I've created a Blog!

Well, this took most of my night. I will try to make it more beautiful and interesting later on. For now, it is up and I'm too tired for deep thoughts.

I have looked at blogs that made me uncomfortable...I mean, people display their most intimate, private thoughts out in the wasteland we call the internet----for strangers to read and ridicule. What is it about people that want to share this stuff?? It makes me feel badly, because I know they are gonna get hurt.  They are setting themselves up for emotional disaster. And somehow I think that people who blog about their most tender feelings and most treasured ideas are the least secure----the ones looking for approval and who can least afford the public humiliation they are about to receive.
I love the internet. It is like a place to me...perhaps a second home in some ways. It is a marvelous resource and endlessly entertaining. But for all of its wonderfullness, it can be a very cruel and cold place. People feel free to speak their minds in ways they never would if they were confronting each other face to face. Anonymity has a way of bringing out the worst in some people as they sit safely behind their monitors typing venom and reducing their fellow human beings in cyberspace to smoldering ruins. Because when we become mere words on a screen, we somehow lose our humanity to some...we truly are no more than words on a screen...faceless, souless and unworthy of compassion.

I have never been able to disconnect like that. I yam what I yam, as Popeye would say.

I remember way back when...when I used to play Ultima Online. Ultima Online was one of the very first online games (or MMORPGs as they are called now----often shortened to MMO). My daughter and I often played together, even when she was away at college, we could go adventuring together in this huge online world---riding our horses, killing monsters and gathering treasure. There was an aspect of this early, ground-breaking game that I never really liked a lot or got used to....other players could kill you and take your stuff (and even kill your horse!). They were called player killers (or PK-ers). I really hated them. They ruined more wonderful adventures. And they clearly loved doing it! I despised them and the horse they rode in on. They would swoop in out of nowhere and just mow us down...and laugh. No matter how hard I tried I could never be like them...I couldn't bring myself to harm other players for pure enjoyment.
I just didn't understand how they could be that way. But they would say to me "It is just a game. So what?" And that was the answer. To them the world of Ultima was only a game, to be won or lost. To me it was the reality that I was in at the present. It was a place with depth and wonder. Because of that, being attacked and killed was personal and painful. It was just two different perceptions of the same situation. At various events over the years, I met some of these PK-ers face to face. They didn't have warts and fangs---they were just really nice kids who played a game on an entirely different plane of reality than I did.

Anyway, this blog is not going to be a soul-baring type of thing. Just a collection of meandering, random thoughts. It might get philosophical or political, depending on my mood at the time. Or I might just talk about my cats or my garden. I will think of it as my Journal, which is what it will be more than anything. If someone reads it, that is cool...if not that is ok by me. I'm writing it because these thoughts and stories need to go somewhere and quit bouncing around inside of my head!