11:50 p.m. - 2001-12-25
irc this
I remember three years ago when I was still in school wearing the grey uniform and walking from lecture to lecture with the class pack and a droll expression on the face like a zombie robot, another brick in the wall.during some of these dour days, I used to skip some lectures and then go to the school library which has a small room with seven computers beaming blue microsoft screens at everyone and there I accessed the internet and also played irc.
playing irc three years ago, I guess the whole irc machine with all of us tiny circuits in it lighting up and going off ; the whole machine wasn�t as jaded as it was today, wasn�t as tightened with all the awareness of perverts stalking chatrooms or as silent as squatters stoning in the rooms observing the chatter of the others. yet I�ve always felt this tension in me, the tension to spout out all the dirty cybersex stuff to any girl I�m having the conversation to; the tension that stays and says in my mind, �what a waste of time, I�m sick of this game, charade of love and friendship, where�s the sex?�
sooner or later, staying in the computer room and playing irc, you get to know the users of other computers, how they talk to many girls or boys at the same time, like fishing with many lines of bait, or how they swear off irc from their lives as some desperate attempt of teenagers trying to get sex, how they only surf the web and don�t chat or how some others park themselves at the same channel everyday waiting for their irc love.
I got to know a few guys, it was quite funny or ironic, there we were in school during class lessons, but we skipped class and went to the library to play irc and stayed in chatrooms named after our school and talked to people who skipped class too but were in their homes just lazing away the time.
I remember one fine time we had, after tiring of all the crap in the chatrooms, we just went #singapore, which was a busy interchange of nicks and chatter, and one after another, we started to flood the server and the room with gibberish, our fingers banging away symphonies of words and numbers and vulgarities, we avoided the bot which kick users away by typing different strings of alphabets each time and each person taking turns carefully; just four of us were all it took to jam the chatroom, slowing down the channel, preventing people from speaking in the main board. the sight was really funny, it was like anarchy. the sustained assualt could only last for a few minutes but whenever one of us were kicked by the operators, we can easily skip to another computer in the room and enter the channel again and repeat the process. back in that time, I guess the irc programs weren�t as advanced as the ones now, which seemed to prevent flooding in advance. and seeing the lines of letters which don�t make any sense, I thought of burroughs and his alphabet machine.
and this line someone said in the room before leaving:
we are all just molecules bumping against one another.
