I’m here to tell you why.

I’ll try to be brief because being any other way nowadays means you might as well not be at all.

Our definition of writer is wrong.

Well, that’s catchy, but it’s a bit off. It’s more like we’re working off an entry from an old dictionary.

That little container called “writer” into which I have poured years of my life and joules of caffeine-induced energy was made by the hands of a story distribution system that is going away.

That system is exclusionary, expensive, slow, non-digital, dependent on marketing, and built upon centralized control over information and one-way relationships with audiences.

That system and the brilliant performers it supports create beautiful pieces of work. It spawns well-researched books. Sentences carved just-so. Headlines making poetry out of grit. Narrative twists that pull you forward until your eyes just can’t stay open. Facts like bedrock. Transitions as smooth as a sweet-dreaming roll from one side of the bed to the other. Characters you cry for. Untouchable proclamations and conclusions stuck in time like concrete islands that expose the core of being human as surely as an x-ray reveals bones.

The audiences served by these works are, as the saying goes, what they eat. They are masses, not individuals. They move like a pack of glaciers on the hunt for an ice cube. They roam ritualistically from one information meal to the next, dividing up their story time into breakfasts, lunches and dinners.

This behavior takes something important: sacrifice. Accessing the work means giving up something.

They give up time, but so do digital audiences, albeit in different units.

They spend money. That is the requirement to access an inefficient distribution system in which every copy comes with a noticeable cost. Digital audiences generally don’t do that.

But the most important difference between the rapidly fading audience rooted in the past and the digital audience of today is that the fading audience spends space.

I have to make room on my shelf for a new book. I feel its weight in my bag as I walk to the subway. Information is very much a thing in this world. By the act of accommodating its claim on my scarce time and space, I grow attached to it. It changes me in tangible ways.

Like many things, I want this information object to last. I want it to be a refuge. A place. I want it to envelop me. I want it to be complete. If this ink on paper requires that I go elsewhere to make sense of it, that means more sacrificing, more cost. I don’t come to a book with the expectation of being forced to another one to feel satisfied, just as I don’t sit on my couch expecting it will compel me to go sit on another to feel rested. I come for a beginning, middle and end. I need those components just as a day needs morning, noon and night to know the difference between sunshine and darkness.

That’s the feeling I wanted to satisfy with my writing. I wanted my stories to be so thoroughly constructed that they felt like as much of a thing as the paper in your hands.

I suppose bits and bytes could be considered things too. You use a computer to read books. But it’s impersonal. The same thing can be used to check your e-mail or play music. You look at pictures on it. It’s a general purpose container lacking an intimate tie to any one story. You can’t dogear your Kindle or MacBook Pro. Your laptop has weight, but the information it presents does not. The only difference between a novel, a short story and an article on your screen is how long it takes you to scroll to the bottom. No matter how hard Steve Jobs and the iPad try to recapture thingness, they will always fall short.

But we’re on the Web now.

A lack of thingness — a spiritness? — is where writing is at.

The Web requires us not to build landing pads, but launching platforms. Information now is air and springs, not earth and pillars. Water, not ice. Links, not lockdowns. Ideas are birds to be freed and snared by whoever is on the hunt, not obese stegosaurs to be admired in a zoo.

Okay, it’s not as simple as that. It’s both. You don’t need to write one way or the other. You can make things, and make spirits, all in one day. The Web takes both. Not without ramifications, but it does.

Bu trying to do both, all the time, makes my stomach churn with doubt about my endurance and drive.

Yet what really hurts me is a hard-to-kill expectation that passionately wrought information things will function in a world of phantasmic bits and bytes the same way they do in a world of bookstores, magazine racks and dead-tree subscriptions.

Those castles of thought I agonized to build quickly turn to huts of sand in the stream of the Internet. For a moment they are a whole. A moment later, they dissolve in the rush of the update, the new, the fresh, the next link.

Caught in the current is the satisfaction of fabricating a fortress for an idea. It lasts for ever-decreasing durations. I shorten my missives to even the balance. If I will only get 140 characters of satisfaction, does it make sense to give 140,000,000 characters?

It is cheap, easy and fast as a tweet to record and spread your stories throughout the world.

I love this, but it might be a one-sided relationship.

Not all at once. Not for long. This is a reign at risk with every squeaking spin of my wheels. But for sweet stretches of asphalt that sometimes last just shy of forever, I am made a king by an offering the city intermittently bears only after it has settled into its sleep like a shark to the ocean floor: emptiness.

