Re: RAT Lurking online

[NOMADMONAD@aol.com]

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!            
                                       --EMILY DICKINSON



Thanks, Jeff and Allison, for your thoughts.  

I have been a frog croaking across the rat-list bog since day one.  Of course 
at many times within its history the rat-list has been more than just a bog.  
Mitch has said RAT is his audience.  Others, including myself, feel the same 
way.  But what does that mean?  

Most of the year we are geographically separated from one another.  We rarely 
if ever see one another, let alone one another's work.  Except for this new 
medium of email, Internet, and Web that grew hand in glove with our RAT 
adventure, I have little doubt now that RAT would have never evolved much 
further than that one meeting in Iowa.  

I've said this forever.  The rat-list is prelude to the kiss.  The gross frog 
awaits the transforming kiss from his lurking princess. 

--nick 



n a message dated 1/31/00 8:39:39 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
Diogenes_@compuserve.com writes:

> Sometimes, Allison, when I am feeling lonely and the enormity of my sad and
>  meaningless existence presses hard upon me, I go out into the night and sit
>  in a dark room and watch other people say and do things.  I am usually
>  bored to tears but I keep doing it over and over.  I know I am a bad man,
>  that I should step into the light where the other people are saying and
>  doing the things that are boring me to tears but instead, I lurk in the
>  dark with the ten or fifteen other people like me who have also paid money
>  for this experience. For you see, bad as I am, I know that the people who
>  are boring me up there in the light are another degree of bad and the idea
>  of this room full of bad people, some talking, some only watching, all
>  partaking of this shared grubby sense of their own inconsequential badness,
>  is the source of one of life's piquant pleasures.  Lately I have introduced
>  my daughter, a shining creature, to this world of consensual badness.  She
>  stands radiant in the light, for now uncontaminated by the badness, but
>  she's so beautiful that she's gotta die some day.
>  
>  Voyeuristically yours
>  
>  «el sínico»