Howdy, y'all.

Every teenager thinks they’ve invented adolescence, its angst and rebellion; each teenager thinks he or she is the first to ever have felt this way, to go through these troubles. Similarly, every internet community thinks they’ve invented the concept of internet community - when I’ve seen the same patterns over and over again since my own introduction to the ‘net in 1995.

Fark.com, in case you’ve never heard of it, is an internet community centered around posting and commenting upon other Internet content, be it a news article or blog posting or whatever. Within the large community of Fark resides an elite group, that of TotalFark, where subscribers pay $5/month to see all of the links submitted to the queue instead of the few that the moderators select. Because of the many discussions and threads which take place within TotalFark that the larger public never gets to see, there is perhaps a greater sense of community there, a more cohesive sense of unity.

Recently, there have been some changes in Fark. Most visible of these was a site redesign, from old-school to a more Web-2.0 sort of look, accompanied by technical difficulties that caused the site to run slooooooowly; people who complained about the new look or technical problems were told, in a now-famous post by a moderator, “You’ll get over it.” Less visible but of more critical importance to the male segment of Fark’s population was the fact that “boobies” links - long a staple of Fark’s offerings - were now being deleted. In addition, complaints began to arise of heavy-handed moderation, of people being banned or given time-outs and threads being deleted for subject matter that had previously been tolerated. In turn, these complaints were then being moderated and removed, giving rise to claims of censorship and more - that Fark’s management were pandering to their advertisers, and ignoring the demands of the faithful subscribers and site visitors who’d given rise to Fark’s popularity in the first place.

Thus it happened that a group of disenchanted Farkers created a site calling itself banniNation.com - a site with the same exact submit-news-links-and-comment-on-them premise, but with an added twist: instead of moderators choosing which links were worthy of posting, the site’s members would do so, by voting on the links while they were in a “pending” queue. In fact, this new site was to have no moderators at all, and all speech would be welcome, all people free to debate and discuss and even troll, as they chose. This site would be everything Fark was not, and be all the better for it.

The premise lasted, I think, for a couple of weeks and 1,000 registered members, before one determined troll copied and pasted death threats into multiple comment threads faster than the other members could vote down and thus remove his posts - and the site’s maintainer took action, enacting the first moderation action on the new forum.

What went wrong? Strictly speaking, nothing. It’s simply that no forum of any size can exist without moderators to police the actions of its members. Sooner or later, someone is going to be an idiot, and a determined idiot, and do something appalling enough to warrant action. And if that idiot does his/her stupid thing and gets away with it, other idiots will swiftly follow suit - and before you can twitch an eyelash, your forum is nothing but trolls, trolling each other, while the more moderate and level heads will long have left for a more amenable venue of communication.

BanniNation, at a thousand members, may as yet have need of only the occasional administrative action to silence a troublemaker. Fark, at a minimum of tens of thousands of active members, requires a good deal more than that. In such a large and volatile environment, a flame war can quickly spiral out of control… and all it takes is one or two nasty incidents to negatively brand a forum. And let’s be real here, Fark is a moneymaking venture for its management… its creator/owner is making his living off Fark, and there are people being paid to help maintain it. When you’re in business, you have to protect the reputation of the business, and take action to keep the business profitable. If that means “pandering to the advertisers”, then so be it.

Don’t like what’s happening on Fark? Find another forum, or make your own. But know this: if your new home on the web starts getting popular, it will face the same issues of moderation, there will end up being rules about what is acceptable behavior and what is not, and penalties for not abiding by those rules. That is not a flaw of any forum: it is simply the nature of the beast. One cannot expect any forum of any size or activity to police itself and remain civil without intervention. It’s just not going to happen.

And if that forum continues to grow… then the bandwidth used, and the fees imposed by hosting companies for same, will cause money to become an issue for the forum, and then what? Should the forum accept advertising - becoming then responsible for keeping the forum in line with what the advertisers consider acceptable, and risking accusations of “pandering”? Should the forum solicit donations, or impose fees for membership - eliciting complaints of “I paid for this!” whenever an unpopular moderation decision is made?

