Across the Wires

Warning: Parts of this post are probably going to be super emotional. I might even cry...but keep that on the down-low for me. :-P
Also, I'm really Attention Deficit today.

Today, and yesterday, there was a rumble going on in this particular niche of the blog-o-sphere that I seem to have placed myself in. It's a very comfortable niche, I have to say. If it were a room, we'd have expensive, cushy leather couches, I think.
Anyways, the point is...there was a rumble. That's my word for -- no, not for a gang fight, that's West Side Story -- for an event everyone talks about. You know how when everyone is whispering to each other in one place and you don't know what they're saying (yet) it's kind of this rumbling noise caused by the voices? That's why I call it a "rumble".

I've lived through a lot of rumbles. Oddly enough, I usually have a feeling that a rumbling is going on before I hear anything about it. I mean, just for instance, the night of Station Nightclub Fire -- probably the biggest tragedy to happen in Rhode Island in...well, possibly ever, was a definite rumble for months afterwards. The night it happened I couldn't sleep, so I went downstairs to get a drink and discovered my dad had turned on the news. It was about 11:00. He and I watched the news for another 10 minutes, discussing our mutual inability to sleep even though we both had to be up at 6 the next morning (I can't for the life of me remember why). At about 11:10 the news switched to live coverage of the fire.
"Oh," I said, "I wonder if that's why we couldn't sleep."
As it turns out, we weren't unique. From the people I talked to about it, it seems like most of Rhode Island couldn't sleep that night.

Anyways, enough of my off-topic story telling. The blog-o-sphere has had a rumble. And when I logged onto Blogger yesterday, before I opened anyone's blogs, I had that sort of feeling. I've had it before, you know. When someone you know isn't totally alright and you know you're about to find out. You've had that nagging feeling all day, and you know you're about to find out because the feeling just jumped from the back of your mind to the point where you can't think of anything else.
So I went down my blogroll. It didn't take long before I found out who it was. Everybody who's reading this, please keep Spider in your thoughts and prayers.
(I particularly like this spider in this picture because, yes, it's still a spider, but it's actually not ugly.)
Anyways, I've read about this event in Spider's life on, I think, four blogs (five counting this one...) and each one has had tons of comments from other bloggers, many of whom I can only assume are talking about it on their blogs which I haven't read.

It reminds of me of something. I bet Muse is already thinking of it. The episode I'm about to tell you of probably had an even bigger effect on her than it did me. It's a lot more serious than what happened to Spider (not that I'm minimalizing what Spider's going through, I'm really not!)
See, the moral of this event I'm about to describe is that the people we talk to online, even though we've never met them, have a profound effect on our lives. And we, in turn, have a profound effect on them. Even though we've never seen each other face-to-face, we are friends, acquaintences, and in some cases enemies in a very real sense.
And much like the real world, it can sometimes take something unfortunate to prove that. The number of people pulling for Spider right now seems to support this idea too.

Anyways, this story will bring together everything that I've talk about in this post. I promise.
See, the online community Utopia Skye (which used to be much more active, and which I used to be much more active in when I had more free times) began in the world of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs). And, as sort of silly as a ton of people think it is, our starting point was in the game The Sims Online (TSO).
As an aside, I'd like to point out that when I played the most was during my Crohn's flare ups and I couldn't move and stress made the pain worse, so I'm forgiven from the extreme dorkiness of playing a MMORPG where you don't kill things. :-P
Back to the story though...one of the members of the Utopia Skye community, and a fellow player of TSO went by the name of Jessee (or Jessi). She was terrible at typing and, at first, annoyed the hell out of me because she just couldn't type anything right sometimes. She grew on me though, and she was always giving me advice and words of wisdom and so on and so forth. She was also always a lot of fun...like in this picture where our friend Tony trapped Jessee on the toilet? Or the one below, where Jessee is cheating at pool? Yeah, amazing. Good times, good times.
So one Thursday I had that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I was talking about earlier. I went through the whole day without hearing anything. I got home from school, hopped online and found out immediately what was going on.
Jessee, as it turned out, had only told a few of us (not including myself, unfortunately) that she had cancer. That day she had gone into a coma. I was told that the doctors weren't sure whether or not she'd come out of it. (And here come the tears...geez.)
Her fiancee came online from her hospital room and let Utopia Skye know. At the time, Utopia Skye also had an Internet radio station so we did a two day long radio broadcast in honor of Jessee, and her fiancee played the whole thing in her room. Her family was there too. We all listened, we all posted our well-wishes.
She was back to us by the end of the weekend. Later she told me that she could hear the whole thing, although it sounded like it was underwater.

There's so many more stories about Jessee and so much more to say buttt, we'll save those for other days.
The point is, the way everyone is pulling for Spider in his time of need right now, despite the fact that most of us have never met him, reminded me of that. I mean, like I said, it's not as serious. Spider's still awake, and cheery from what I've been hearing (which is great!) and if we were to do a radio broadcast for him* (and he had a computer with him in his hospital room) he'd hear it like everyone else would.

*Hi, that's not a bad idea. Anybody or able to afford a radio station?