Ever since that night when beloved Uncle Ben died, shot by a burglar that I had failed to capture, thinking instead only of my planned career as a masked wrestler, I have realized that for each of us, with great power comes great responsibility. But today...after seeing my beloved Aunt May attacked by the Sinister Six, I realize that my lifestyle brings my loved ones and innocent bystanders into too much danger, and I am going to STOP BEING SPIDER-MAN!
Oooops, wait, wrong speech.
I just read the two writeups above, detailing how two people who I thought were getting along well here have decided to pull up stakes, over creative differences or managerial issues or personality conflicts that I am unaware of. I will miss them, but it is their decision.
But I want to talk about my own decision, why I am here pretty much as long as this site exists with any vestiges of its original mission.
I have not always had an easy time at E2. I have had personal conflicts and political conflicts. I have felt, with the typical teenage angst of a modern twentysomething, that the entire site was out to get me. I have feuds and grudges running on this site that started when I was an almost totally different person than I am now. It is a pain to get on here and see people's names mentioned that I am apparently doomed to eternal mistrust with, especially since the reasons that this started are about as relevant to my life as when I was in preschool and I got crowded out of playing with the big kid blocks.
Oh, and my writing. I have many writeups on here. But if you look at a lot of those writeups, especially going back to 2001, many of them are filler. As a depressed 22 year old, my only source of connection with the world was to write descriptions of city improvements from Civilization in hopes of getting a little pellet of dopamine reward. I've gotten a little better over the years, but if you look at the people on here who are really good --- Dannye, The Custodian and Lucy-S, all I have is a long list of random things I have encountered, written in prose that I hope people don't notice is held together with duct tape and twine.
But I still consider E2, and my presence here, important. If I could sum it up as best as I can (remember above prose/duct-tape/twine comparison), it is that my work on E2 is a natural product of the site. My writing on E2 is not just essays I write in a vacuum and then add some brackets to, and then post here. And the interweaving of what I write with the rest of the site is not just a matter of reference to a few in-jokes or the like: for more than a decade, E2 has been a key source of insight and information and conceptual structure for me. This site is the scaffolding of what I learned.
Or, briefly, since E2 is based on collaboration, I don't feel that I have the moral right to totally leave, and certainly not to pull my writeups, which are the works of so many other people, although my name is on them. Of course, I still own the legal copywrite to what I wrote, and if the site did become wildly askew...if the management pulls a Brad Fitzpatrick and sells the whole thing to some shadowy Russian conglomerate, I will remove my writings. But until then, I will stay with E2 because E2 has stayed with me.
Okay! Enough noding about noding, now it is time to write something of import!