Duct Tape... Yeah I can fix that!

Man's way of solving almost any problem...

except women.

A great Quote

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." - William Somerset Maugham

I started my 'great American novel' over forty years ago and I wrote less than one chapter. It was called A Man With Clumsy Hands and although it was not autobiographical, the main character was me. At 19 I was a kid in his first year of college who desperately wanted friends, particularly a girlfriend, and wanted to fit in with everyone else.

For reasons that I have never understood, I was sort of popular in an awkward way. I had casual friends, and I got along with my roommate. (We hitchhiked to Newport News together to join the Air Force in December 1968.) Plenty of girls talked to me and bummed cigarettes off me. I finally got it through my head that most of my 'popularity' came from the fact that I always had cigarettes and money in my pockets.

In the year and a half before I dropped out to join the service, I never had a girlfriend. I didn't leave one waiting for me at home either. My unfinished novel was about a sad character who didn't know how to relate to girls, one who had been hurt so often that he would rather be lonely than risk having his heart broken one more time. The conflict involves a girl who, in my imagination, is very interested in him, but she can't get past his defenses. He keeps pushing her away. At the same he is attracted to her, but is afraid that he will ultimately be rejected once again.

Forty years ago, a young inexperienced writer was stuck because he could not imagine a suitable ending to his story. He wanted a happy ending (don't we all), but could not find a way to weave the tale to a conclusion.

Forty years later I am in the same fix. I still don't know how to find that happy ending. I still don't know how to make and keep friends. The friends I have... well I always feel deep down that I still don't fit in, that if I disappear overnight I would not be missed.

Like the character in the book I never wrote, I sit and stare at my clumsy hands. Hands that never made anything worthwhile, never could hold on to anything good. Clumsy, useless hands.

Long Time... No See

I haven't written in quite awhile. Part of the time I was busy and happy and there was no need to write about what was happening. Then a lot of things went downhill fast.

• SL girlfriend and I had a misunderstanding, me jumping to conclusions because a friend said something about her.
• SL girlfriend got sick again.
• SL girlfriend had computer/internet service problems.
• SL friend (the one I thought I was very close to, like BFF) turned against me.

All of a sudden my SL world was crashing all around me. I couldn't be with the girl I wanted to be with. I couldn't turn to the person I trusted the most. Everything I was working towards in my relationships was gone or falling apart.

My SL gf and I are doing ok now. We cleared up our misunderstanding and have created alternative ways of communicating without Second Life. We are friends in real life and I want to keep her as a friend no matter what. She feels the same way. I am still worried about her health and she is fighting to recover.

My former friend... I don't know. I won't go into details. She would not like that. She has a right to her privacy. All I know is that I did something that by all appearances was harmless. I immediately apologized and tried to correct my mistake. I was screamed at and immediately de-friended. My action did not deserve the response I got. I think it was the trigger that set off something else that had been festering inside her for a long while. This former friend now hates me and I can only imagine why.

I still have some friends. One is an author who used to be friends with the same person that de-friended me. At the time I tried real hard to reconcile them. They both are strong, opinionated women and I tried to get them back together. I pushed both of them and they both told me to back off or lose their friendship. I had to admit defeat.

It's awkward in Morris now. The rest of my friends are friends of my ex-friend. Being around them means coming in contact, or at least close proximity, with her. At first I tried going to other sims, but there were few people I know outside of Morris and I wasn't upbeat enough to start conversations and make a new batch of friends.

So I went back to Morris and tried to stay a proper distance away from her while being close enough to my other friends to talk. Then I said "to Hell with this" and got closer to talk to my other friends, the whole time wanting to shout "please be my friend again!" to her.

I know that she feels like I have grieved her badly in some way. She doesn't do things without a reason. I know I have made mistakes in the past. That's why I apologize so often. I make mistakes! I am sorry!

Maybe she never was a friend. A real friend would have understood that.

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.