Ornoth

Today, kids grow up with their entire lives digitized and at their fingertips, but those of us over sixty rarely get a high-fidelity look back into our childhoods.

Sure, there might be some faded Polaroids or 35mm slides from major holidays, but those aren’t particularly vivid or easily shared. A majority of our lives—who we were and everything we experienced—exists only in brief flickers of increasingly fragile human memory, ultimately unsharable except as tediously repetitive verbal anecdotes, like those our grandparents told us when we were kids.

So when one uncovers an item that triggers lots of childhood memories and emotions, it’s worth expending some effort to preserve it. In this case, a 40-year-old cassette tape bearing a very special song, which I recently digitized.

Therindel and Daeron cover

Therindel and Daeron On Ravenhill cassette

In 1978 I was only fourteen years old and about to start high school. I’d recently devoured J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and had gotten in touch with a handful of other young fans to found the New England Tolkien Society.

NETS had two publications: I produced a big annual called “MAZAR BALINŪ” (The Book of Balin) that featured art, poetry, fiction, and such (read more about that here); but our regular newsletter was a monthly called “Ravenhill”, named after a fortified spur of the Dwarves’ Lonely Mountain, which was the ultimate goal of Bilbo & Co.’s quest in The Hobbit.

Our Tolkien fan group’s meetings were infrequent, because we were spread out all over the northeast, but we made up for it with enthusiasm, taking on Hobbit or Elven or Dwarven personae, dressing up in costumes, having period feasts, hosting Tolkien trivia contests, and the all-important mushroom-rolling race (using only one’s nose, of course).

Those events were always uproarious fun. Contrary to my home life as a very strong introvert, under my Hobbit persona I surprisingly found myself loosening up and expressing a fun-loving, impulsive side at our gatherings. For me, they were incredibly important experiments in my adolescent social and emotional growth.

It was in that context where, at one of our very earliest meetings, we were joined by a local musician named Tom Osborne, who went by the name “Dæron”, after a minstrel mentioned in Tolkien’s works. He played guitar and sang a folk song he’d composed around a poem written by Marthe Benedict (aka Therindel), a Tolkien fan of international renown.

The song, “On Ravenhill: Gimli’s Song of Parting”, is a poignant one. You may or may not recall that Gimli was the Dwarf who joined the Fellowship of the Ring to help Frodo bring the One Ring to Mordor. Tom’s song takes place long after the conclusion of the War of the Ring, as Gimli says farewell to the Lonely Mountain and Middle-earth, before joining his Elvish friend Legolas in sailing to the Undying Lands: something no Dwarf had ever been permitted to do.

Between the stirring words, so wonderfully performed, and the direct connection to our newsletter “Ravenhill”, everyone who heard it at that early gathering was near tears, despite the fact that we were mostly teenaged boys. There was something about Tolkien’s works that had touched each of us—the sense of wonder, the magnificence of nature, the freshness of youth, the sentimentality and romanticism—and Tom’s music and Therindel’s words captured all of that perfectly. It’s no exaggeration to say it resonated in my heart and lodged itself permanently in my memory.

The version I have on cassette… Over the past 42 years I never played it very often, but—knowing that it was important to me—I hung onto it through my many moves and all the changing roles and circumstances of my life. I’m happy that after so many years, it’s still in adequate condition for digitizing and posting (here’s the MP3), even if the quality isn’t up to modern standards.

Now, like Gimli, in old age I find myself looking back upon an astonishingly diverse, full, and fulfilling life with immense appreciation. I’m not quite ready to depart for the Undying Lands, but I can look back at the many treasures I have found, and savor precious memories such as those evoked by this deeply meaningful song of parting.

Far down the Lonely Mountain’s southern arm
I stand on the grey rocky height
Whence oft of old was sounded the alarm
And winged messengers soared in urgent flight.

(BEGIN CHORUS)
Only on Ravenhill—can you believe it still?
Looking across the green lands;
Mining the metals we shaped with our hands each day
Under the mountain where mystery lay.
(END CHORUS)

Here sun and wind and rain shaped the stone;
Here blood of kinsmen slain have soaked the clay;
And here I stand bent by the years I’ve known
To hear the echoes of a fading yesterday.

