From time to time I am, like many folk not members of the Republican Party, given to brief periods of introspection. It can be like standing butt nekkid under the punishing jets of cold shower, and it can also be the basking warmth of a hammock, on a beach, in the lazy days of summer.
I tend to find rather more of the former, summer days and hammocks not figuring quite so large, yet I remain cheerful, and generally happy.
So what brings about this eternal optimism and satisfaction? Well it's not the relative poverty, the endless worry about money, or lack of. It isn't balancing the books every month in the sure and certain knowledge that I will have to do it again the next month, and the next. It isn't fighting the foreclosure, or the complete and utter disdain I feel for many of the folk who live around here. Not the petty bureaucracy nor even the casual manner in which my Rights are infringed upon while all the time having folk tell me how we are hated for our Freedoms.
It is simply this ...
I have a home, food on the table, a wife who loves me and a passel of kids who have the grace to keep their annoyance at their daft old Dad to themselves, at least in public. What more can a man reasonably and realistically ask for? I mean, there are things I would like and they concern social justice, jobs for all, a freer and fairer country, world. I'd like a decent acoustic guitar too. Those things I cannot achieve directly, so I Blog, and I remain happy.
It wasn't always this way and I'd like to share just the story of how I came to leave the Peoples Republic of Europe, and settle in God's Own Free Country, Oklahoma!
I am not content. I rather think that when one becomes content, if that state is ever really achieved, then one is pretty much done. As I fully intend spending as little time as possible "waiting for God", then I fully expect that contentedness is not part of my future.
I am, however, happy, and I think there is a difference between those two states. I guess if I were content I would be happy, at least happy to be content yet I do find it perfectly possible to be happy and not content. If that makes any kind of sense.
There was a time when I was not so sanguine about life, and everything. Indeed, had someone described me as an "angry young man", I would have responded, angrily, while still appreciating that at least they called me young. That angry phase lasted a long time. Through High School, College and my early working life. It lasted through a ten year marriage and two wonderful sons. Of course I wasn't angry all of the time, that way lies madness, but yeah, I was anything but happy.
Then it got worse. The angry young man of my twenties and thirties became the despair of my early forties. I went through a divorce, clean enough but nonetheless painful, and had to work out new relationships with my boys. To this day I remain grateful that they survived intact and that we get along very well, despite the ocean between us.
Work too fell apart, and that part of the story I shall gloss over here, because it's not relevant, and it still hurts, but it fades. Time does that, a natural anesthetic, a healing agent that will work if you are able to give it what it needs, and that is simply time.
In the middle of that unhappy phase I did a stupid thing. I decided to quit smoking. So now we can add withdrawal to anger and despair .... Then I went looking for a Support Group.
This was all back in September 2001. That is ancient in internet terms. The web-based forums we use now were rare, and on 28 or 56k dial-up, they were mainly rare because page load times were measured in minutes, which felt like hours so as a practical source of help they pretty much didn't exist. They would all appear, but later when connection speeds increased enough to make graphical interfaces a practical proposition.
What we did have was Usenet. Some of you will have never heard of Usenet, and even if you have may have never dipped into what was, and is, a worldwide distributed messaging system. Split into eight moderated hierarchies covering such topics as computers, news, science and others, it was the pre-eminent method of posting and reading threaded conversations, It's beauty was its speed, all text, and the price ... free.
There was a ninth hierarchy. Looser, unmoderated, less organised and thoroughly despised by the Usenet Elite who managed the other hierarchies. Let me introduce you to the "alt" hierarchy. So called as a simple abbreviation of "alternative", more fondly known by the name taken from its three letters ... alt
I give you Anarchists, Lunatics, Terrorists
I have to tell you ... There is something about a threaded text conversation. Actually, Daily Kos comment threads are close in that they are indeed threaded. But we are amateurs. A particular comment thread can "push the right margin" then it becomes unreadable .... we have all seen those threads. On Usenet the threads could "push the right coast", and still remain readable and ... ahem ... entertaining.
