Falling Stars

The world is always wrong. We are always wrong. Since there is no rock that is fixed in time and space, there is no absolute standard of when someone is right and when someone is wrong.

It is easy to come up with generalizations, for example, looking back on my time in Second Life, a disproportionate number of the people who have caused me grief are men from Australia. The mind grabbing for the easy generalization can take this and draw conclusions from it. But that's foolish. Because there is a real, not coincidental, connection.

Or rather two.

The first one is one I know. There are some men in Second Life who are not happy unless they have reached through the screen and hurt a real person in the real world. This is the exact pleasure that they want. This is what motivates, for example, an ordinary griefer. To them, forcing emotion on people is "winning." They in turn, since they don't listen to people, since they don't feel, believe they "win" every discussion, because they don't feel hurt. This is what joined my two unpleaant experiences.

But that is the world. It was true yesterday, it will be true today, and it will be true tomorrow.

The other part is me. Not Lillie me, but me me. And me me feels very uncomfortable dealing with these people. They are like talking to a garbage disposal. It just spins and whirs. I can't accomodate them, because what they want, specifically, is the one thing that I don't provide: emotional rape.

It isn't that there aren't people who are willing to fill this role in a relationship, public or private. In fact, that is what keeps the emotional rapist going. An enormous ego and self-centeredness that is so thick, that it crushes under others. But just as there are people who don't feel alive unless they are abusing their position, so too are there people who don't feel alive unless their psyches are receiving blows.

I'm not going to speculate on causes. I wouldn't even know when and where to start. There are dozens of easy explanations for this, I don't doubt that all of them are partially true. I think that, to take a visual analogy, this reality is a vast looming prison, and it looks and feels like one, whether from a distance, or inside one of its cells. All these things are true.

But the other part is that there are some people much better able to deal with these people than I am. People who either have the ability to conform, or the people who are more comfortable than I am... and here is where I stop. Because here is where my imagiantion fails me. I cant't even imagine the words that would have to come out of my lips.

I know the reason this is true, it is that they only call you a whore when you aren't. And I know that while I am a pixel prostitute, I am not a whore. Mostly, no one gets by in this world without whoring from time to time, even the very fortunate must, from time to time, present their emotioanl hindquarters in submission.

So as I watch the planet of ego streak by me in space, I have to think on how it is watching me. And it is watching all the other little shooting stars that burn up in its atomosphere.

And it is hard for me to even imagine what it is they see.