Basically, the minute a forum becomes popular, it’s going to face the same series of challenges Fark has faced, and end up garnering the same array of complaints that Fark has faced in response. The only way to escape that fate is to keep the forum small, exclusive, limiting your numbers and screening members carefully. Yet to do so eliminates “fresh blood”, and soon such a carefully-cultivated community will grow stale, as its members run out of things to say to each other. A web community must grow - and by doing so, become heir to the suite of issues it might have once hoped to leave behind.

For now, banniNation still thinks it’s invented adolescence; and Fark is the big bad grown-up, who either was never a teenager or who forgot what it was like, and just doesn’t understand. But to me - standing outside the conflict, detached from both, and remembering my years of internet mailing lists and newsgroups and bulletin boards and such - I know it’s all just the same progression as always, and I have to laugh at the absurdity of anyone thinking that something new and different is happening.

Cameo - heretofore known as Kittums (for she is Kittenish, with a scoochable tum-tum) - has proven to be more playful than previously thought. This has resulted in the ascension of the Toe Conundrum: if it moves beneath the covers, it will be Pounced; therefore, how can one slumber Without Moving One’s Feet, Ever.

So my life at the current time is comprised of: sleep too long, wake up shrieking from the claws sunk into my toes, and go back to sleep again. Fun!

Most people - well, actually, I don’t know if it’s all people, most people, some people, or a few people - can look back in their memories, once they’ve come to a certain age, and pick out a few occurrences that were defining moments in their lives: things which, by happening, utterly and completely changed who that person was, forever after. I know that I, personally, can name a few.

There was the moment when, at the age of… twelve, I think… I called into a radio show, somehow managed to nudge aside the incessant busy signals, and got to speak to Joey Ramone. I don’t remember precisely what I said; I was a child, and starstruck, and in shock at having gotten through - but I did manage to stammer out a few sentences about how much I loved the Ramones, and how my mother, a cab driver, also loved the Ramones. In reply, Joey said (again, my memory fails me on the details) that my mother should come by the radio station, because he could use a ride home. My mother, driving in her cab at the time, heard this on the radio, went by the radio station, and spent a pleasant interval conversing with Joey.

The upshot of this was that we ended up eventually building friendships with the band and their gang of cohorts, going backstage, following them to shows around the Northeastern U.S., and generally living the sort of lifestyle that every music-crazy teenager might dream of. In those moments of that stammering, half-remembered phone call, my life changed completely - from being a bullied and downtrodden nebbish amongst my peer group with nothing in life to look forward to but more of the same - to a Life Just One Side Of The Spotlight. If I hadn’t gotten through to the radio station that day, I’d be an unimaginably different person right now.

The other life-defining moment that immediately comes to mind is the moment when I stepped in front of the ex-employee at my old job working for the home improvement company, to prevent him from leaving the building with confidential company documents. During the ensuing squabble, I got thwacked soundly in the head with a countertop sample, a small slab of marble about an inch thick, which opened a very small wound (four stitches’ worth) in my scalp and became an undiagnosable head injury from which it took me some five years to recover. Again, I don’t remember details - in this case, probably because of the concussion and later memory loss I sustained - but that moment of bravery affected me profoundly in two different ways.

First of all, I learned that I was brave - maybe not when it came to spiders (yuck!) or heights (::shivers::) but in a more important way. I learned that I would stand up for what was right - instinctively, without conscious thought or decision - when faced with a situation requiring such a choice. I’d never thought of myself as a brave person before… but after that incident, I knew I was, and that knowledge has given me an inner certainty for which I am most thankful.

Second: it was during those five years of my convalescence that I got a home computer of my own, like the one I’d used to use at work, a shiny new 486 66Mhz machine with a staggering half-gigabyte of hard drive space and a lightning-fast 14.4K modem. On days when I could barely manage to sit in my chair at the computer, I was able to surf the brand-new, dazzlingly exciting Internet and find diversion, entertainment and companionship there. But most important of all: in my discovery of the Internet and its riches, I learned about web pages, and that I could create my own - that I could combine text, and images, and music, and format them to my liking, and publish them before a potential audience of millions around the world. I fell in love with that part of the Internet, a love affair that’s continued to this day, and become a career the likes of which I couldn’t have dreamed of, back when I was working for a pittance doing meaningless and intellectually unstimulating secretarial work. If it hadn’t been for that computer - which I likely would not have bothered getting, had it not been for that dreadful head injury - I wouldn’t be who I am now, doing what I do for a living today.

