Strange love
Nov. 23rd, 2004 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138I've been pondering the following for a few days, and still can't decide whether the proper reaction is, assuming there is such a thing. Still, there's practically no chance that anyone directly involved is likely to find my blog, esp. without any incriminating keywords/names.
Sometime last week on one of the sites I usually follow, a new user appeared whose general outlook on life was a strange blend of cynicism and despair: "People suck and you just have to live with that, although I woulddn't if I hadn't promised to." Gradually he started to reshape the entire discussion so it was All About Him, though I genuinely think it wasn't entirely deliberate on his part-- he kept filling in more of his personal background, of which the most pertinent part was that his only reason to hold back from suicide was a promise made to the second love of his life before she died from cancer. The regular posters gave up on him eventually, and it's entirely possible that the site owner just plain locked him out as being inconducive to the original topic. But I felt obscurely sorry enough for him to start poking around the web for more information about him and his late sweetie.
His own website had some stories he'd written around the fandom in which they'd first met, with fairly obvious self-insertion character romances based on both him and her. More specifically, they'd met in a fandom-based MUD/MUSH, which is like a text-based "Everquest" for those who don't remember such things-- a roleplaying chatroom, essentially. Almost invariably, he referred to her by her fan alias, which I'll reassign as "Amber", although once or twice he also used her mundane name, which I'll render as "Lexi". Some of the older stories and blog entries had playful notes about Amber/Lexi nibbling on his ears to make him (not) write certain things and so on. But over the past few years, his blog entries turned to her initial diagnosis, their hopes that the first round of treatment had driven it into remission, and then the last few devastating months of metastasis and chemo failure. She died this past spring; he flew to at least one memorial service in other cities where she'd lived, and her ashes were scattered on her family plot several states away from where he lives. On the date of her birthday this past summer, his computer calendar reminded him to give her a gift he'd bought last year and hidden away, and (he wrote) he pulled the gift out and couldn't stop crying for the rest of the evening; if it weren't for the promise he'd given her, he'd've dug out his old service revolver and shot himself right then and there. But he managed to comfort himself by pulling out some of the tribute pieces he'd requested while she was ill: he'd asked some artists/writers to make sketches or cameos of the "Amber" character, and that made him feel better enough to keep going for another day.
All of this provided even more scraps of info for me to keep looking around, ghoul that I am; it suggested to me that both of them were sufficiently well-known within their fandom that other people might have their own memories or tributes to/for her. As it turned out, yes and no.
At first when I found her old Usenet posts, I thought some of them were a case of mistaken identity. And then I thought it was a case of later surgical intervention. But then I found other web dox from this past year, and everything fell into place like a Dali landscape: an earlier supposition of rationality sliding into the actual yet surreal.
"Amber" may have been a female character at some point on the original MUD/MUSH, but Lexi was referred to as male by everyone else who knew him, including the fellow furries whose house he lived and died in. From what I can tell, Lexi didn't identify as transgender in RL. It's not even clear to me whether Lexi was gay or straight; despite the original poster's stories and blog, Lexi didn't live in the same house, neighborhood, city or state. For all I know, they never met in RL at all.
What stops this from being farce is that regardless of identity and delusion, the original poster really does seem to be still suicidally bereaved of his beloved Amber, and Lexi really was a young man who died of cancer earlier this year. But I think that for me, the most pitiable aspect of all was finding Lexi's blog-- listed under the same fan alias, which is not really "Amber"; scattered with a few entries typed through those last months of nausea and flippant, futile courage; completely devoid of any mention of the man who was about to take up the role of his desperate widower.
Sometime last week on one of the sites I usually follow, a new user appeared whose general outlook on life was a strange blend of cynicism and despair: "People suck and you just have to live with that, although I woulddn't if I hadn't promised to." Gradually he started to reshape the entire discussion so it was All About Him, though I genuinely think it wasn't entirely deliberate on his part-- he kept filling in more of his personal background, of which the most pertinent part was that his only reason to hold back from suicide was a promise made to the second love of his life before she died from cancer. The regular posters gave up on him eventually, and it's entirely possible that the site owner just plain locked him out as being inconducive to the original topic. But I felt obscurely sorry enough for him to start poking around the web for more information about him and his late sweetie.
