Thursday, October 25, 2007

Why did I scorch my blog?

Look at them. Don't they look happy? Believe it or not, they were all married to one another. Five wives. Talk about Big Love.

Oh .. if you are one of the few people who used to read my blog, you might recall that I already talked about Big Love, Lesbian Style. I was pretty proud of that piece. It was about three women who fell in love and got married, but not in the Mormon HBO sense of polygamy. In Second Life anything is possible and Bill simply was not needed in the equation.

Well, the Big Love got even bigger in July 2007. Hence the five wives.

As you can see in my earlier post about polygamy ... oh, wait. You can't read it any more. It doesn't exist any more. For some reason, the author of this blog threw kerosene on it, struck a match, and watched that baby burn. What a crazy bitch!

In fact, she .. oh hell, let's drop the third person and take responsibility for our actions. In fact, I torched a number of posts, obliterating from this blog every reference to my polygamous experiences over the idyllic summer of 2007. My remaining wife and partner Marissa was, I think, shocked that I did. It is quite out of character for me to burn bridges (and what is the deal with all the fire metaphors?) and in retrospect I am a little shocked myself.

After a couple of months of silence, I feel the itch to babble in the blogosphere once again. However, I can hardly pick up where I left off now that several chapters of the story are missing. So it strikes me that the best place to resume the story of my Second Life is by answering the question in the title of this entry.

Which brings me back to those five happy looking spouses pictured above.

First there were the dragon and the elf. They met on Orientation Island, fell in love, and entered the mainland a couple. Time passed and they fell in love with a pixie and married her too. Some of the three later fell in love with a sorceress and a nymph and the marriage grew to five. One big happy family of mythical creatures.

Alas it was not fated to end happily ever after. But end it did. Just not the happily part.

Try to imagine the five-way marriage as a kind of web. Each member in the marriage is emotionally connected to four other women, so there are 20 different threads making up the web. If all 20 are exactly the same length and tension, the web is structurally sound, symmetrical and enduring. But if some of the threads are of different length or tension the whole web is in danger of collapsing upon itself.

Speaking only for myself (the other four all have blogs of their own and can speak for themselves) I openly admit that the threads connecting me to the other four were not symmetrical. Two, in particular, were especially strong. However, this is where my "web physics" metaphor breaks down because one would expect that the two weaker strands would break under tension from the two stronger. Quite the opposite happened: one of the two strong threads snapped. Fortunately for spiders, their webs are not compromised by jealousy.

So one of the threads connecting me to another snapped and propelled me away from the web. I pulled with me she to whom I was attached by the other strong thread. The momentum of our departure severed all remaining marital threads betwixt our two and their three. As we floated away, I looked back and honestly hoped the three would find happiness. I loved them, and in my way I still do. I am therefore sad that threads continued to snap in the coming days, but that is not my story to tell.

My story (in this post at least) is about the maiming of my blog. One August evening, Marissa and I were puttering around in our new apartment. A week or two had passed since the sundering of the Five. I was beginning to regain some sense of equilibrium, the shock was wearing off, and I was starting to feel as if I had a home once more. An old friend logged in and I opened up my friends list to send a greeting. That was when I noticed that two of the Five were no longer on my friends list. They had both elected to remove me from their list of friends without so much as a word.

The best way to describe my reaction would be to say I had a "hell hath no fury" moment. Dear Mari, who always sees the best in people, tried to calm me down by assuring me that there must be a good explanation. But I was having none of that. Oh no. I was hurt and angry and furious. First things first: purge their pictures and references from my Second Life profile. Second things second: quit any groups of mutual membership. And third things third: scrub the blog of any reminders. You know how the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character is a little tornado of destruction? Picture that .. with red hair flying in all directions .. and you have an approximation of my state of mind. And just like Taz cuts tornado shaped holes in the trunks of trees, I cut a pretty wide swath of destruction through this blog.

I am not proud of myself. The next day, Mari gave me a little "our past makes us who we are" lecture, and she was right. I felt like I had burned books or something. And as you might imagine I later learned that the friends list episode was not done in malice but for reasons that are not mine to tell the world about. They both have blogs and can fill you and the other 6.5 billion folks on the planet in if they so choose. Or you may just have to die insanely curious and unsatisfied. Life sucks like that sometimes.

But at least now you can die knowing why I scorched my blog.



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