CHORUS

I am a living part of all this land—
Each standing stone, each tree a treasured friend,
Each glint of the sun a gem within my hand—
And yet beneath the sun all things must have an end.

CHORUS

I will surrender all I held as worth
And take the westward road across the sea.
A Dwarf of Durin’s race, a son of the earth,
Who dared to crave the lofty Elvish destiny.

CHORUS

So here I forfeit all my mortal right,
And here I render up my earthly will.
I shall leave it all to seek the light,
For I have bid the past farewell.

CHORUS x3

It’s time to come clean and clear up a falsehood that I’ve been telling for decades. Ornoth is not my birth name.

I changed my legal name back in 1994. But ever since then, when someone asked where the name “Ornoth” comes from, I told them it was an old family name with no particular meaning or history or derivation other than prior use. I didn’t think it would be flattering or to my advantage to admit that I’d changed my name or to reveal its origin, so I very purposefully kept it hidden.

Why am I revealing this now? Well, at my age I no longer feel compelled to protect a career, a reputation, or a fragile ego. And in this time where people are allowed to redefine all aspects of their identities, a simple name change doesn’t carry the stigma it once did. And having first started using Ornoth as a moniker fifty years ago, there’s no question that making it my legal name was a good long-term decision. Looking back on it, it was one of the best decisions of my life.

Coat of arms of Orny (Switzerland)

If you want to know the whole story, you’re gonna have to sit down and allow your author to relate this story in the third person, present tense…

Journey with me back five decades to 1976: to a 6th grade English class. An awkward 13 year old kid named David listens attentively as Mrs. Bernier reads J.R.R. Tolkien’s children’s fantasy novel “The Hobbit” to the class. Within a year, the boy enthusiastically plows through Tolkien’s more ambitious three-volume followup: “The Lord of the Rings”.

By chance, around this time he sees a newspaper article about a slightly older kid named Gary: an internationally-known Tolkien fanatic who lives an hour away. They meet up, start recruiting others, and create the New England Tolkien Society: a group of adolescent fans who regularly get together for events that feature discussions, trivia, music, camping, cooking, contests, and costumes.

Along with their costumes, everyone’s got a Middle-earth alter-ego persona. Gary dresses appropriately as a Hobbit called Hidifons. There’s Elven maids named Lothiriel and Therindel, a bard named Dæron, a pack of irascible Dwarves, and a few dozen others.

So David needs to come up with a Tolkien-inspired persona and his “Hobbit name”. Consulting Ruth Noel’s book “The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, he mashes together the Elvish words “orn” (meaning “tree”) and “loth” (“flower” or “blossom”) in an attempt to capture the image of the fragrant lilac trees that herald Maine’s brief spring. Thus, he announces himself to his fellow fans as “Ornoth”.

By nature extremely analytical, introverted, and solitary, a curious thing happens as our protagonist proceeds through his high school years. At Tolkien gatherings, he starts making friends, clowning around, acting silly, and flirting with the girls, who playfully shorten his nickname to “Orny”. Being outgoing is so completely out of character for him that he thinks of himself as having two separate and distinct personalities: one named David, who is a quiet, jaded, introverted loner; and the other named Orny, who is impulsive, energetic, and gregarious. “Ornoth” is also the name and persona that he carries with him when he begins attending medieval recreationist events put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism.

The awkwardness of maintaining two separate names and personalities comes to a head when he leaves for college, where he repeatedly winds up living with roommates who share the given name David. Partly out of simple convenience and partly to lean into his outgoing persona rather than the introverted one, he uses “Orny” throughout his college years. After using it for more than a decade, he has become more comfortable identifying as Ornoth – or Orny – than as David.

However, he has to revert to using his given name during the decade following college graduation, which brings marriage and a budding professional career. After several years of early success, both these endeavors flounder, as he is forced out by new management at work, and undergoes a divorce that is partially attributable to the cold dispassion of his predominant “David” persona.

The year was 1992; I was about to turn thirty, my life had fallen apart, and I longed to return to the carefree ease of my days in college and Tolkien fandom.

