-capitals, no-punctuation emails, and a lot of shit that seems it should have gone to spam, I dance around the internet like a hyper-connected fool.

There’s a story on Smithsonian.com about a man who found the oldest message in a bottle ever found. The bottle contained a postcard written in June 1914 by Captain CH Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation. He promised the finder a reward of 6 pence and clarified that the bottle had been part of a scientific experiment (in which 1,890 such bottles were released) in hopes of charting currents around Scotland.

Yes, the bottle had been floating around the Atlantic for 98 years.

In a remarkable coincidence, when the man found it he was in a boat with the man who held the current Guinness Book of World Records for oldest message in a bottle found. The one he found was 92 years old.

This sets off lots of thoughts. In the first place I am reminded how bad of an actor Kevin Costner is. Then I throw on The Police. Then I start thinking of how in the 5^th grade we sent out balloons with our names, school, and home room written on a card tied to the string. And how my balloon fell into the hands of a girl named Kathryn who wrote me a long letter in which she dotted the I’s with little hearts, thus making me the butt of every mocking schoolyard melody whose cruel refrain had me sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

I wonder if kids still do this. The balloon thing, that is.

And then – motivated by coffee and curiosity – I find that I have three boxes of letter writing stationary. They are dusty, sitting in a high shelf in my bookcase next to a Writer’s Market Guide and the A-Z Grammar Guide. I shall designate this shelf The Shelf of Things I Should Use More.

When did you last write a letter? Did you use a pen? How about stationary? Did you seal it with a kiss? If so, I am not judging…dork.

It used to be so cool to get letters, a thing in the mail from someone you knew, or from someone who found your balloon. We take connectivity so much for granted these days that our correspondences are no longer personal, they lack meaning and are no longer handled with care, an indictment evidenced by the widespread use of shoddy language and text speak, the lack of punctuation and capital letters.

So, my idea for you is to write a letter to a friend.

If nothing else, it’ll remind you how to write with a pen. If you’re feeling extremely adventurous, throw a message in a bottle out into the sea, or tie a note to a balloon, or write to me. But if you do that, don’t dot your I’s with little hearts, cause I’ve already been sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.