The downside of reading craigslist is that there is so much crap. Too much crap. The lists of crap is endless and constantly grows. You can click refresh or control+r and see yet more crap.
This is bad for the little OCD character that sits inside my head and dreams of crap. All kinds of crap. I want to look at all the motorcycles for sale. All of the small, one bedroom, no view can’t have pets apartments for sale. You have a beauty service? I want to read about it. It, and the next five ones that get posted.
I just like to read about crap. Because if I read about it I don’t have to buy it. My apartments and living situations used to fill endlessly with the crap I didn’t want to throw away. That, and the stuff everyone else wanted to throw away. I would walk around neighborhoods picking crap up off the street.
But now I do this no longer. Instead I read about crap on Craigslist. It is lovely. No ads, no popups, none of that stuff that crowds the ghetto that is the web as we know it today.
But I do have some favorites. I have Rant and Rave. Where I get to feel better than every poster in that section. It seems to be filled not with people anymore. Just raw emotion and experience. It is like that the moments and feelings people have get directly transmitted to the page. No filter, no need for filter. I can see pictures of GWB sucking Satan’s cock himself. Or of aborted fetuses smearing the face of a photoshopped women in reply to some other comment.
There the people only feel the need to hope against hope that someone reads and recollects something similar. Or trolling for others to rant. That is the real beauty of RNR (as it is affectionately called by its regulars). It is the utmost paramount of trolling.
The only reason to post on the passive-aggressive board it to bait some other poor sap into dripping out a little soul and experience onto the page.
I have done it. Both sides. I have posted things on there just to push a button of a total stranger (or not a stranger, who knows?). And I have very self-rightously RE:’ed to a person that is obviously an asshat. Or at least obviously to me.
It doesn’t matter if you are right or not. In fact, usually it is better to be wrong. To bait is just to expose the weakness of everyone human being. That anecdotal experience may have shaped your life, but it don’t mean shit to me.
There is no reason to argue about it. Every human being wants to knee jerk or be knee jerked at sometimes. Don’t feel badly.
But I have a much darker view of another part of the CL experience. It is MIS, or rather, missed connections.
If you have every really read the back of the Stranger, or the Dallas Obverser, or any number of weekly gratis publications in a “greater metro area”, you know a part of MIS. The “I Saw U” ads. The moment when you were walking down the street and saw that beautiful woman. The one had you opened your mouth you could have sworn that you two would have made romance history. But you didn’t. As most of us wouldn’t. You just kept walking.
Or that hot, big muscle-y guy in the guy on the stairmaster next to you. He said hi, and started chatting you up. You could of asked this sweaty Dionysus for his number, or out to coffee. But you chicken out.
This is where the “I Saw U” ads come into play. You place an ad saying “You were the beautiful woman in the green business slacks walking down 3rd and James on Tuesday at 4 pm. I was the tall skinny fella’ in the bright pink jumpsuit looking for quarters among the subway grates. You smiled, I smiled. We shared a moment. Contact me soon!”
And then it was done. You would sit and wait and check the call line or your PO Box daily hoping to see some line back from the woman. Or the sweaty beau-hunk from the guy, or whomever.
But with Craigslist missed connections, you get instant feedback. This is not entirely true. You can check instantly for feedback. Your refresh button and be clicked in an endless stream of clickity-click-click. You can control-r to your hearts content. The feedback loop has been reduced.
No, this is not completely correct, either. The going to the PO Box has been reduced to Repetive Stress Injury.
But this comes with good and bad again. The feedback loop is closing. But this adds to peoples level of laziness in the ads.
For example, “I saw you on 4th street” would be the new typical. I mean, wtf? Who isn’t going to think on some level, “That was me?!! My love is calling out to me over the tubes that are the internet.”
And here is where MIS gets me. I constantly am vibrating with the sense that someone is really talking about me. That althought the ad states Man Seeking Woman I am sure that this person has clicked the wrong button and if I view the ad I will be reading about the woman (which woman? who cares!) that fell for me instantaneously while I was walking between the coffee shop and my measly little apartment. Obivously. What else could it be?
The disappointment I feel when I open the ad and see that, lo-and-behold, no, that was some dumb (for sure) jock-no-brain-guy begging the low-life girl (I mean, if she had class she would have seen me between my apartment and my coffee shop) that she had a great set. That disappointment just move along as I hit the back key, and refresh the page.
What? What is that? A new ad is up? Well, I must click. Click and click some more.
I would love to track the locations for all of this. Where are the spaces that most of these happen? I don’t just mean the geographic locale, like the 4th Ave and James. I mean, the gym? The grocery store? In you neighbors window. I don’t know. It interests me to know this. Where are thes places that I have managed to ignore. Because the saddest thing to me is the mistaken MIS communique. I wish only that I would or could get one of these to aim at my heart just for one second. But they won’t because I don’t really leave the four block raidus that is my life. I have become very provencial with my attitude towards this city.