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I went out on a Jesus Run the other day. If you’ve ever done Body-for-LIFE, you know what a Jesus Run is: twenty minutes of wishing Jesus would come and take you away. In reality, it is, indeed a run: a fast warmup followed by three sets of increasingly agonizing intervals, followed by the Grand Prize: five minutes of death-rattles, little pink birds tweeting around your head, and a terrifying sense of the Grim Reaper overtaking on the right. If you survive that part, you fall into something akin to a leper’s lurch, limping past your fellow park inhabitants, lungs coming apart, unwillingly returning from the edge of the River Styx. And then it’s over. The good thing about the Jesus Run is that it forces you into meditation. There’s little alternative; after all, if you focused on what was going on in your body, you’d have to kill yourself. So, last week, after I’d had a particularly unpleasant time confronting a number of Neanderthals in one of FF’s chat rooms, I indulged in a Jesus Run in a dry, 101-degree California summer heat. At eleven o’clock on a June morning, little Mexican ladies were setting out a picnic in the park in celebration of school closing. By the third circuit, I was interested to notice that they had started dancing the jig in my peripheral vision. By the fourth interval, they had disappeared; instead, I heard my chat roommates from the night before, jeering from the trees. Through their catcalls, and the overload of oxygen and ThermoDynamX burning in my system, I discovered the truth. The average “advanced” chat room – say, one where everyone has known each other for donkey’s years – isn’t much more than a virtual orgy. A group fuck. A global form of masturbation. If you’ve ever read The Sexual Life of Catherine M., you’ll know what I mean. After all, few – if any – of the people you know in your real life are present. Somebody’s laid out on the table, and everyone’s taking turns. You don’t know their real name; you don’t know the color of their eyes. People couple off into flash chats, but voyeuristically, few can help themselves from eavesdropping on the main event. Now understand, I don’t say this to eviscerate anyone. It just is what it is. We’re all humans, after all, and this kind of behavior is part of our nature. In 25,000 years of human history, I have to believe that at many points and in many cultures, “real” orgies either were or are a normal and accepted form of behavior. Just because they are not accepted now does not mean that we are not still the rightful descendants of our pagan forebears, and are not continuing to adapt our thinking to meet our very human needs. The chat room is, in many ways, a modern adaptation of the orgy. By chatting, we can keep the group fuck going when society forbids the real thing. See, you can’t get AIDS in a chat room. You can’t be labeled an adulterer. There are no scarlet letters being handed out; nobody can really prove that you even exist. In most cases you don’t actually know these people, so if you wake up with a hangover, wondering what in hell you said last night, you don’t have to worry. After all, you can always change your handle and come back as somebody else. And, if you discover your YIM archives full of garbled sentences and misspelled ramblings from some guy named Hellahorny, you are simply cued that regretfully, you need to change your YIM ID as well. Messy, but doable. And, if you think about this properly, you appreciate that, unlike your forebears, you didn’t have to go to jail, you didn’t get tied up and dunked in the lake. Not only was there no financial consequence, but amazingly, you’re still alive! Bingo. End of problem. I once took the Mensa test and failed at 96%. That’s right; according to Mensa, Kitty the college dropout has a higher IQ than 96% of the population. Don't get me wrong; it's not nearly as glamorous as all that, though it is kind of fun to know where you stand. (Oh, and BTW: 96% is not good enough to join Mensa; you can’t be a Mensan unless you top out at 98% or better.) That 2% is what I call my “naïveté”. Those of you who know me personally understand that we can be scorching along, having a grand old high-level discussion on molecular physics, when suddenly, Kitty falls off the planet. Your last piece of brilliance went straight over her head, and you could be speaking Slovak for all she’s still with you. After spates of pure genius, Elvis has suddenly left the building. Call it a vitamin deficiency, or Kitty’s Neptune in her 9th house, but there you have it. (Of course, a simple question like, for example, “did you understand what I just said?” would cause everyone involved to realize that Kitty isn’t truly naïve; she’s simply a sentence-and-a-half behind you. She didn’t leave the building; she’s just still processing. Her mind is exploding with the possibilities. After all, she’s a dreamer, and probably had more to say about the thought that went before. Sadly, however, most people won’t stop to think that way. Instead, she’s naïve, or she’s slow on the uptake. All sorts of stuff gets made up, when in reality, an additional 30 seconds of wait-time would have made the difference. Voilà the 2%.) OK, where were we? Oh yeah. Naïveté. Naïveté often comes at me like a boulder to the back of the head, and the other night was no exception. There’s nothing like thinking somebody’s been sweetly playing marbles with you, only to discover that they stole your cat’s eye and took it to the group fuck. For the very private and safety-obsessed Kitty, such a thought is a frightening, little-girl-lost occurrence. You think you’re having a private little tap-dance with ten or twenty of your closest friends, and suddenly you’re on stage at the Albert Hall, buck-naked in the spotlight with Michael Flatley on your left hand and no reel in your feet. You haven’t eviscerated anyone – you’ve been eviscerated. You’re being served up on ten or twenty plates; gossiping old ones and jealous young ones, obfuscates and innocents alike: all are having plates of Kitty Stew. What a shitty feeling. Of course, it probably didn’t really happen like that the other night. No doubt I made at least some of it up. Most likely, nobody was really having my liver for lunch. However, most of you will be nodding your heads, swearing it’s happened to you too. I’ve even been there when someone thought they were being eviscerated, when I, with my own eyes, saw no such knifing. No stew was being served; their liver was not present in the onions. So I have to think that maybe we do make it up. This stuff probably never really happens, and it’s more a matter of amino acids, indigestion, tides and high-pressure systems. Ah, physics again. It actually makes much more sense that way. In the long run, it doesn’t really matter. Nobody’s going to write about it in the history books. The only thing that matters is in our own selves; where it matters that it does hurt. We can at least take comfort in the fact that it happens to all of us. In my case, I responded by going South, to Santa Clara. I called up the Tall Man, an old friend of Kitty’s who can be counted on to give me shelter when I am wounded. Tall Man doesn’t talk much; he acts. After an evening of old movies and catnaps, I recovered. While my ego was still tender -- and it still is -- at least I was renewed. See, like Freddy Mercury taught us in Bohemian Rhapsody, nothing really matters. I believe that every chat room IS a group fuck, to one extent or another. Yes, people get hurt – and that’s the way of the world. So next time the knives come out, I’ve already decided: I’ll strip my clothes off myself, slit my own belly, and join the feast. |
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