And third - yes, I just thought of a third way in which the head injury defined my future: It was due to the head injury that I realized that I could never manage to live independently in the rough-and-tumble world of my hometown, New York City - and it was the settlement money from my worker’s compensation that provided me with the means to, at the age of thirty-one, leave my ancestral home to begin a life on my own elsewhere. If it hadn’t been for the head injury, I never would have ended up in Atlanta, nor made the friends (on the Internet, years ago) who I treasure so highly today.

So those are the two most overt defining moments of my life - and it seems unfair, really, that I don’t remember either one clearly, but such is life. If either of those moments had happened differently, or not happened at all… I don’t know who I’d be, but I would be someone unrecognizable compared to who I am now.

And what put me on this train of thought to begin with? Simple: I saw the Back to the Future trilogy last weekend. And it got me thinking about how small things can have huge effects, rippling outward indefinitely. I’ve wondered, sometimes, if someone actually hopped into a time machine sometime in the future and came back to nudge those events into place for me, to create the person who I am today. Or if it’s just someOne, letting just a trace of Their hand be seen in the graceful subtlety of the events in question. Small small things. A ringing line instead of a busy signal. Stepping in front of somebody, instead of stepping aside. In either case, a difference of a few seconds would’ve changed everything. And in both cases, the ripple effects of the incident - even in the case of the head injury, and its accompanying five years of pain and fear - have been ultimately beneficial to me, in the extreme.

Defining moments, indeed.

Two weeks to the day from the death of my beloved Elfy, I found myself at the local Petsmart, signing adoption papers to bring home another cat, so far named Cameo. For a cat-person, the loneliness that comes from not being owned by a cat cannot be described. Two weeks of not being owned by a cat was quite enough for me.

Cameo is as different from Elfy as night is from day. Elfy was sleek, skinny and small-framed, lustrous black coat with gleaming golden eyes. Cameo is vaguely Bengal-patterned, spotted-striped-marbled in a dozen shades of beige and brown and black, almost seeming to glitter in the light; her eyes are a pleasant, mellow green, and she is a hefty handful in my arms. Elfy was stately and graceful, a proud little lady, perfectly aware of her own queendom. Cameo is affectionate, wanting always a lap to snuggle in, a hand to pet her, a finger to nibble on gently. Elfy spoke only when something needed saying, and did so in a voice of certainty. Cameo speaks often, and her voice always sounds like I’ve stepped on her tail…

They are two very different people, and for that I am glad. I will always cherish and love my Elfy; her memory will always be strong, and honored. But Cameo needs someone to love her, and I need a kitty to love, and that mutual need is creating an entirely new bond between us, separate from the bond I shared with Elfy.

Mommy loves you.

Elfy came to me in the winter of 1992, in a box of squirming kittens left on our doorstep by some unknown person who knew we liked to feed the neighborhood cats. As we waited for the mommy cat to relocate her babies and take them away who-knew-where, I reached in and picked out the littlest, scrawniest kitten of the lot, an all-black kitten with huge blue eyes. “Aww, lookit that,” I said, cradling her close.

And she looked up at me with those big blue eyes, and she arched her little back, and hissed, and spat, and clawed a gouge out of my hand.

And I gazed back down at her, and smiled, already in love with such a big attitude on such a tiny baby. “You’re mine,” I said, and cuddled her until she relaxed into the warmth and began to purr.

She was small enough to need formula, but she tucked into the big-cat food as if she’d been eating it all her life, and played rough-and-tumble with my (sadly short-lived) bigger cat Tuddy. When startled, she’d jump straight up in the air as if she was spring-propelled; she’d chase a catnip mouse across the floor like a demon possessed. If I shook my finger “no-no” at her, she’d take a swipe at it with her paw, claws unfurled, to show what she thought of the situation. She didn’t like to cuddle much, at first, but slowly and surely I trained her to like sleeping close to me, with my arm tucked ’round her, and I was happy, with my two girl-kitties.

I took a blow to the head and ended up sick in bed for what would become a five-year stretch; Tuddy took ill and died. Elfy, golden-eyed now, was my comfort and my companion, living with me in a single room isolated from the big dogs downstairs. When at the end of that five year stretch, I gathered my wits and my courage around me and set off for a better life in Las Vegas, Elfy came with me, bewildered but brave (and buttered - long story) on her first plane trip in a cat carrier at my feet. We lived there for a year, and then it was another plane trip, and another home, this time in Atlanta: her third home, of many.

