I’ve always loved writing.  For some reason, pictures painted with words seem more colorful to me than pigment on canvas.  A symphony of sentences sounds better than a live concert.  A well-written meal can taste better than the real thing, leaving a lasting impression that can be enjoyed again and again in a hedonistic orgy of pleasure without all of the pain and discomfort from overindulgence. Words rule.  They say, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”  I perceive this to be true.  A well-wielded pen can wreak havoc, make or break a career, or forge an empire.  I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for the power of the words I have written.

Before moving to New York I lived on a small island in Alaska, with a base population of just over 3000 people, most of whom were men.  I spent ten years of my life there, working in the commercial seafood industry.  It was good work, rewarding in many ways, but lacking in certain social interactions.  Commercial fishermen, in general, aren’t the greatest conversationalists.  Other than the weather and local fish runs, there just wasn’t much to talk about.  Needless to say, after a few years, I had pretty much exhausted all of the conversational topics available to me with my local comrades.

Then, in the winter of 1997, I got my first computer and Internet access.  Suddenly, my tiny little island opened up and I found myself standing in the doorway of the entire world.  I was no longer dependant upon our one local radio station for music.  The Petersburg Pilot was no longer the only newspaper in town.  The Rural Alaska Television Network (lovingly called RATNET) no longer dictated what I could watch, or when I could watch it.  A wealth of information was now available to me, and I consumed it with a passion.

Before long, I discovered that the Internet had something else to offer; people.  Hundreds, thousands, millions of people, all surfing the Internet, making web pages, chatting online, sending emails and socializing.  My little island became global that winter, and I spent the long dark night glued to my computer, chatting with strangers, making new friends, and rebuilding old relationships with friends and family in the lower forty-eight.  I taught myself HTML that winter, too, and built my first website (torbtown.com) in order to share more of myself and pictures of my little island with the rest of the world.  That was a great winter, probably one of the best in my life.

Like all good things, though, it came to an end.  Before I knew it, fishing season was once again upon us and I had to return to the endless day of summer salmon.  My job was quite demanding in those days; up at 5:30 in the morning, working until midnight or later. There was little time left over for eating, sleeping, or chatting online.  After a few weeks of work I found the time to check my email.  To my surprise there were a few hundred letters waiting for me.  I discovered that, whereas my year consisted of one long day and one long night, the rest of the world functioned on a more rational time scale, and all of my new Internet friends wanted to know where I had gone and why I wasn’t chatting anymore.

It was then that the Lazyletters were born.  Lazyletters were simply one single email that I sent to everybody I knew.  They got the name “Lazy” for two reasons; I was too “lazy” to write to everybody individually, and I titled each letter in the subject line with something like “Lazyday” or “Lazyforklift”.  I tagged each letter Lazy so people would know that this email from me wasn’t really to them personally, it was just a mass email I was sending out to everybody and they didn’t really have to read it if they didn’t want to.  In other words, they too could be lazy and just delete the thing if they wanted too.

Lazies quickly became a habit for me.  I would come home after my insane day at work and rant and rave to some invisible person about the ups and downs of my life.  It was quite the stress releaser.  However, unbeknownst to me, my rants were becoming rather popular. People found them to be funny and amusing, or sad and heartbreaking.  The media crazed people of the lower forty-eight were sucking up my stories from Alaska as fast as I could write them, and demanding more.  They were also doing something else; they were forwarding them on to their friends and family.  Every week some total stranger would send me an email that read something like “Hi, you don’t know me, but so and so has been sending me copies of your emails and I was just wondering, could you add me to your list?”  The LazyList grew by leaps and bounds.  By the end of 1998 I was distributing Lazyletters to over 500 people.  How many people they were forwarding them on to remains a mystery but I did receive a forwarded letter one day that turned out to be one of my older Lazies.  The header of that letter contained over 1000 email addresses from all around the world.  Since then I’ve heard various stories from people telling me that they were sitting on planes, in movie theaters, or at restaurants, and how they overheard snippets of conversation from total strangers about this crazy guy in Alaska that sends out mass emails called Lazyletters.  I may have been stuck on a rock in the middle of nowhere, but my writing was getting around.

One day I came home from work and there was another one of those “Hi, you don’t know me…” emails waiting for me.  It was from a girl in New York.  By this time I had become pretty used to the total strangers pestering me for more stuff, so I just added her to the list and continued upon my merry way.  The days went by, winter rolled around, and once again I had sufficient free time to chat with people online.  The girl from New York was one of the people I found time to chat with.  As it turned out, we had some semi mutual friends.  Some friends of my parents were also some friends of her parents.  We also both grew up in the same part of northern California and for a period of our lives we actually lived quite close to each other.  Small world.  We chatted a lot that winter, both online and on the telephone. It was nice.

Before the next salmon season could overtake me, I let it be known to my Lazy audience that I was going to take my first vacation in years.  I had had enough of the peaceful tranquility of my little Alaskan island and I was ready for something a bit more metropolitan.  Within a week I had received over a dozen offers from people saying, “Come visit me”.  Most of them, however, were from people in places like Montana, Colorado, and Wisconsin, beautiful, pristine places, but in the middle of nowhere.  And then the girl from New York sent me a note saying I could crash out in her apartment if I wanted to.
 I’d never been to New York before.  I knew it was a big town, it had a reputation for being a bit rough, and I figured that a trip there would be the adventure of a lifetime.  My mind was made up in a heartbeat.  I scheduled a leave of absence from work, bought my plane tickets, and before I knew it I was winging my way from the Final Frontier to the Big Apple.

The city was incredible.  In the course of one day I saw more people than I had seen in the previous ten years combined.  I spent days walking around with my mouth hanging open and my eyes wide, making the average tourist look like a seasoned local by comparison.  As incredible as the city was, though, the girl was even more fantastic.  I was in love.  Big time.  Head over heals, heart pounding, can’t eat or sleep kind of love.  It was delicious.  By the end of my trip, she decided she kind of liked me, too.  The farewell was tearful.  Upon my return to Alaska we decided we missed each other, it wasn’t just a fluke or fling, there was actually something deeper going on.  We decided we wanted to spend more time together.

I gave notice that summer, and quite my job of ten years.  I sold my house, gave away most of my possessions and moved to New York.  The girl and I spent a year living together, at the end of which we were both still very interested in being with each other.  We became engaged, and then married.  The wedding was a spectacular non-traditional winter solstice gathering, which included many Lazy people, people I had never really met but who knew me from my writings.