SAGE ADVICE: Off line and off kilter

I hate it when the Internet is down. I hate it for all the reasons you would expect. I can’t check, send or delete e-mail. I can’t access the Web site that has all of Townes Van Zandt’s lyrics. I can’t search Wikipedia to see if any of the folks listed as notable people from my college are actually anyone I’ve ever heard of. But more than that, I hate it because it makes me see, and confront, how much the thing we used to call, before we had any idea what it really meant, the information superhighway has changed my life.
I was a reporter back in the days when the Internet (a.k.a. the Net, back then) was just a blip on the horizon. My first months on my first job were sans Internet. Eventually, the newsroom I worked in invested in a dialup account and installed it on one computer, an old one that sat over net to the guy who toned photos and drew maps of car wrecks, shootings and that sort of thing. The staff signed up for e-mail, though we never thought to include the address at the end of our stories. No one reading the paper back then had e-mail. Most of them never thought they would figure out how to use e-mail, much less get ads prompting them to help some rich foreigner transfer money from some rich foreign county to their bank accounts. I remember I checked that e-mail about once a week. Most of the messages came from the provider. A few came from sources at places like hospitals and government agencies, but even these were few and far between. No one communicated online back then. No one really searched the World Wide Web, as we were always careful to call it, that much either. Late at night, after I’d switched shifts, while the copy editors and I waited for the first run to come off the press, we’d sometimes type in random words followed by .com. Seven times out of 10, at least back in those days, a random word followed by a .com dropped you square in the middle of a porn site. The more innocuous the word, we often found, the more disgusting the Web site. It wasn’t a tool for vital communication or research. It was a parlor game, period.
Even as the World Wide Web gained traction, and like a haughty pop star dropped the World Wide from its name, I never thought of myself as depending on it. I enjoyed it. I got an e-mail address or two. I began communicating with friends, business associates, sources, etc. through e-mail. But I didn’t need it. I, unlike some of my younger colleagues, knew how to use a phone book. I could still discover information the old fashioned way, by thumbing through hardbound paper.
Even today I have this idea of myself as using the Internet in much the same way my preacher grandfather used the television. Back when it first invaded his home, I’m told, before anyone knew that that thing would eventually tune thousands of channels of mind-numbing content, he would stand outside the den, leaned against a wall watching whatever was on back then. He wouldn’t commit to a chair in front of the TV, but he spent an awful lot of time leaning against that wall. Later, by the time I came along, he had a real comfortable recliner pointed at the color version. We’d stay up late at night, him holding me in his lap, while we watched Jesse Ventura and his feather boa mix it up in the “squared circle.” By that time, he didn’t miss many “Wild Kingdom” or “Hee Haw” episodes. 
So that’s what bothers me about the Internet being down. I still want to believe I’m in the “leaning against the wall” stage, when really I’m in the reclined in the La-Z-Boy, a jar of honey roasted peanuts by my side waiting for the Mutual of Omaha music. When the Internet is down and I can’t look up things like how to spell La-Z-Boy, I have to confront that fact. So, you see, it’s better for my view of myself that the Internet not go down.