We lived together, we learned together, we grew together. We moved from apartment to apartment together, spending the longest stretch of time in a studio in midtown, where she had a cozy spot on the back of my futon in the afternoon sun, and a catnip plant towering overhead to provide enticing smells. During times when I was all alone, Elfy was there to keep me company, even intruding on my “private time” in the bathroom to demand that I brush her while I was at it. On days when I didn’t feel like getting up and facing the world, Elfy was there meowing for her breakfast and twitching her tail into my sleeping face until I got up to do her bidding. Opinionated and bossy and willful, yet ever welcoming that scritch on the head or stroke on the back, Elfy was always very much a “mama’s girl” - she was my cat, no one else’s; she always made that very clear.

Elfy’s fourteen years old now - an elderly little lady. She has kidney troubles, yet she’s so terrified of the vet that they need to knock her out with sedatives in order to so much as examine her - so any ongoing medical treatment is less a help to her than it is harmful. She’s skin and bone, yet she still has her appetite, still nags me for her breakfast and her lunch and dinner and midnight snackies of chicken or lamb baby food. Still comes running for treats of chicken or shrimp or lobster, still numms up tasty morsels eagerly (and toothlessly) from my palm. She still sleeps on a pillow beside my head, settling down on my outstretched palm under her tummy to feel me close to her, so I can feel her close to me. Still curls up in the laundry basket like a queen on her throne, as attitudinous as ever.

Elfy’s fourteen now, and I love her with all my heart, as I have always done. And someday very soon I will lose her - and my world will be a far emptier and lonelier place. But I know that up in Kitty Heaven, there is a place waiting for her, emblazoned with all the many names I have known and loved her by: Elfy, Pelf, Ploofy-Poof - a comfy spot in a warm sunbeam, with a crystal goblet of lobster nibblies close at hand; and when the time comes, that will be my consolation.

In recent times, there has been an upsurge in the fundamentalist Christian movement to “sanctify Christmas”, to properly celebrate December 25th as the date of Christ’s birth. People who feel this way will take extreme offense if you dare to wish them “Happy Holidays”, and will point out your error in self-righteous tones.

Problem is, a simple analysis of Biblical references shows that Jesus was born in September or October. (No, I didn’t do this research myself. But a simple googling of “when was jesus born” can be quite illuminating.)

So what is the reason for the season? Well, “the Roman Catholic writer Mario Righetti candidly admits that, “to facilitate the acceptance of the faith by the pagan masses, the Church of Rome found it convenient to institute the 25th of December as the feast of the birth of Christ to divert them from the pagan feast, celebrated on the same day in honor of the ‘Invincible Sun’ Mithras, the conqueror of darkness” (Manual of Liturgical History, 1955, Vol. 2, p. 67).” (Found at this website, here.) In other words… the real spirit of Christmas lies in ancient Pagan celebrations of the Winter Solstice; the ancient Christian church simply saw fit to plan their celebration to coincide with the Pagan one so that the people they were trying to convert didn’t have to give up their favorite holidays.

So much for fundamentalist Christian indignation.

But does it really matter whether Jesus was born on Christmas or not? I don’t think so. The “spirit of Christmas”, I believe, goes far beyond any one religion. I think that the promotion of “peace on earth, goodwill toward all men” transcends such lines, and is, or should be, something we all strive toward - if not perpetually, then at least for a few weeks each year, when a holly wreath or set of twinkling lights remind us to.

In this regard, I believe that the de-Christianization of Christmas is the best thing that could happen to the holiday. Let “X-mas” become a secular festival, where it can be celebrated by all. And above all, let it not become a bone of contention by those who wish to use it as an excuse to chastise others for not believing as they do.

Happy Winter Solstice, y’all. And a Happy New Year.

I admit it. I am a cowardly carnivore. I eat meat, and I love it; yet I am too squeamish to consider killing my own dinner. I lack the moral strength to look a cow in its big brown eyes before slaughtering it for its meat. I am, in short, a hypocrite.