But this misfortune was also the watershed moment that spurred tremendous changes in my life. I reached out and reconnected with some of my old friends from college. I re-assumed leadership of the electronic writing project I’d left six years earlier. I grew my hair long for the first time and started hanging out in the Boston nightclub and music scenes. I got involved in the local BDSM and polyamory communities. I got an exciting and profitable new job at a cutting-edge consulting firm near M.I.T. where my skills were highly valued. I briefly lived with my old high school girlfriend before finally moving from the distant suburbs into the heart of the city. And I took up cycling again after a decades-long hiatus.

In all these different environments, I went by “Ornoth” or “Orny”, resurrecting the name that I identified with, that represented the kind of person I wanted to be, and which was used by all my friends, both old and new. At the same time, I finally started working to integrate the two halves of my bifurcated self-image: the methodical intellectual and the playful impulsive.

And it was time to finally leave “David” behind, a name that I found uncomfortable, that had unpleasant associations, and was only used by family members.

But my family provided an intimidating obstacle: telling my very conservative parents – who had given me my birth name, after all – that I wanted to legally change it. Fortunately, by then I’d gained the self-confidence to express myself firmly, so they couldn’t do much more than choose to ignore it.

So after nearly twenty years of using it informally, in late June of 1994 I went to probate court and had my name formally changed, taking Ornoth as my first name, and demoting “David” to one of now two middle names. As such things usually go, it was both an immense fundamental change and an anticlimactic formality.

That was thirty years ago this week, and there hasn’t been a single second when I’ve regretted it. Ornoth is who I am, who I have been for nearly all of my life, and how everyone knows me. “David” sounds as alien to my ears as Billy-Joe-Bob.

The only times I was the least bit equivocal about it was when I was introduced to someone new. When the inevitable “What kind of name is that?” question came up, I always fell back on a convenient lie: that it was just an old family name with no specific derivation. But today that equivocation officially ceases, as I take unapologetic and public ownership of this deeply meaningful life choice.

As you might imagine, having a unique name comes with advantages and disadvantages. For some people, it’s easier to remember a name that’s distinctive, but many folks require time and repetition to commit it to memory. So it has often gotten shortened to Orny, Orn, or even just O. People often mishear the ‘th’ and call me “Ornoff”; another common error is “Ornath”; and sometimes people misread a printed ‘rn’ as an ‘m’ and see “Omoth”. Such is the price we pay for being unique.

On the other hand, picking a username is a breeze; I’ve never had to resign myself to being “DAVID783” or the like. Googling has revealed that there are small towns called Orny in both France and Switzerland (see the latter’s coat of arms in the image above), and at least one person in Germany has Ornoth as a surname. And there are several fantasy- and gaming-related websites using Ornoth as the name of a fictional character, which always feels a bit ironic.

Having thought of myself as Ornoth for half a century, it’s not just a part of me; it is me. But so is the entire story of how it became my name: its origin, etymology, and literal meaning; its central role in my social and emotional growth; how I reclaimed it as part of a major mid-life revitalization; and how it prompted me to finally stand up to parental authority.

And while I’m very happy that today literally everyone knows me as Ornoth, I’ve always self-consciously kept all that backstory hidden. But the story behind my name is one that deserves to be claimed and celebrated, and I’m happy to share it with you today on this personally meaningful anniversary.

While the date is approximate, this is essentially the 20th anniversary of my founding of FSFnet, the electronic magazine which evolved into DargonZine. It’s by far the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet, and its mission—to help aspiring amateur writers improve their craft—has been my real “life’s work”.

What follows is an email that I sent to our writers’ discussion list in observance of this event. I thought it appropriate both to archive it here as well as to share it with anyone who is interested, as it is without question one of the most significant events of this year for me.

With that said, here’s the message…

Going to college in northern Maine isn’t very pleasant, especially in the dead of winter. The sun has fully set by 4pm in the afternoon. The average daily temperature is 18, made worse by the wind that sweeps the bare, exposed hilltop university bare of anything but ice. The nearest town is twenty miles away; the nearest city, over 235.