There are times Broadway is so clear of activity, I freely swerve my bike from one side of the street to the other for no other reason than that I can. No one honks. No one screams. I hit no one; no one hits me. There are no pedestrians in my path; no delivery trucks stop before me. None of my bicycling brethren claims my space. I have the city; for once, it does not have me. I am king.

In this quiet space, I notice what I normally do not: the dark spread of sky resting atop the skyscrapers; the joy tucked inside an aggravating wind; the relief in my legs as they stretch and compress, stretch and compress. If the quiet lasts, even a few blocks, I begin to hear my breathing. If the quiet lasts, I hear more: the stilling of my mind. If the quiet lasts, I begin to believe: I need this space of silence. It is here, in a tiny kingdom of one, perched atop a throne of leaves coalesced in the stilling of the city’s clamor, that I become more than a collection of second-by-second reactions to those around me. For a moment, I am choosing a future, not dodging the present.

This moment always ends, certainly by Union Square. More often than not, it is broken by the engine whine of a surging taxi. I return to my clearly marked bicycle lane. I keep my wheels between the lines until the emptiness comes again.

But breaking the grip of a MacBook Pro’s 2-D, 17″ window onto the world takes a lot more than hauling a Web worker’s chair-sculpted ass up and out the door.

That glowing rectangle is not just a thing that can be walked away from. Not when you spend roughly 80 percent of your day in front of it.

At some point — about 3,000 hours in — the window hops off the table and nails itself to the wall of your perception.

What you once saw, you now watch. What you once felt, you now record.

Where there was the flow and music of nature’s complex, sensual software of human interaction, there is now a control panel stopping and going your heart with a click.

Come as you like. Leave when you want. Reboot, replace, copy, paste.

Repeat and you’ll see: Through this window, relationships are Web sites.

Drop by any hour. Refresh and scour for what you want. No costly, messy exchanges of fragile curiosity and glass hopes.

It is seek, find, click, scrape, escape. Risk-free. Cost-free. Scar-free.

Lifeless.

It is superbly ironic that I attempt to alleviate the isolating voyeurism intrinsic to a wired world by using the very device I rail against for conditioning us more and more every day to watch life rather than live it.

But that’s what I did on a sunny Sunday in New York.

It began with a bike ride over the Manhattan Bridge.

The trip across this span always loosens any shackles of worry I may be carrying. It’s the view. As you enter the ramp, the sky frees itself of the concrete needles pinning it to the city. Suddenly, you can see you are part of a planet, not just a city.

Traffic’s screeching dies away. Your ears re-calibrate, hear differently. The rumble of passing trains, like the heel strikes of marching boulders, no longer pummels your ear drums with its violent bouncing off a tunnel’s walls. The sound is free to dissipate, roll into silence like any good song does.

Your breath plays in gasps as you climb. The ascent is a gentle slope, but it’s long and painful. It sends fire to your legs. Places unreasonable demands on your urban dweller’s lungs. My appreciation of it has grown after reading a passage from Seth Godin. That humble hill is a test of my strength and, as Godin describes, a yardstick for progress that no effortless descent can provide.

But I still savor the thrill of moving so quickly that pedaling is useless.

Whoosh — past the walkers who inevitably carry sacks of ankle-biting groceries, past the observation points, over the pneumatic tubes counting the riders — and into a long curve, hugging it with a knee out as if I were atop a motorcycle doing 200.

And back to the street for a short jaunt to the flea market.

It was beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. From where I stood, I could admire the bridge’s sinews and the angry snapping of a U.S. flag atop the sculptural structure:

The market lacked the busyness I expected. Shoppers drifted easily amongst wide lanes between stalls selling jewelry, clothing, antiques, pizza, bicycles, paintings and more. Hurrying, that poison gas inhabiting every nook of Manhattan, had no claim here. The pace was succulent.

There were several ways I could experience this haven. The easiest would be to wander and watch, as the 17″ computer screen, still pinned to my mind, suggested. Maybe I would run my fingers over a trinket. Maybe lean into a painting to make out the details of the brushwork.

I circled once, looking, observing.

I felt the urge to check my e-mail, my RSS feeds, my Web sites. I wanted to shift my attention, to click my concentration elsewhere. Why did I agree to meet my friend? I could be home. Watching, reading, learning, clicking. Nothing in my search engine was here. The links, all irrelevant.

I put the sensation in contemporary terms, but it was the ancient reality of being a stranger in a new place. There are many ways out of this predicament. The computer screen mentality suggested I check the Internet. But that would only provide information, not connection.

