A few weeks ago I met my very first monkey. One of the 50,000 monkeys on 50,000 typewriters that can't be wrong. I dunno why I haven't posted about this yet... but here it goes.
Mike and I had hardly talked before on the soapbox, but it is easy to miss each other... it's like a huge building full of people... you just gotta be at the same room at the same time, or something. I have been on the soapbox since its earliest glory days, when we were only 16 people, and I met Jun the Corruptor and one of my best internet friends. Jun had a ball ticking Angie off for being a veggie, and me for being a fundie, so we would be slinging verbal mud at each other... Jun knew where the button was, and he was not afraid to hit it with a hammer.
Anyways, I digress.
In the meantime, the soapbox has grown immensely. The community now is HUGE, unique and extremely civil. They all rock... people are so kind and supportive and brilliant in there, it's my other little world. And one of the things they do is to organise Monkey Meets all over the world.
There were a few in England already, but I always missed them.
Until, one day, Mike sent me a message, saying that he would come down to Bournemouth, cause he had a meeting at the Arts Institute, which is right next door to my uni.
You know, it tends to be mildly weird to meet internet friends. You have seen them around, "read" them talk, but the face you connect with them is usually an avatar, and the name a screen name. When you meet them in real life, you tend to want to address them by their screen name and feel weird seeing a face other than Buffy or Spiderman or Cartman or bouncing boogers. But then again, Mike made it easy, cos he uses his real name and an actual photo.
It was a beautiful warm spring day when Mike came down, and we met and went for coffee and a fantastic chat. Mike is a lovely chap, totally different from the average Bournemouth lad. More metropolitan, not this low-instinct ball-steered bastard type haunting the streets down here. In fact, he totally reminded me of Zac... his kind of humor and mannerisms... difficult to pin it down. But he is the kind of chap that made me admire the English and want to live in England: civilised, kind, fun and genuinely warm and friendly. A person you feel immediately comfortable around.
It was kinda cool to see my "real" life and my online world "fuse together" like that.
Then Mike went off to have his meeting, and I met my friend about which I posted.
Later, we met in the uni bar for drinks. Mike wanted to catch a train home soon, but we had such nice chats and got along so well that he kept missing it. By the time he had to leave, at least I was pretty tipsy (what about you, Mike?). It was a really cool nite, and I hope we'll get to meet up more. Mike is wicked awesome, to quote The Danz.
I had the nicest walk home... as nice as it can be, being inebriated on a beautiful dusky spring evening. When I am at this stage, my mind gets amazingly clear. It reduces the wild chatter in my head to a clear single train of thoughts (which is why I always have a shot of Jaegermeister before exams - just enough to kill the anxiety and shut the circus in my head up).
I think I have figured what makes alcohol so attractive, and while this is not news, really, it is, for me, a new understanding on many levels. It's that it makes you lose your sense of fear. Fear of yourself, fear of others, fear of consensus. For someone like me who has been afraid for most of her life, this sense of timeless peace, this infinite bubble of happiness and natural existence, that is pure bliss.
I think fear is the worst thing that can happen to life. Fear it what kills you. That night was amazing. I was drunk, but I felt strangely alive,because there was no more fear in me. Did you ever notice that fear kills all the senses?
I walked home, and all those scents hit me, sweet and real and alive, and I was immersed in it, connected to it. Cut grass, and blossoms, and the spicy smell of the horses that came up to the fence to greet me. And the naturalness of laughter bubbling out of me, unstoppable, when I chucked pebbles at Dom's open window, and his face appeared, and he threw a kiwi at me, hitting my back, and I kept throwing it back at his window till all that was left was fruit salad.
A pint of Guinness, and I have recognised my enemy. Funny, the way things go.