Perhaps that’s why the students and computer center staff at the University of Maine were at the forefront of the nascent BITNET network, back in 1984. Desperate for any contact with the rest of the world, UMaine saw the development of the first Internet chat machine, the second automated network information service, the first registry of network users, and a half dozen of the Internet’s first electronic magazines. Perforce, we became the leading edge of the burgeoning international computer network; there wasn’t much else to do, after all…

I recall well the day that I had the idea for a BITNET-based fantasy magazine. It was between Christmas and New Years, during that lull between semesters when there’s no one on campus. Even the hardcore hackers I hung out with had stayed home due to an immense blizzard. The only people around were myself and one of the computer operators, a friend and fellow writer who came out of the glassed-in machine room to chat.

About six years earlier, I had been responsible for putting out an collection of poetry, art, and fiction for the New England Tolkien Society, a premium annual to complement our cheap monthly newsletter. I wondered whether an electronic magazine focused on fantasy and science fiction could garner enough submissions to survive. My friend Murph, the computer operator, was enthusiastically supportive, and even promised a story or two. So within a day or two I distributed what I called “FSFnet Volume Zero, Number Zero”, a bare, baldfaced plea for submissions, which went out to 100 people in our BITNET user registry, the Bitnauts List, who had listed fantasy or science fiction as an interest.

The response was very encouraging. Submissions started coming in from a handful of interested parties, and one interested reader designed a much better masthead than the one I’d used initially. After an early dip down to about three dozen subscribers, readership steadily grew into the hundreds. At the end of our first year, I brought our many separate writers together for the first time and proposed a radical concept: a collaborative milieu that would permit us to write related stories, sharing characters and places and events.

My motivations and expectations when I founded FSFnet were really twofold. First, I wanted to write. Second, I wanted to find other writers who were interested in talking about writing.

FSFnet and DargonZine achieved and far exceeded those goals. Looking back at it, my goal of merely talking to other writers seems a bit unambitious. In the interim, DargonZine has become a dynamic family, featuring both lifelong friendships while warmly welcoming new members. Even today, after the advent of bulletin boards, the World Wide Web, cellular telephones, and all manner of pervasive computer- and network-based technology the social aspect of the project remains one of the most powerful, vital aspects of our mission.

But there have been so many surprises along the way. Over time, the quality of our writing and our critiques have consistently improved. I’m proud to look both backward and forward and feel a great sense of pride in some of the tremendous works that I’ve had the honor of publishing. We’ve helped a lot of writers, and in return they’ve shared with us some truly wonderful works of fiction.

Of course, quality is often matched with quantity, and I don’t need to tell you about the volumes of writing we’ve printed. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would ever look back and count four hundred stories. Anyone who has tried to go back and read all our back issues knows firsthand that we’ve printed enough material to fill about two dozen paperback books.

And then, of course, there’s longevity. If you’d told me in 1984 that I’d still be putting this beast out when I turned 41, twenty years later… Well, that would have been quite a surprise.

Another thing that has surprised me along the way is how much people have sincerely cared about the magazine, as reflected in their comments, their demonstrations of emotion, and the effort they’ve put into making it work. The devotion and faith that our writers have had for the project has probably been the most humbling thing in the project to me, because it’s really touching that people believe so strongly in something that I had a part in creating and continue to guide.

And the final surprise for me has been that DargonZine has become, to some degree, as what I’d call a “leadership engine”. The project long ago became much more work that one person could administer. For many years, our writers’ devotion has prompted them to accept responsibility for small projects that further enhance the project’s purpose. As they execute those projects, they learn how to express their visions of the future, build consensus behind their initiative, get and keep the ball rolling, and bring it to fruition. Whether it’s running a Summit or updating our maps or character descriptions or whatever, it’s been rewarding for me to give our writers a place to test their leadership skills: practice using skills which might aid them in their careers and interactions in other organizations.

