..on the inside.

Ah, memories. These days I wonder what I can or should reveal after so much passage of time. It can be a tricky thing, maintaining safety vs. contributing to posterity and giving stories which will otherwise be lost forever unless we tell them.

I've come to believe over the years that many presences here were not altruistic. That is, they were not who they appeared to be, nor here for the reasons they claimed to be, and frankly, I'll likely never know for sure who was scheming and who was from the heart. Who was law, who was vigilante, who was schitzo, who was merely malcontent, who was just being themselves.

That said, I got to know both Humanist and Seamus away from the board, but we still maintained our anonymity. I got a distinct impression from Humanist that he was quite real. He was also the only one at that time who gave me an impression that he was um, shall we say, just somebody of stature in the real world. If I had to guess by things he told me, he was a 70's era fellow traveler of an old man from Vermont. He was trying to help me get something started that was doomed from the start, but I appreciate him for trying to assist. We snail mailed some things, and like Sheepy, my trust in him never brought me any grief or gotcha. One would think I would have been a decent prize in those days (as opposed to today), a proud notch on someone's belt, but the fact that he didn't fuck me ought to prove he was no LEA, but you seem to realize that already. I am curious why the admin suspected it.

Anyway, I lamented his disappearance here several times. He also tried to turn me on to some commune of the time, which I will never name, but suggested I go visit. Having known about the Wild Country Nutflix example even back then, I just wasn't interested. None of my close encounters with commune-like places were ever anything but skeevy experiences. Some other poster here took me to something similar, or maybe it was just some sort of gathering, but the whole getting naked in a giant hot tub with dirty adult strangers to be close to nature.. nope. Eeyore was now sure he was no hippy. In any case, Humanist once described someone to me in private as "a dark cloud hanging around GC" and that someone was..

Seamus! I disliked him through most of his stay here, but toward the end we got to talking in private. When he let his guard down, he was a very vulnerable older dude. He was probably in his 60's back then, and often bitter that his brother was more successful, that their parents had left him a lot of money and Seamus got zip. He was also very weak on security. He had a habit of trying to look for pedo related things by typing them into "Ask Jeeves" with no proxy of any kind. I taught him how to be a little safer.

And yet, despite the amusing shortcomings, I also found he strangely had a lot of wisdom. He had so many awesome sayings as you surely remember as well. "Empty barrels make the most noise" was in one of his posts here, and remains my favorite Seamus quote ever. That sig of the restroom man with no head? Hilarious! He told the board he was a trucker, had been all over the country. He had a problem with the bottle. Last time I talked to him (years ago) he had somehow made his way to eastern Europe. He raved to me about either Serbia or Slovakia or Slovenia.. probably whichever one was white Christian etc.. I don't remember which. He was talking to local girls, nothing illegal, just telling me how feminine they were and ladylike, and how one mother yelled at him for chatting with her daughter. I sadly suspect he has passed on by now, but I also wondered if he crossed a line and is wasting away in some eastern European clink.

Oh, the stories we could/can't tell...:)