Game Over Man!

If you spend time in Second Life, like I have, you get to the point where you think that it is all real. You think that the people are real. You think the relationships are real. You think that feelings are real.

Friend, let me tell you here and now that it ain't so. It's all in your head. You are imagining it. If you forget that it is going to punch you in the face. You'll find yourself dazed and bleeding. You'll be wondering WTF happened. What happened is that SL is a game, and Dude, you just lost.

Mea Culpa

Having been married 35 years I realize that men are generally stupid when it comes to women. I was stupid recently in Second Life. Not for the first time either. I made an offhand remark months ago that was taken in a way I did not expect. I was told that I was wrong and I apologized for my insensitivity. The really stupid thing I did the other day was to make another offhand and totally unnecessary remark that was not as witty and I thought it was. I won't go any further in the details, but I was lucky to be forgiven by someone I feel really close to and cherish her friendship.

The remainder of this post comes from a e-mail that someone sent my wife and she in turn passed on to me. Why would a man post jokes about men? mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Why's of Men

1. WHY DO MEN BECOME SMARTER DURING SEX?

(because they are plugged into a genius)

2. WHY DON'T WOMEN BLINK DURING SEX?

(they don't have enough time)

3. WHY DOES IT TAKE 1 MILLION SPERM TO FERTILIZE ONE EGG?

(they don't stop to ask directions)

4. WHY DO MEN SNORE WHEN THEY LIE ON THEIR BACKS?

(because their balls fall over their butt-hole and they vapor lock)

(You're laughing, aren't you?!?!)

5. WHY WERE MEN GIVEN LARGER BRAINS THAN DOGS?

(so they won't hump women's legs at cocktails parties)

6. WHY DID GOD MAKE MEN BEFORE WOMEN?

(you need a rough draft before you make a final copy)

7. HOW MANY MEN DOES IT TAKE TO PUT A TOILET SEAT DOWN?

(don't know...it never happened)

( C'mon guys, we laugh at your blonde jokes!)

And the personal favorite:

8. WHY DID GOD PUT MEN ON EARTH?

(because a vibrator can't mow the lawn)

Childhood Memories

My brother sent me an email today. That in itself is news worthy. We never were that close and we usually only talk on holidays and Mom's birthday. But he sent me this email. It's about life in black and white for those of us who are over 40 years old. Ok, I am way over 40. It's a long email with a bunch of pictures. Let me give you a few excerpts:

• My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread Mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning

• My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli.

Note: Two things, I personally have never eaten raw hamburger. I don't care for steak tartar and you can't pay me to eat raw fish. My wife eats raw cookie dough and raw spaghetti which grosses me out. But I did get food poisoning once in the first grade from a sandwich with mayo. I switched to PB & J and didn't eat bologna again for years! The funny thing is that it was probably the mayo and not the bologna that made me sick.

• We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

• We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

This email brought back a bunch of old memories for me and I wanted to go back home again to see the places where I played as a child.

There was the sandy lot across the street where my best friend Ryland and I organized our toy soldiers into two massive armies to battle against the forces of evil. We also used war surplus ammo belts to make our Batman utility belts full of a arsenal of crime fighting devices to defeat the Penguin and Joker.

Just a short bike ride down a busy two-lane highway was the home of my classmates Chris and Scott. They were twin brothers who, in later years, would become local sports heros and big men on campus. But in our pre-teen years we were blood-brothers and great friends who built a tree house in the woods behind their house and had pine cone wars in the old rickety barn nearby.

Finally there was THE FORT. It evolved over time. It started out as a shallow depression in the ground in the woods behind my grandfather's shop. When I was a child this building was already a dark and mostly unused relic. My grandfather, who died before I was old enough to fully appreciate his genius, was a master mechanic and inventor. He didn't just built machines. He could and did forge the parts he needed in his designs. The forge was in the front of the building and I remember watching my father use it once. Most of the other machine tools had been moved to a new shop building across the road from the family peanut processing plant several miles away.

THE FORT grew as we added walls of salvaged wood and tin roofing that just 'happened' to be laying around. To make it livable in winter we added a fireplace of bricks and rocks with a flue that never did draft properly. One side of the complex was more open to "attack" by hordes of toy machine gun wielding invaders, so we wove a fence of thorns that was quite painful to stumble into in the dark.

It was a wondrous place where we used our imaginations and fought battles against commies, nazis, and aliens (the outer space kind). I wanted to see it again. I wanted to return to that magical place so I used Google Earth to go there. At least I tried. I found the shop, but the beautiful rural woods of my youth had been sub-divided into lots with roads and homes. Sigh... Tom Wolfe was right. You can't go home again.

Signs of Friendship

This is a short posting today. My sister just sent me some humorous signs. I've picked a few to share with my friends in Second Life. Enjoy! May they bring a smile to your face.

Second Life is a Community

The fact that Second Life is a community is not apparent to everyone. Some people are here for business. Some are here to play games. Others are exploring a place they have never been before. Most will say that their real life is private and separate from SL. When they think of their community they are thinking of the town or city they live in the real world.

Newbies don't realize it at first, but it should be obvious to the long-term residents that Second Life is a community (really many communities). Many of us work to make this world a better place. We police ourselves and try to discourage bad behavior, hard to define, but easy to recognize. We help one another. There are official SL mentors in many of the welcome areas and there is the Help People group that trains volunteers, but then there are many of us that will stop and help a confused looking avatar change their appearance, give them a landmark, or help them find someone who speaks their native tongue.

We also give. When wildfires ravaged Australia, more than just a few groups and clubs held events to raise funds to help. I don't know how much was raised over the whole of SL, but the club I was in at the time raised over $300 US for the Australian Red Cross. The Relay for Life has become an annual event in Second Life. We talk and raise awareness of issues that affect all of us on this planet.

Our groups of friends become very close and important to us. That became very apparent to me yesterday. My SL girlfriend had been sick, very sick. She was in the hospital for 11 days. When she finally returned online yesterday I was so happy, so relieved to see her, I wanted to shout it to everyone. We spent a lot of time talking and catching up on what had happened, but I had to share her with so many others who wanted to talk to her too and let her know how much she had been missed.

I was a bit peeved at first because I wanted to monopolize her time, but she had so many instant messages to reply to that I just had to be patient and share her with the whole community of friends. All day long it was "Hold on. I have an IM that I need to answer". I didn't mind, much. She was home (in RL and SL) and with me.

She told me later last night how overwhelming it was to have so many caring people in Second Life concerned for her. Sadly more friends here than she has in real life were worried about her health and expressing their gladness that she was on the road to recovery. But it made me think again about community.

Over the ages man has formed communities. Our ancestors gathered families together in tribes to hunt, grow crops, raise their young in a protected environment, pool their knowledge and pass it on to the next generations. Communities share common values. They share the good times and suffer the bad times together. A community provides the strength that we don't have always as individuals. Yesterday I saw that strength and a sharing of love that is wondrous and beautiful in any community, but I was so grateful to see it in MY community in Second Life.