There has, of course, been a great deal of change in the past twenty years. Back in 1984, the Internet didn’t even exist! Even the networks that would eventually combine to create the “network of networks”— ARPAnet, Usenet/UUCP, BITNET, Decnet, and others—were little more than a dozen sites each. Email existed, but no World Wide Web. No electronic images existed in any fashion; text was the only interface, and email was the only way to communicate with another computer user. No compact discs, no cell phones, no laptops, no PDAs, no MP3 players, no ATMs, no GPS, no digital cameras, not even color computer screens. We still had computer card punches and readers at UMaine, and most students preferred to work on paper-based DecWriter terminals because they didn’t trust monochrome CRTs. Today’s technology environment is as different from 1984 as the Wright brothers’ flyer is from the Stealth Bomber.

On the other hand, some things just don’t change at all. In many ways, DargonZine’s challenges remain the same as they were on day one: having an adequate number of writers and enough submissions to fill a regular publishing schedule. And then as now, readers are really more of a side-effect than a priority.

And, just as that December day was back in 1984, today is actually a unique and pivotal moment in our history. In a matter of weeks, we will finally break the longest spell we’ve ever gone without an issue, and we’ll do so by publishing the first of many Black Idol stories, which is itself one of the most important events in our long history. We are desperate for new writers, and hopefully the publicity that the Black Idol generates will bring in a new wave of writers who will become the project’s backbone for the future. Our Web site desperately needs an overhaul. We need to bring in new readers to replace those we’ve lost over the past years. Both the arc and Dafydd’s epiphany have gotten us thinking about how to collaborate more closely and more effectively. After failing to get our new writers involved, as evinced by the number of people who are getting dropped in the current participation review, we are completely reassessing the value and tactics of our mentoring program. After years of just coasting along, happy with the status quo, we are currently both in great peril, and on the verge of tremendous changes, and it’s definitely an interesting time to be part of the project.

For more than a decade we’ve owned the right to call ourselves “the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet”. But every single day we increase that longevity record. The fact that we’ve been around a decade longer than virtually any other online publication further underscores how very special what we do really is.

Since day one, I’ve known where to lay the credit for the magazine’s success. Here are some quotes from FSFnet 0-0, that initial mailing wherein I defined what FSFnet would be. I think they were absolutely prescient, because an unimagineable twenty years later, these statements are just as true as they were that wintry evening back in 1984:

FSFNETs success depends on reader contributions and efforts.

Please, FSFNET can only work if people are willing to contribute to it.

The more people who read it, the more people will submit quality work, >the better FSFNET will become.

This is your fanzine, more than it is mine. It is up to you to keep it >going. I have merely brought you together. Now it is your turn.

Some of you have been here virtually since day one. Dafydd (my erstwhile editor, most prolific writer, and overall curmudgeon), Jon (my conscience and good friend), and Jim (my last surviving co-founder and recurrent agitator). There’s simply no way that I can say enough to thank you for how much you’ve helped the magazine survive and thrive. People have long looked up to you as the soul of the project, and I do, too.

Some of you—Rena, Pam, Victor, and others—came on board in a wave a few years ago, and you have all pulled a lot of weight. You joined the project and thought of yourselves as newbies, but you very quickly were asked to become project leaders, and you’ve done an excellent job, rejuvenating the project when it was at a point much like today, when we needed new ideas and energy to replace the departure of several outgoing veterans. I thank you all, because you’ve taken on so much. The project survived and came out of that stagnant period stronger than ever, and the zine is what it is today because of your hard work.

Our newest crop of published writers includes Liam and Dave, and I couldn’t be happier with you guys. You, too, have provided an infusion of energy when the project really needed it, and you have also stepped forward to become leaders, like the generation before you. I hope that you stay with us for the long haul, because we really need active new writers with a passion for improving the way the magazine works, and I really see you as agents for positive change. You’re the people with the insight to ensure that we set up policies and procedures that enable us to effectively integrate and inspire the new writers who will be showing up in the coming months, and that’s the most important job anyone can do right now.

And the new folks who haven’t been printed yet. You haven’t been part of all this history, but I really hope that you will help create DargonZine’s future, because DZ’s success is very much more in your hands than it is our veterans. There’s always turnover in the project, even amongst the Old Ones, and we’re always looking for people with the vision to help us improve the project, and the enthusiasm to make it happen. I really hope you make the effort to be active in the group, because you are really what the project’s all about, and you’ll have to step up and help lead us soon enough.