There was a time when, if a person wanted to eat meat, that person had to kill, and usually hunt, their own. That time is past. Now, meat is a thing that comes neatly packaged in styrofoam and plastic in the supermarket, with no real connection to the living being from whence it came. It’s easy to buy that steak, that chop, that fillet, and never give a moment’s thought to the fact that you’re eating something that once had its own life force.

Do I feel guilty about this? Yeah, a little. But then, everything we eat, with the exception of water and salt, used to be alive: vegetables, spices and all. So where does the dividing line lie? Does the guilt come from eating something that once had an eyes and a brain to think with, even if its thoughts consisted solely of eat, procreate, sleep?

From a moral perspective, it strikes me that if I’m unwilling to consider the possibility of killing my own meat, perhaps I should refrain from eating it. Yet I will not. I’m the product of the modern world, where such things take place far away from my tidy supermarket and kitchen. It’s a side effect of the evolution of our culture, that I should be so insulated from the realities of life this way, same as how I don’t have to go build a windmill to generate power, only plug a cord into a wall and pay a bill once a month for the privilege. If my carnivorous tendencies carry with them traces of hypocrisy, then it’s a hypocrisy that’s my birthright alongside electronics and so forth.

There are some who feel that hunting is a vile anachronism that should be outlawed. Yet I have a certain respect for those who kill their own game (as opposed to those who hunt for trophies and leave the meat to rot). In their own way, the hunters keep alive a part of our human history that we should be honored to acknowledge. If the world were to go to hell tomorrow, it would be those hunters who’d stand a chance of surviving, whereas the insulated “evolved” humans like myself would begin dying as soon as there were no supermarkets left to loot.

But that has not happened yet; and so I remain a cowardly carnivore, secure in the knowledge that there are braver souls out there killing my meat for me so that I don’t have to do it myself. All hail the modern world, where such miracles may happen.

This year for the holidays, I gave myself a present. The present was: to buy gifts for all my friends.

I’ve had a lot of years when I couldn’t, not even a card. A lot of lean years where the best I could do was say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Hanukkah” or “Happy Yule” and leave it at that. But this year, I’m doing a bit better financially than I have in the past. And I have some really good, close friends… and I wanted to do something special for them, as a token of my appreciation for their friendship over the years.

In most cases, I didn’t spend a lot of money. But I made it my mission to try to match each gift as closely as possible with the person’s interests. For one friend: a World of Warcraft “epic” t-shirt, bearing stats like those shown on the armor one gets in-game. For another, one of the terrific Sudo Make Me A Sandwich t-shirts from xkcd.com, the perfect gift for any UNIX geek. For a friend who’s a space geek, I got a sport shirt and baseball cap combo from the Kennedy Space Center shop - bonus: he wears sport shirts all the time for work, so it’s useful as well as cool. And for my bestest friend the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fan, I got a Hufflepuff school tie and, from Ebay, an autographed photo of the four hobbits from the LotR movies, complete with certificate of authenticity, in a handsome frame. I have other friends I’ve bought gifts for, but since I haven’t given them yet, I’ll refrain from describing them now… Some of the gifts were more elaborate. Some are very simple and even very small. But in every case, I went to some effort to find out what might be wanted and needed by each person in question.

And it was so much fun! Not having gone on so elaborate a gift-buying spree before, I hadn’t realized fully just how much fun it could be to buy things for other people. Browsing the internet, sifting through thing after thing to find just the right thing, was a game and a challenge. The reward: seeing them open their gifts, watching their faces light up, and knowing I’d succeeded in my goal.

It’s made me think about the spirit of giving, a phrase oft used and over-used this time of the year. Too often we speak or think of gift giving as a necessity, an obligation. How to come up with the money for the new games system that the children want. What to get for one’s recalcitrant in-laws. That Secret Santa gift you’re obligated to buy for your workmate, but really couldn’t care less about. (Mine got a little package of fancy teabags, tea mug, scented candle and bath wash. I hope she liked it.) We turn holiday shopping into a chore, and bemoan the expense.

But this year, I experienced the real spirit of giving: in which the giving is truly as much of a present for the giver as for the recipient.

I may not be able to do this again next year, or ever. The nature of my life is such that I’m never quite sure what tomorrow will bring. And that’s okay. But to have known it once - to truly experience the spirit of giving - well, that’s a gift in and of itself.

