I spent many hours in chat last night, with a bunch of people I mostly never met, crying about a person we all mostly never met.
I couldn’t help but think to myself the many times I have seen from people, “It’s just a message board.”
Well, fuck you.
If this is “just a message board,” then WallyM7 - and all of the other poeople here I love - are “just messagers,” and that is fucking bullshit.
One does not cry over the loss of a messenger.
One does not lose sleep over text which won’t appear on your screen again. Ever.
If I EVER see anyone say, “it’s just a message board” again, I will personally call them a “Goat-felching putz” and I encourage everyone here who I laugh with and now unfortunately grieve with to do the same.
Yer putz,
Satan
I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
Two months, one week, five days, 16 hours, 24 minutes and 58 seconds.
2947 cigarettes not smoked, saving $368.42.
Life saved: 1 week, 3 days, 5 hours, 35 minutes.
I am seriously considering spending this weekend making a sixteen hour round-trip drive to Toronto to attend the funeral of a man I never knew.
This blasts a hole in my budget. This kills a weekend I planned to spend shopping for an engagement ring, and quite possibly means that I won’t be able to propose to my girlfriend at the most opportune, picaresque time.
But someone I cared for very deeply passed on, and I can’t think of any tribute I would make that would be too much.
So to anyone who thinks that this is just a message board, that it doesn’t really matter what you say or do, let me tell you now:
FWIW, I’ve NEVER thought it was “just a message board,” any more than the people I email are “just” my email buddies. Y’all are closer to me than some of my RL friends. I love you all. Hope you know that.
And now I’m getting too damn sappy for the Pit, so I’d better go.
Then why did I spend most of this morning grieving for Amy and her mother, who had to wake up this morning in a house gone silent. How can I feel this sense of loss for a man I have never actually met?
That is exactly what I was trying to explain to someone last night !
They didn’t understand how I could cry for someone I never met. Or how I could spend nine hours on line reading and talking about this same person. Or why I got so angry over what some idiot did last night.
I consider a lot of people on this board my friends, Wally was one.
Ayesha,
It’s sad that it takes something like the death of Wally to open up our eyes and make us realize that real live human souls are behind screen names.
Although Wally would be pissed if we took the bite out of the board, I would like to apologize to those people to whom I have said things that I wish I could take back, in particularly Krispy, Drain, Konrad, Homer, but especially Keli.
For me, it used to be just a message board. The more time I spent here, the more I came to realize that “just a message board” is exactly what it is not, and Wally’s death brought it all home.
As soon as I find out where to send them, I’m going to send flowers to the family of this man I never met IRL. I wish I could go to his funeral, and I know I’m not the only one wishing that.
I tried to explain this to my BF. Why I couldn’t just leave. Why I cried for Wally all night last night. Why this board will always have an empty spot in it now, only half-filled by a memory.
You don’t love somebody for how they look in person. You don’t admire someone for their casual gestures. You love them for the words they speak. You admire them for the REAL gestures of mercy and kindness. That’s all you get on the MB. All inhibitions are down. People are free to let their true spirits and hearts show. Anybody who can’t understand that are assholes. Assholes without hearts and who can’t look pass the purely material.
Ukulele Ike and I have spent the morning discussing (among other things) how weird it is that this kind of relationship didn’t even exist ten years ago.
Even the invention of the telephone didn’t enable you to meet and chat with total strangers all over the world. So now I’ve just lost my first cyber-friend . . . I’m not even sure how upset I should BE. I have close relatives and associates whose deaths wouldn’t bother me nearly so much as Wally’s.
Maybe I’m the only one who thinks this, but you know what? It is just a message board.
It’s the people who post to it that give it the quality we’ve come to know. That make up a virtual community of friends and family.
Would it be the same without Shayna? Or without Coldfire? Even Silo? No, it wouldn’t. And, for that matter, it won’t be the same without Wally. In our case, the individual parts define the machine, rather than the machine defining the parts.
To me, Wally wasn’t a messenger. None of you are. You each hold value with me.
So, forgive me if my semantics don’t jive. I apologize for my poor analogies. Still, it’s not the message board I care about; it’s YOU. Each and every one of you whom I have come to know, even the tiniest bit, over these short few weeks.
I must admit I feel odd posting in response to this sort of thing, being that I am relatively new here, and never even knew Wally. But I thought I should say something, so here it is: I didn’t know Wally. But I wanted to. From the first thing of his I read, “Wally Tries Cybersex” I said to myself “Damn this guy’s funny, I have to to get to know him.” I actually started posting from the beginning in the hopes of getting into a battle of wits with Wally. Granted, I would not have been nearly as heavily armed, but the exercise itself would’ve been fun. But now I’ll never have that chance. And it’s really weird, feeling bad over someone that you never even exchanged words with. I know that you all lost something very precious when Wally passed away. But you are all ten times richer than me for having known him.