For each of you, I want to thank you for what you’ve done for the project, whether you’ve been here twenty years, twenty months, or twenty weeks. As I said twenty years ago, all I’ve done is give you a forum; DargonZine’s success—and it has been a phenomenal success, achieving far more than I ever anticipated—has been entirely because you cared about it, believed in it, and worked for it.

As I have said countless times, DargonZine isn’t my creation. Sure, I had a couple good ideas a long time ago, and I send out the emails and crack the whip to keep everyone moving, but ultimately DargonZine could survive very easily without me. On the other hand, there would be absolutely nothing were it not for dedicated writers like you.

Together, we have created something amazing, something that has lasted longer than anything of its kind. We have learned a ton from one another and helped amazing number of writers, and we’ve created a very tight-knit community. I’m honored to be one of the people within this circle, and I thank you for everything you’ve done to make it what it is today, and to create the future that I see before us.

So please join me in raising a glass to twenty years of collaboration and camaraderie. Then get back to your story or your critique queue, so we can get started on our future!

I'm afraid this is going to be a lengthy one, even by Ornoth standards. It's a good example of how one inoccuous comment can trigger a whole series of discussion topics.

Inna and I have been very close for four years now. During that time, we've become more intimately familiar, and more open and forthright, with one another than with anyone either of us has known before. I think it goes without saying that our relationship is something I treasure immensely.

Certainly there's an investment in education there: we've taken the time to really get to know one another deeply and intuitively, which only comes through long months of shared experiences. Contrary to popular myth, that kind of understanding cannot happen overnight, or in a matter of weeks. But the investment of time certainly isn't the most important reason to value a relationship.

Instead, there's a special joy in sharing your life with someone who really knows you, and who interacts with you at a level of depth and real understanding and intuition that simply can't be approached without that investment. For someone to take the time to know me so well is priceless to me, for that is the baseline for genuine appreciation and understanding.

At the same time, offering that intimacy of understanding opens one up to unparalelled criticism. To let someone know you that well is also to let them see your worst and most feared faults, even the ones you choose not to acknowledge, and hide from yourself.

A couple days ago, on the way home from a dinner, I was walking across the Harvard Bridge, accompanied by Inna and two of her friends, when I made the apparently understated comment "This isn't bad".

All that night, Inna had been hounding me to express an opinion about the evening. It is, of course, one of her triggers, because she is excessively concerned with how others perceive the events she chooses to take responsibility for. In addition, her emotional state is influenced to a large degree by how demonstratively happy the people around her are. In a phrase, she is more affected by how the people around her enjoy an event than by the event itself. All this results in people's reactions being an emotional trigger for her.

On the other hand, I am extremely conservative in demonstrating my emotions and enjoyment of any given event. It's just the way I am (I'll get into the reasons for that in a moment). But you can see already how this combination of personality traits will result in Inna feeling insecure, and me feeling pressured or criticized.

Inna reacted to my comment by indicating that "This isn't bad" is "the highest praise possible from Orny", and going on to attack me for being so stingy with my emotions. I went on to defend myself, and the evening ended quite unsatisfactorily, with each of us feeling hurt and angry for expecting something different from one another. Nothing that won't get settled, it's just that I needed to relate that bit in order to proceed from here.

In the rest of this entry, I discuss why I am so reserved. It's a lot of self-analysis and some of it I admit will sound quite adolescent. It's naturally something I typically try to rise above, but at the same time, it's also still something that continues to influence my behavior.

So why am I so reserved? It would be easy to cite the familiar axiom that it's easier (or safer) to be negative than to be positive. In the past, that has certainly been a factor in my tempering my reactions, even recently. I think that I've made great progress on this one recently, thanks partly to Inna, and partly to my increased participation in the creative community. I'm learning, gradually, how to be more supportive and less judgemental, at least when the circumstances require it.

But there's much more to it than that. There are ultimately two big reasons why I'm not more demonstrative: first, I lack the ability to feel, express, and act on my emotions, and second, I fear what might come out if I tried.