When I was ten years old, there was no way to record a television program and watch it later. I remember setting up my little Radio Shack cassette recorder by the TV so I could at least replay the audio track of my favorite shows… When I was twenty-ish, we got our first VCR, and bought our way into a video rental club for an $80 membership fee, and were treated to the ability to watch things that weren’t currently being broadcast. Heaven! Now, I could have a Tivo if I wanted, or download television shows from the Internet.

When I was ten years old, there were a handful of television stations: CBS (Channel 2), NBC (Channel 4), ABC (Channel 7), a handful of independent stations (Channels 5, 9 and 11) and PBS (Channel 13). That was it. And though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, as I grew up in New York City, I had more to watch than most people in the country… When I was twenty-ish, cable television was beginning to be installed in Manhattan’s midtown area, and I longed for the day that the lines might actually reach out into the boroughs, and despaired of it ever happening. Now, I have cable TV, dozens of channels, and I could have hundreds if I felt like paying the bill for it… and there’s still nothing on to watch. ;)

When I was ten years old, there was no way to take music with you when you were out and about. I remember carrying my little Radio Shack cassette recorder and plugging an earphone into my ear for some low-fidelity, tinny, monophonic sound. Or carrying a tiny, staticky transistor radio for the same effect… When I was twenty-ish, I had a Walkman that let me listen to the radio and my cassette tapes with stereo headphones. I could carry as many as fifteen songs with me on a single tape. Wow! Now, I have an MP3 player that carries a couple of thousand songs currently, with plenty of room for more.

When I was ten years old, a computer was a huge monolithic structure that only a scientist could use or understand. When I was twenty-ish, I worked at jobs performing data entry on a black screen with glowing green lettering, tabbing between fields to enter numbers and words, and that was unimaginably more modern than the manual typing of letters and invoices that I’d been taught in secretarial school. A bit later, I got my first computer, with a full-color monitor and a half-gigabyte hard drive and 4 meg of ram and a 14.4K modem, and that was just amazing to me. Now, I have a 150 gig hard drive, some ridiculous amount of RAM and a broadband connection… and I take it for granted.

In the past thirty years, technology has made such leaps that I sometimes sit back and just feel dizzied by it all. Of more interest to me, though, is what the next thirty years will bring (and if I’m lucky, I’ll be around to see it happen!). Thirty years ago, the Internet didn’t exist… ten years ago, interpersonal contact on the ‘Net was mostly via mailing lists and newsgroups… today, we have full-graphic MMORPGs and are on our way toward a sense of global community that would have been unimaginable in my youth. Where will we be when I’m seventy?

And these kids nowadays, who are being born into a world of Tivos and satellite television and broadband and the Internet, will they be less dizzied and dazzled by the new technology that assails them as they mature? Or will they be similarly jarred by those changes?

Or will we, despite the Internet’s unifying effects toward global unity and understanding, still manage to destroy ourselves as a people… or be destroyed by the fanatical efforts of a relative handful of rabid militants?

It would be sad if that were to happen. We have so much potential. That we were able to take a network of computers that originally was meant for scientific research and turn it into a medium of bulletin boards and Livejournals and Ebays and MySpaces, where people can meet and gather and get to know each other, says much for our potential as thinking, reasoning, feeling beings. We as humans have always had a tendency to form ourselves into groups and turn ourselves into “us vs. them”. But now, the groups we’re forming cross national boundaries and income lines; now, the groups we form are based more on common interests than they are based on accidents of geography or lifestyle. And that’s a good thing, a positive thing.

Now that I’m forty, the world is still fighting wars, groups are still battling for civil rights, countries feel besieged by threats from terrorists. Will it still be the same way when I’m seventy? Or will we have used our knack for creating ever-more-ingenious technology to find our way to something better?

I suppose only time will tell.

From the time I entered school at the age of five until I dropped out to get my General Equivalency Diploma at the age of 16, I was consistently harassed, bullied, ridiculed and tormented by my peers. This probably began because I was “skipped” out of kindergarten into the first grade, and was woefully unprepared — I didn’t know what the simplest things, like “line up in size order”, meant — and human beings, children especially, zero in on weakness and are unrelentingly cruel toward it.

Nowadays, ever since the victims began fighting back with guns and explosives, schools have begun to adapt a “zero tolerance” policy toward bullying in school. But in the seventies, when I was in school, the attitude was “Kids will be kids”, and I was left to fend for myself.

