Community

For six years of my life I played a video game. It was MultiPlayer Battletech. I began my Battletech career during an Open BETA of the game, after which it moved to AOL. I picked it up there, also. It then moved to the Gamestorm servers, and I played there through a Gamestorm account as well as a LineOne account (a cheap backdoor via England).

These are the fondest days of my life. I still remember the magic involved in that game. I can not explain it. I can not put it into tangible words. All of my adventures in that game rattle around my brain and excite it with stories. Stories I have no one to tell. The community is scattered, and like refugees of a forgotten, fallen nation no one can relate to the stories of our homeland.

It makes me cry to remember these things. If there was one thing I could wish then it would be to go back and have more time during this period of my life. I miss every single one of those guys and gals in that game. I'll never have that sense of community ever again, I imagine.

posted by Pacer 3/29/2003

End of the Road

My childhood is effectively coming to an end. Some might say that there childhood is shorter than I claim as my own, but childhood is not a matter of years. At the end of the summer I shall have graduated from the University of Georgia and be on my own. There has not been a point in my life where my memory can stretch back coherently in which I was not in school. For the first time in my life, I will not have classes to go to. I will not have a schedule dictated to me in the sense that school dictates your day. Sure, other things may come, like work and family and other such schedules, but they will be different. School has always been a large part of my life. I find I am reluctant, and sad, to leave it.

posted by Pacer 3/29/2003

Thursday, March 27, 2003

An Unfinished Oration

With nervous trepidation I stand
And look over the master plan
Of words on this very sheet
Which I feel are quite incomplete

And I stand here, in front of all of you
For I believe an oration is due
In my first full meeting as one of you

So I stand before you here today
With nothing quite so special to say
Except that I believe in love

For love is the engine that I hold most dear
The facet of life I can never near
In understanding, for it eludes me still
And all my hopes and dreams it does seem to kill

I could quote various poems I have written
On this subject I have been most bitten
But they all fail to capture the essence
Of love
And remain incomplete

For how can one write of something he knows not?
And can one truly understand something with which he has fought?
Or would they both be reconciled with knowledge
Of one another, delivering their hearts from the bondage
Misunderstanding brings to them
And how do I understand?

So with this question I end my speech
Still feeling rather incomplete
But I hope it was of some interest
Although I doubt it would win any contest

posted by Pacer 3/27/2003

Monday, March 10, 2003

The Second Comings

The glue comes undone
As the world begins to conspire
To break into pieces
And float down to the floor
Only to be spit back out
And reformed once more

The Gyre might spin
And things come undone
But from the refuse
More things become one
So that the cycle of blood-dimmed tides
Might begin once again

And and the best might be driven dull
While the worst driven mad
But the second coming is only a third
Or maybe a fourth, or fifth
While the cycle begins once again
And the beast raises once more
Only to be slain again
As the Wheel of Time turns
And turns on into infinity

Ages come and go
And times pass
But the Bethlehems of the past
Will meet the ones of the future
And none of this will last
But it will all come to pass
Once more with a turn of the Wheel

Only Love is greater than time
And the turning of the Wheel
For it is the animator of all

posted by Pacer 3/10/2003