I'm unable to feel, express, and act on my emotions? Isn't that the easiest thing in the world? Well, to many people it must be, but I've never been ruled by my emotions; I've always kept them under smotheringly tight control, to the point where today I have great difficulty even identifying when I have emotions, much less what they might be. I know that's probably counterintuitive to most people, but trust me on this one; I know of what I speak.

The root of most of my insecurities surely lies in my reaction of our family moving to an unfamiliar town when I was nine years old. I think it's typical that most children will react to such a traumatic event either by becoming extremely extroverted (in order to attract new friends), or by becoming extremely introverted (out of fear). I fell into the latter category, and never had a large number of friends until late in high school (see below). My family reinforced the value of intellect over emotions, and my life goal became to live forever, so that I could learn everything there was to know and know how the world would turn out. And after all, what use are emotions when you're alone?

When I began find myself attracted to women, my introversion and insecurity kept me from actually pursuing relationships. They of course seemed extraneous to my life's goals, but with no outlet, the unreleased sexual tension of adolescence worked inside me, turning me into a very hateful, judgemental racist: a very dangerous hooligan, but without the disregard for traditional values that would have enabled me to do real harm.

The stage was set for my first real romance, which took place during my final year of high school. Jean was, of course, everything I was not, but most especially she was positive, in touch with her emotions, and impulsive. My entire life turned around in one moment that took place in my parents' back yard. On a warm, lush spring day, I watched as Jean actually laughed and skipped down a set of rock stairs into the grass beneath a maple tree. I (quietly, of course) stood there dumbstruck, watching her suffused with joy to overflowing: an emotion I never let myself feel, expressed in a way that I could never express. That was my revelation, and I made a very conscious, deliberate decision to be more impulsive (ironic, eh?).

At that time, I was one of the principals in the New England Tolkien Society, a group of young fans of the author who wrote "the Hobbit" and "the Lord of the Rings". The group had one or two camping trips each year where everyone got dressed up in medieval garb and pretended to be hobbits or elves or whatnot. This was to be the testing ground for my new impulsiveness.

At NETS gatherings, I stopped caring what people thought of me, and actually pushed myself to become an extrovert. I started acting before thinking, incorporating random acts of silliness and flirtation into my behavior. Amazingly to me, I became quite popular, even with the girls. I had successfully been able to "flip the switch" from cold, hateful intellectual to outgoing, silly, and impulsive extrovert.

The problem was that I was still living at home, where that kind of behavior would never have been acceptable. So in order to rationalize my different behaviors, I borrowed from schizophrenia, describing myself as two separate people. David, the name I used up until college, was the master of intellect and self-control; Ornoth, or Orny, which I'd used as a name in Tolkien fandom and other medieval recreationist events, was the flirtatious, uninhibited fool. That was the situation when I graduated high school.

Throughout college and into my marriage, I went through several phases when one or the other of these two "personalities" were dominant. Any given phase would last about nine months, but within those larger phases, I might switch back and forth (intentionally or not) for a period of days or hours. Friends who knew me well said that they could see in my eyes when I made the discrete transition from one to the other.

But as my language indicates, these two halves were never integrated, and my intellectual half never learned how to demonstrate, or even see, my own emotions. Two decades later, Inna wisely told me that this division was contrived and that perpetuating it from adolescence was unhealthy, so I tried to set it aside. Unfortunately, for the most part that meant losing touch with my emotions, though I shouldn't lay the responsibility for that wholly on Inna. After all, my ex-wife's parting shot was to give me a Mister Spock tee shirt, effectively saying that my coldness and rationality were the equivalent of the Vulcan's banishment of all emotion. And while working for Sapient, I twice took the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, perhaps the most famous personality test in the world, and never scored so much as a single point on the "emotions" scale.

One thing I pride myself on is expressing myself accurately in written form, after I've had a chance to digest things and determine how I feel about them. But I am wholly inarticulate, unable to detect or describe my emotions in "real-time", as events occur. This was particularly well demonstrated when Inna and I spent a week on Cape Cod two years ago. At the time, Inna had no idea that I was enjoying the trip. To be entirely truthful, I don't believe I knew it, myself. But after coming back to Boston, I realized how much I treasured those memories, and how much I'd enjoy repeating them, and only then was I able to show Inna how much they meant to me. Of course, to her, who trusts emotions far more than words spoken after the fact, this sounded insincere.