Into that maelstrom of trolls, worse than trolls, and some fairly normal folk looking for a conversation on their chosen subject, jumped twigg. Still angry but now suffering from withdrawal too. I have alluded to a less than glorious internet history before. Well this was where it mainly happened. This is where I laughed, loved, cried and learned. This is where my Trolldar® was developed and honed. This is where EvilTwigg was born and raised. It is the place I grew up, matured, calmed down and was the genesis of my journey to these shining shores.
By a remarkable stroke of good fortune I found one of the very best Support Groups that Usenet had to offer. It was, and is called alt.support.stop-smoking (AS3). I believe it is still there, less active than then although I haven't looked at it in years. You can. You can view it in a browser these days, but then you needed a Newsreader. I used Forte Agent. The free version was fine at first, but I upgraded, I need the killfile. Daily Kos doesn't have killfiles, or even an ignore button. On the other hand, the folk who would live in your killfile would be consigned to donut hell and bojo here. Remember, the alt hierarchy was unmoderated and that means exactly what it says. No one could be banned, there was no court of appeal. You learned to deal with the crap, or you left. It was pure in a way that modern Forums are not. The modern version does work well, but I sometimes miss the anarchy.
There were some pretty unpleasant characters in that Group, and there were some fabulous people, many of whom remain good friends to this day. One of them I married.
I joined a small group of Quitbuddies. Quitbuddies matter. They are your refuge, your support, the ones you can call when you need to read some friendly text. In AS3 they were usually the folk who quit at the same time you did. They went through your hell, understood your pain, and were going through the same themselves. There were eleven of us that month. As far as I know only two of them stayed the course. To be fair, I would be the third. I quit for four years, which was all of my time in that Group. Now I need to do it all again.
When I do I will need my quitbuddies. I can get some new ones, but I am still in touch with three of the old. Skyler, a Kossack actually, from Maryland. She is the person who first invited me to the home she shared with her girlfriend of many years. She is also responsible for introducing me to teh Orange. Then there is Kita ... one of the most infuriating people on the planet (next to me). She has remained a friend for over ten years now. I have watched her son grow into a fine young man, Facebook has it's uses. It was years before I even knew her real name,and a few more before she told me where she lives (Florida). She is the best friend I have never met. It's a funny old world. Then there is Jillybean. Another friend I have never met, but she is living happily in the Pacific North West, so if I ever get up there ... There are quite a few others.
For all we have concerns about security and personal safety on the internet, people are remarkably sharing, and caring. Given a modicum of common sense there really is little to fear it seems.
Into that world came a new user, macs_mom. She was looking for help quitting. She was asking if anyone had any nicotine patches spare as she couldn't afford to buy them. I was the first to come across her request for help and I asked her to leave it with me. Within a week patches began arriving at her friends workplace in Oklahoma (she was cautious). From New Zealand they came, from the UK and from various folk in the US.
Usenet is for chatting, so we did. First in the Group, then by email and chat client. Then text and phone. One thing lead to another, because international boundaries, five thousand miles and an Atlantic Ocean simply cannot stop people being, well, human!
She never did quit for long, and when we moved in together I hung on for a year, but my quit bust too.
Mrs Twigg has to go see her Primary soon. When she underwent a minor procedure the other day her blood pressure spiked to 208. She is putting it off because she knows he will tell her to quit smoking, and she knows she should.
So we both will, and we will need all the buddies we can get.
I have always tried, since joining Daily Kos, to remain calm and objective. I like a joke but I also recognise when even humour can hurt people. Indeed I am no longer the guy who rampaged through Usenet all those years ago, yet he does lurk somewhere. I was described the other day, in a comment, as being "annoyingly reasonable". It really made me smile but I fear there may be a few weeks in my future that promise a little less of my normal calm.
Try to have some sympathy. After all, I will be living with a wife who is also trying to quit. I have to sleep sometimes, and she knows where all the sharp implements are kept!