The years have been kind to me, erasing the sharp edges from memories that used to be acutely painful. I don’t remember any of the names of the children I went to school with. Except for one.

I was just entering seventh grade, and the prospect of a new school made me think, foolishly, that maybe I’d left the bullying behind, that I would be given a fresh new start. Silly me; teenagers are crueler than any other group. I was instantly targeted in this new setting. One girl, in particular, made a point of being nasty to me. I couldn’t eat lunch without food being thrown at me. I couldn’t do a project in art class without paint being spilled on my work. I walked home rather than risk being on a bus with her. I lived in fear of her, every waking moment. If this were happening today, perhaps I would have looked up “bombs” on the Internet, made one, and brought it to school to jam up her ass. But this was the seventies… so I merely went home and cried.

At the time, she was larger than life to me, the biggest and worst enemy I could possibly imagine. How time changes things. Looking back now, I realize that she was overweight herself, as I was, and unattractive, and possibly unpopular, and there’s a really good chance that bullying me was the only measure of control she could exert over any part of her life. Looking back now, I can see that quite possibly, we had more in common than not — and I can feel not only pity, but understanding.

Interesting side note: When I was in my twenties, there was a sum of time in which I took up hanging out with a couple of similarly-aged young men in my neighborhood; and there came a day when I happened to be at the local hospital E.R. for a back problem, and they happened to be there for I-don’t-remember-what, and she was with them. We fell to talking — “we” meaning me and the guys; she and I were ignoring each other completely — and began discussing previous nights we’d hung out together, drinking beer and listening to music. Indignantly, she turned to the guys and asked them, “How come you never do that with me?” And one of them looked at her and said, with the utmost disdain, “Because you’re not cool, like SHE (pointing to me) is.”

And I watched her wilt. And in that one moment of being, for the first time, superior to my erstwhile tormentor, I achieved all the revenge I would ever need for the years of heartache.

Sometimes, life is wonderfully fair.

I went from being the uncool, picked-on kid in school to following rock bands around the country, and from there to being a damn-well-paid computer geek — as I said, the years have been kind to me. And sometimes I wonder, idly, where life took her. But the beautiful part of all this is, it really doesn’t matter. When I was young, I believed that my miserable, traumatic years at school would scar me forever. But… they didn’t.

In the end, really, school years (from a social standpoint, at least) don’t matter.

If I could go back in time and tell myself anything, if I could give one piece of advice to other kids in a similar situation to myself, it would be that.

I read an article this evening about safeguarding radioactive waste material against the future: about the question of how you alert people to the fact that there’s a danger 10,000 years up the road, when languages will have changed, and most likely any warnings you leave will be taken as seriously as we took the warnings of curses on Pharoahs’ tombs.

It’s insane that we’re generating waste material that will remain dangerous for 250 generations or more. I can’t begin to describe my incredulity at the fact that no one, not ONE person, has looked at this situation and said, Listen, guys, this is batshit insane; why are we generating intensely poisonous materials that can COMPLETELY WIPE OUT THE HUMAN SPECIES and that will remain lethal for thousands of years? How our species can be so completely callous, so blind to the future, that it can just dump nuclear waste in a hole and say, Oh well, not our problem.

Then I read the end of the article, and it just gave me chills, describing a site where an atomic warhead was detonated 1,151 feet underground in 1961:

“Two corroded plaques glued to a 4-foot concrete slab commemorate the test, dubbed Project Gnome. The monument has been nudged several yards over the decades by cattle that use it as a rubbing post. Spent rifle shells crunch underfoot; the pockmarked shrine is favored by locals for target practice.

A third plaque was pried off, perhaps as a souvenir. According to earlier visitors, it read, in plain English, “This site will remain dangerous for 24,000 years.”

Twenty-four THOUSAND YEARS.

And it’s already been all but forgotten.

We’re poisoning this planet, and we have nowhere else to go; and when I read articles describing debates over how best to build a nuclear waste site so that people thousands of years in the future will understand that there is POISON there, not hidden treasure or archaeological understanding of past civilizations… I just, I can’t even believe that there are any among us who claim to any pretense of evolution, that we as a species can be so blind to the future and still classify ourselves as anything but mindless apes.

And I’m exhausted, yet somehow I’m having trouble sleeping. Gee, I wonder why.