So for more than a quarter century I've practiced a uniquely successful method of denying my emotions, to the point where today I find myself questioning whether I have the capacity for emotions at all, and if I did, how I could possibly recognize them in myself, much less allow myself to publicly demonstrate them and act upon them. There are, of course, both advantages and disadvantages to this way of life, but I think it would be nice (and healthy) if I had the capacity to choose whether to demonstrate my emotions or not, rather than having no choice at all because I cannot even register them.

And then there's the other question: if I demonstrated them, what might come out? As I mentioned above, I was a pretty angry kid in high school, and there is still some residue from that. I was hateful, racist, reactionary, and, more than anything else, judgemental. Those were the emotions that were most natural to me then; would they resurface? Of course, I've thankfully evolved out of most of those. I've put aside most of my racism and hatefulness and prejudices, and I've tried to be more supportive and less quick to judge.

But one thing remains with me: I'm really not fond of people at all. I can't say that I truly hate people anymore, which is good, but my tolerance and patience with them is extremely low. As my relationship with Inna proves, there are people out there whose friendship has immense potential for me, once it reaches a certain level of depth. I think my problem is that as an introvert, it just doesn't seem worth the effort to make that investment. Most people either aren't compatible with me (through no fault of their own, of course), or simply don't desire the depth of friendship which would make the investment of time and energy worthwhile. Most people operate at a very shallow level, and that bores me to tears. I need a few good friends who know me very well, who are intelligent and articulate, with broad interests which include some of my own, but also include other, new things that would help me grow.

But establishing those kinds of friendships takes time, during which you have to slog through all the common, surfacey stuff before genuine depth comes through meaningful shared experiences. And putting that time and effort into a surfacey friendship that might never "pay off" is what I, as an introvert, shy away from. And that's why I am so alone, though I live in the very heart of the city.

So my fear is that if I really allowed my emotions to show, my general impatience and intolerance of people would drive people away.

With such an attitude, one could reasonably ask why I need people in my life at all. For the most part, indeed, I have concluded that I don't. But there are certain reasons, most of which are either very practical or mundane.

First, being alone is dangerous. What happens if I have a heart attack or cannot live unassisted? That's a problem, but it's hardly a great basis for friendship!

I'm physically attracted to people. This is the one thing that I find most frustrating, this unquenchable desire. There's so much turmoil that I wouldn't have to face if I could just rid myself of my sexual desires. I've tried; that's just not going to happen...

People are necessary for my entertainment and growth. Even living a purely selfish life for my own amusement, I need what other people create. I need live music, interesting artwork, architecture, graffiti, fashion, literature, dining, modern technological innovation, and all kinds of shared activities. I need intellectual challenge, and people who can bring me new experiences and ideas. That's why I live in the middle of Boston, and why I can't just pack up and live in isolation up in northern Maine, even though that has its attractions.

Of course, none of these are terribly lofty reasons for interacting with people. The one thing that I really need from people, that I could never possibly deny, that makes everything worthwhile, is exactly what I described between Inna and I at the beginning of this entry: understanding.

What I need, more than anything else, is for someone to know me. Not just in a surface sense, but to really know everything about me, fully and deeply, and understand who I am, what I've seen, and where I want to go. Someone to share my pains with, to appreciate my fiction, to understand why I think DargonZine is an honorable life's work, to know what polyamory means to me as well as my negative opinions of marriage, to share the spiritual appreciation I feel of nature, to understand my philosophy and why I live the way I do, to know when to push me and when it's best to leave me alone, and to occasionally surprise me when they understand me even better than I know myself. And I want to be able to know them as thoroughly as they know me, and know the new experiences and ideas that they can bring me.

And, of course, I want them to understand the difficulty I have with feeling, expressing, and acting upon my own emotions, and help me to overcome it, rather than condemn me for this area of weakness.