Certainly won’t be spending any money on it here. I’ve the feeling the fascination will be very short lived. H.o.p. spent hours earning enough CP coins to get a pet Puffle. The rules are that you have to visit the Puffle once an hour when you’re logged on or it might run off. H.o.p. had logged out appropriately but the next day when he returned the Puffle had run off. This didn’t endear Club Penguin to him.

Maybe there’s more to it, after all you can spend money on that site somehow. We never had any real money left over for a virtual world, so I wouldn’t know. Club Penguin lasted a only a few months as a fascination around here.

I think you are probably right, that people are a little afraid of looking deeper into themselves. I think you are also right, that most people want to be loved above all, and respected and appreciated.

What you wrote here was also reminding me of something my SIL said once. She is almost an architect. I say almost because she did all the course work and then never wrote the dissertation. So for years she’s worked as a kind of highly trained draftsperson, doing a lot of training of others. I remember that she said one time that the most terrifying thing in the world to her was a blank, white sheet of paper. She said this because not surprisingly an architect-in-the-making has to draw things and so some drawing classes are a requirement. Here she was taking all kinds of math classes I’m sure I’d not be able to manage, but she admitted to fearing a blank piece of paper. It seemed to be that there were limitless possibilities, no defined task, that were the things that terrified her about that. I don’t think it was particularly a fear of the mechanics of drawing, just this idea of everything being wide open, all choices were hers to make.

I think of a conversation I had with someone who asked me, since I was a writer, if I thus had to sit alone with myself and think a lot. I said yes and she laughed and said that would frighten her, that she wouldn’t be able to do it. And yet she seemed to me to be deeper than your usual person (and she is) and I thought even that she would bring up the subject within five minutes of my meeting her said quite a bit about her.

The woman above isn’t an example of this, but I think there are a number of people who may fear that depth. They sense here is a person who has spent a lot of time listening to the very quiet parts of the world and they may fear that person may have a real eye for skrying histories, past or future, in the palm of a hand. They may fear that person can hear the soft backstage whispers even during a performance.

In stories that kind of seer is usually an individual living on the border of town, out with the birds and talking stones and trees. In stories that seer is usually sought out during an exceptional time in an individual’s life…and by not very many.

That is a kind of archetype, of course, and so everyone has a bit of that seer in them, which knows a little more than their other parts about the past, present or future. Some have more and some have less of that seer. Some fear that bit of seer within themselves and back away from it, and some fear that seer they may sense in another.

Like they come upon an especially still pond of water, and if they look at it straight on and too long what might they see. What might that pond find out about them?

Which may seem odd as what most all people want is to be respected and loved and appreciated. But perhaps what they want to have respected, loved and appreciated they also may fear to be a fabrication, a lie, and worry about a crack through which the authentic self may shine and be discovered by one who is used to looking deeper.

And I hope you enjoy it as well. Marty gets stopped nearly every time he wears one of H.o.p.’s shirts, people asking where he got it. Last weekend he was stopped by three separate people in one store.

The cashiers at Old Navy were all asking where they could buy one.

Anyway, maybe you should have used smiley faces at tx.guns.

Somehow, I never made it around to tx.guns.

I bet, after you left, they talked about you for quite some time. You may have even become a legend of sorts.

I don’t think the internets are a very good medium for having conversations. Maybe the medium emits a mind control gas that makes the penguins say nothing, or get up and wander off. I dunno.

You _can_ get people to talk, on the internets, but I don’t recommend it. In a previous internet life, back when usenet newsgroups seemed to the naive (i.e., me) to be a possible way of holding reasonable conversations about important things, I would interject my views about political or social topics on newsgroups devoted to those subjects, and the penguins did not get up and disappear. For example, there was a newsgroup called tx.guns inhabited by gun zealots, and I thought, gee, why not try to reason with these folks? They are not necessarily natural born killers (which is true), so I would introduce friendly doubts about the anti-second amendment mind-control gases emitted by (source of your choice) at which moment they would not clam up and go away. No, they would exhibit many of the symptoms of road rage, which, is a gun zealot, is not necessarily what you want, and become very electronically agitated (I am glad it was only electronic). It was really very difficult to talk to them. They are not friendly people, when faced with disagreement. In fact, they tried to get me fired because they noticed that my email address was a university of texas address (this was before I became a pensioner) and they concluded that I was disagreeing with them on the taxpayer’s dime, on University time. (They were not very good at reading headers.) Anyway, they _claimed_ they ratted me out to my dean, and that I could expect immediate termination (in the lesser sense) as a result. I don’t know whether they did or not: I never heard from the dean.

Eventually, I gave up and wandered away.