Conversations could help. The “Hi, how are you?” one is a good start. But I wanted a little bit more — something more permanent. Something richer.

And I had just the tool to do it: another screen. In this case, my video-recording G1.

Making a little story about these craftspeople would be a perfect excuse to not just know them, but to remember them – and them me. To connect, right?

Through a screen?

This is Daniel. He turns discarded wood into useful objects.

Yoko wants Cameron Diaz to wear her jewelry. It seems the star has already made the discovery…

Taliah has a passion for bicycles.

Carla helps cobblers in Guatemala.

Making these, and writing this, I remembered: A screen is a tool.

It is not a connection, but a means to a creating a connection — the messy type, the one that can come with disappointment and sorrow. The one that costs you irreplaceable, non-copy-and-pasteable time and energy. The one that no search engine can find. The one that is made.

The essential one.

Dec. 25 drains me dry.

It’s not that I hate the King Kong of holidays. Far from it. Generally speaking, I love the beast.

I love making confetti out of wrapping paper. Love crunching my mountain bike’s tires across the Sandias’ flank with vacation time. Love the sappy cards drenched in italicized, standardized, nostalgicized units of poetry by the pound. Love making my credit cards cry. Love watching people go ga-ga with generosity, gentleness. Love it, generally speaking.

It’s a few specifics that get me.

Specifics like this: The death of my birth mom in 1980. The divorce of my mom – technically my stepmom who adopted me when I was 4 – and dad in the late 1980s. The still-unexplained shooting death of my brother in 2002.

Disasters like that slammed into my family like a wrecking ball into a building.

The structure stood, but pieces flew.

Some were lost.

Some lay within reach, identifiable but too heavy to lift, too awkward to sew back into the fabric that is us: a family, an American family still going strong.

Most times, I just leave them there as memories, old realities with no right to who we are today. I move on.

But come Christmas, when I begin the guilt-ridden process of figuring out whom I’m going to see and when, I reach out.

I pick up the pieces. I take another look. I can’t help it. I wonder what was, what is, what’s coming.

This is when love-guzzling SUV No. 999 rams a tube into my heart and starts sucking. This is when I tire.

Do I go to Michigan to see Mom, who has remarried, who really is my family? Stay here to see Dad, who has remarried, who really is my family? Will everyone be OK with my brother’s death still fresh? What about my birth mom’s mom, of family No. 3?

And my birth mom’s sister? What’s my aunt in family No. 3 doing? (Or should I call it family No. 1? No. 2?)

How much do airline tickets cost? How much time off do I have? What’s the weather like? Will my connecting flight get grounded in six feet of snow timed to fall the minute I land at the Grand Rapids airport? Will I have time to see friends?

What’s right?

Part of me – steadily fading under time’s gentle nudges forward – resents having to ask these questions, even when I ask only myself.

It’s the arranging, the scheduling of family time. It can feel like trying to yank music from an orchestra of drunks playing chain saws and firecrackers.

I start thinking how much simpler life would be if this and that didn’t happen. What if, I wonder. How many other people in this country go through this, I wonder. With divorce rates rising, I can’t be alone.

But I’m wondering less.

Even with my extended family numbering more than 50 and growing bigger as more of us have kids – that’s adding more drunks to the orchestra, if you’re following the simile – I’m wondering less.

Why?

Year after year of facing the same feelings, it became clear.

I had to make a choice.

I could spend my time wondering over what was gone, lamenting what no longer was.

Or I could start appreciating the time I did have with my family as it was, the time I had with my brother. I could recognize those days – those specific patterns of family life – as over.

I could start seeing not what I lost, but what I had gained from something we all must face: change.

Lament and resent? Accept and move on?

Accept.

Now questions are giving way – especially after my brother’s death – to a simple thankfulness for all of those in my life.

What I once called rubble – what I once saw as the broken chunks of what was my family – I now see as the raw materials of what is and could be.

I have family all over the country. I can go to either coast and be welcomed with a bed to sleep in. I’ve got twice as many mothers and fathers as most people. I’ve gained three brothers, two sisters.

If family is a network of support, then any way I fall – and we all get tripped up now and then – somebody will be there to help me back up.

It might be a brother. Maybe a stepbrother. Who knows? I won’t until I need them.

In the meantime, I’ve got phone calls to make. My sister said she’s going to make the six-hour drive from Colorado Springs to Albuquerque.

I’m not sure exactly when, but she’s coming.

I’ll be here to meet her.