my unicorn chose a bad spot to take a piss

Once a rock-headed bint
Who did not take a hint
Smeared some spooge on Dear Roger's pet forum
He asploded with rage
Across many a page
She cried "Zounds! Better stab, then, than bore 'um."


To be honest I was glad today to have something internetty, hence not terribly serious, to feel angry about. I was hoping for a slightly higher than normal level of maturity on my new forum, and for the most part that's been true. We'll see what happens. If The Good Reverend Roger takes me up on my offer to leave and I have to find a new forum, maybe I'll hit Baen's Bar and be able to hat about books with fellow fans. Worst comes to worst I can go back to Gaia on a new account, or one of my many multis. The house I built there is still standing and I can still give and receive poetry critiques. If no one is interested in my weird made-up magical craptasms, perhaps it is most polite to restrict them to my blog!

I actually went to sleep angry and woke up angry, which I was not best pleased about. I've read that's a dangerous thing to do; anger is, among other things, highly corrosive. But over the course of the morning I was able to use all that spare angry mental energy (RED MANA har har) to master the usual bevy of work crises with even more style and aplomb than usual. While keeping a grimly determined grip on my positive attitude. As me and Dave discussed yesterday, keeping my positive attitude is going to require a heckuva lot of grim determination. And I am going to NEED that positivity in the coming weeks and months.

The forum tussle did give me a reason to reconsider a few things. We must all question the systems of belief through which we approach daily life. Failure to do so, at least once in awhile, results in painful and horrible reality checks.

My system of belief is DIY, perpetually under construction. I'm perfectly well aware that there are a lot of wheels I'm reinventing needlessly because I would rather do it myself, including six or seven shoddy attempts before I get one that sticks, than take up someone else's symbol set and not understand all its subtle uses and nasty implications. There are those who would probably argue that I'm reinventing five or six wheels when four or even two have been known to get people from point A to point B. That, in other words, there is no need to even posit an invisible world, that life can be lived fully and sensibly if we don't believe in any aspect of the universe for which no scientifically verifiable evidence exists. And for a vast majority of people, that objection is probably true and would make a lot of people's lives easier.

However, there are two reasons I won't give up on this.

One, developing my crazy ideas until they one day, hopefully, become something entirely sane and explicable, gives me enormous satisfaction. I have already gotten what I consider good results in terms of personality construction. That is, I have been able to change myself from an unbelievably irritating boor into someone friendly, upbeat and charming that people generally want to spend more time with than they get to. Chalk that up under positive achievements for my crazy made-up system.

Two, the less positive side, I don't think I can think of the universe without considering an alleged invisible side to it. Having been raised in deadly seriousness to believe in demons and the Holy Ghost and speaking in tongues and all of that fun stuff, the habits of belief are grooved into the formation of my personality at a pretty deep level. I have to put something there. Because if I don't do it consciously, my unconscious self will do it for me, and we all know what a conniving little saboteur she is. At least, if "we" have chosen to waste the time reading my dream logs. I personally re-read them almost obsessively looking for some interpretation or clue I can use. I imagine if other people keep dream logs they do the same thing. Then again it's my solipsism that's just got me into my first online fight in ages, so I shouldn't be too hasty!

The bummer of it is that this has been rather a nice forum and it would be a shame to have worn out my welcome so quickly. Overall the quality of posters is very high, which makes up for the small numbers and slow thread movement. I suppose if someone goes to all the trouble to erect his very own internet masturbatorium he doesn't want silly hippies messing his threads up with their pet theories. Pfft. That's what the internet is for, in my silly hippie opinion. I want people messing my threads up with their theories. Then I get to know what their theories are, and may learn something that contributes to mine! Win-win proposition. But of course not everyone takes insane glee in coming up with crazy theories all the time.

Hmm. *taps tip of nose and ponders* Can this be made into some sort of aphorism? "Play ye not games of air in a fire mage's den," or something like that. It's like having to possibly leave a forum because of a freak gasoline fight accident. Hilarious but dumb, and a waste.