Chapter and Verse, Part III

(Chapter and Verse, Part I is here, and Part II is here).

I was a busy youth.

But I wasn’t busy doing traditional teenage activities. I wasn’t on a high school sports team. I didn’t have a gang of friends to hang out with after school. I didn’t go to local parties, didn’t drink, didn’t get into trouble.

I spent my time on-line. This was back before it was cool. Back before the WWW. Before Al Gore invented the Internet super-highway (at the time, the ‘net was primarily used by the government, colleges, and UNIX geeks). Back then it was a gateway for me.

Once I had cracked the on-line door open at fourteen and became aware of the vast sexual candy store it provided in a medium that gave me the freedom in which to explore it, I was hooked. And when I say candy store, I’m not referring to pornographic movies, audio clips of women mid-orgasm, or even dirty photographs. In those early days, sexual content was limited to risque ASCII pictures and text conversations.

ASCII pictures did not flourish beyond those early BBS days. On-line chatting, however, remains fairly popular.

But this isn’t about ASCII pictures. This is about the women I met on-line and then later met in person.

The very first on-line woman I was to meet in real life was BG, someone I’ve touched on in earlier posts. I was about fifteen, she was mid-thirties and married (like many of my early endeavors). I met her at an Argus BBS brunch and stole my first kiss. No, really – it was my *first* kiss, chaste as it was in closed eyes and lips. What the hell did I know? We had taken a walk down the street from where the small get-together when she stopped, pointed to her lips, and waited.

Then there was the first ‘date’ I had. She was in her late twenties and drove an Eclipse. She had a raunchy imagination and when she got bored at work she would chat with me until she was driven to visit the restroom for relief. I still have a picture of her, somewhere, along with a card scented with her perfume (a hint of flowers that left an indelible impression on me). We caught Dead Again at the movies but I was too shy to make a move on her.

Yes. I was quite shy at that age. I’m fairly sure it was easy to make me blush.

I met the only girl my own age at her high school production of Grease; she was playing clarinet and got me a free seat. Once the show was over, I tried to steal a few awkward moments with her while my father waited to drive me home. Afterwards, we drifted apart; six months later, I logged in to find a note that she had been killed in a car accident. My parents offered to take me to her funeral, but I didn’t know how to deal with it. It was the first time in my life that someone I had had an intimate connection with was, in a irrevocable manner, removed from my life.

There was the woman I received a set of Tarot cards from. She was in her early forties and unlike the rest of the older women I played with, she embraced the age discrepancy between us. She enjoyed playing a nurturing role in my life while exchanging written fantasies about her seducing the young man next door. We met only twice. I can recall an empty playground, her in a swing while I stood between her legs and kissed her – this time, with parted lips, but not much more.

From these women, and all the women I didn’t meet in person, I learned how prevalent abuse was. One had a husband that hit her. Another had her first child in a bathroom because she was too scared to tell her parents. Several had been raped. It was a sharp awakening for me, coming to understand the forces that shape our lives; how easy many people find it to hurt those they love while intoxicated, angry, or simply ignorant. My youthful mantra had been ‘never intentionally harm another’; now it became ‘never UNintentionally harm another’. The edge of the knife I was learning to wield must never draw unintended blood.

I learned how easy it is to fall in love, the first rush of passion and emotionally-charged promises. I learned, too, how quickly those feelings passed. I tethered my heart that I not again be swept away by a rush of hormones and endorphins. With experience, I learned how to differentiate between lust and love and loosened the tether on my hunger while learning how to keep emotional distance (not necessarily a good thing).

I learned that every action, every conversation, was a thread, a connection with consequence that was often not felt for months or years. I learned the basic patterns of human needs.

Today, I know who and what I am. We are a product of what we do. Those who practice music every day become musicians. Those who spend their days in a kitchen become cooks.

Those who spend their time hunting, become hunters.

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Footnote: Meeting someone in person is always a fascinating exercise. Whether you’ve seen a picture of them or not they always look different from what you’ve envisioned. Their personality is often both quite different and exactly the same from what you expect. Reconciling the differences is what makes these meetings interesting. Discovering which aspects of their personality remain true in person will ultimately determine if the relationship will survive.

Regardless of the long-term prospects, human nature being what it is, if the two people are even mildly compatible there is always a chance that the meeting’s emotional and sexual build-up will override any lingering issues. That, and a healthy dose of human curiosity, will often lead to a testing out of in-the-flesh sexual compatibility (kissing, groping, all night long sex marathon…)