His own website had some stories he'd written around the fandom in which they'd first met, with fairly obvious self-insertion character romances based on both him and her. More specifically, they'd met in a fandom-based MUD/MUSH, which is like a text-based "Everquest" for those who don't remember such things-- a roleplaying chatroom, essentially. Almost invariably, he referred to her by her fan alias, which I'll reassign as "Amber", although once or twice he also used her mundane name, which I'll render as "Lexi". Some of the older stories and blog entries had playful notes about Amber/Lexi nibbling on his ears to make him (not) write certain things and so on. But over the past few years, his blog entries turned to her initial diagnosis, their hopes that the first round of treatment had driven it into remission, and then the last few devastating months of metastasis and chemo failure. She died this past spring; he flew to at least one memorial service in other cities where she'd lived, and her ashes were scattered on her family plot several states away from where he lives. On the date of her birthday this past summer, his computer calendar reminded him to give her a gift he'd bought last year and hidden away, and (he wrote) he pulled the gift out and couldn't stop crying for the rest of the evening; if it weren't for the promise he'd given her, he'd've dug out his old service revolver and shot himself right then and there. But he managed to comfort himself by pulling out some of the tribute pieces he'd requested while she was ill: he'd asked some artists/writers to make sketches or cameos of the "Amber" character, and that made him feel better enough to keep going for another day.
All of this provided even more scraps of info for me to keep looking around, ghoul that I am; it suggested to me that both of them were sufficiently well-known within their fandom that other people might have their own memories or tributes to/for her. As it turned out, yes and no.
At first when I found her old Usenet posts, I thought some of them were a case of mistaken identity. And then I thought it was a case of later surgical intervention. But then I found other web dox from this past year, and everything fell into place like a Dali landscape: an earlier supposition of rationality sliding into the actual yet surreal.
"Amber" may have been a female character at some point on the original MUD/MUSH, but Lexi was referred to as male by everyone else who knew him, including the fellow furries whose house he lived and died in. From what I can tell, Lexi didn't identify as transgender in RL. It's not even clear to me whether Lexi was gay or straight; despite the original poster's stories and blog, Lexi didn't live in the same house, neighborhood, city or state. For all I know, they never met in RL at all.
What stops this from being farce is that regardless of identity and delusion, the original poster really does seem to be still suicidally bereaved of his beloved Amber, and Lexi really was a young man who died of cancer earlier this year. But I think that for me, the most pitiable aspect of all was finding Lexi's blog-- listed under the same fan alias, which is not really "Amber"; scattered with a few entries typed through those last months of nausea and flippant, futile courage; completely devoid of any mention of the man who was about to take up the role of his desperate widower.
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no subject
on 2004-11-24 02:48 am (UTC)Ted was a leftover from this. Ted assumed, like his kin before him, that I made up my life and skills. I immediately traced his posts to his ISP provider, and used this knowledge to find out more about him with a lot of phone calls and cross-referencing. I wanted to know about the guy who did these things.
I found out he was an avid Deep Space 9 fan, and played collectable card games for a while. I spoke with some people at the cons he went to, and they said he was an arrogant, yet mostly quiet asshole. I found out about his family, who were very Catholic, and they disowned him when he admitted he was gay. I also found out he'd been accused of "improper behavior" at a church camp when he was a teen. He worked at a major medical lab as a web designer, and his web site wasn't very good, and later it had been hacked. More and more stuff I found out about him until I just couldn't be mad anymore. His life sucked, and sucked so hard it created a false vacuum. When I finally stopped, I compiled all my notes, and looked at the portrait of a tortured soul, torn apart by his mediocre job just below his level of competence, living a shamed gay lifestyle, and fantasizing about a world where he could be free to be anyone he wanted.
I felt any revenge I could have done on him would be like pissing in the ocean to raise the tide.
no subject
on 2004-11-24 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-11-29 09:33 am (UTC)But it's not an entirely new thing, when you consider that people like the Pinis met through letters cols in comic books. Heck, I know someone who paid for his on-line girlfriend to come to live with him. It didn't work out, but what a leap of faith.