On Sun, 23 Jun 2013 09:54:19 GMT, nesScitur@husShmail.com (Ronin)
wrote:
>On Sat, 22 Jun 2013 22:30:28 -0400, Doc NP-f31 wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 23 Jun 2013 02:08:11 GMT, nesScitur@husShmail.com (Ronin)
>> wrote:
>
>>>On Sat, 22 Jun 2013 16:01:55 -0400, Doc NP-f31 wrote:
>
>>>> Does anyone remember what we were doing ten years ago this week in The
>>>> Fort? I'll bet Grant does, and I'll bet Ninja does if he's peeking.
>>>> And I'll bet Tommy does and I'll bet Chad does if he thinks about it
>>>> real hard. And I KNOW Ronin does because that's when he first peeked
>>>> his nose into The Fort.
>
>>>> There is another who knows, but I haven't seen him for years. NPf30,
>>>> are you around?
>
>>>> I'll check back to see who remembers.
>
>>>> Love to all,
>
>>>> Doc
>>>> NP-f31
>
>>> O-Doc-san:
>
>>> Actually, Ronin's hairy eyeball (nose? *peek*?) has been on The Fort
>>> since about the time that posts signed "nopubes" disappeared -- only
>>> to be replaced by syntactically-similar posts signed "sebupon".
>
>>> That Ronin's oar got stuck in the Fort Pool resulted from a poster
>>> presenting himself as a boy, "Spencer", being given relationship
>>> advice by The Fortsters with regard to a younger friend, "Ricky",
>>> which, if followed, carried a high potential risk of ending that
>>> friendship, and badly. Ronin argued, rather clumsily, against
>>> this advice, to no great effect; and, in the event, Ricky wound
>>> up running away, in tears.
>
>>> It still hurts.
>
>>> Ronin
>
>> Hey Ronin,
>
>> Your memory is a good one. Spencer struggled with how to handle that
>> situation. He had lots of advice, some good, some not so good. In the
>> end, he made his choice on the spur of the moment. And as you said, it
>> ended badly. He had misread Ricky. Not surprising, considering how old
>> they were then. But, it was still The Fort's finest hour, everyone was
>> trying their best to help Spencer figure himself out. He had us all
>> turned on our ear.
>
>> Do you remember what happened soon thereafter?
>
>> Love,
>
>> Doc
>> NP-f31
>
>O-Doc-san:
>
>Soon thereafter, a person representing himself as Spencer's father
>posted a message into The Fort expressing displeasure with said Fort
>and also with said Spencer; after some sheepish footshuffling, the
>thread wound down and the ripples died away. Some time after that,
>a relayed message purportedly from Spencer related that things were
>not at all that well with him ...
>
>A few not-quite-right-but-not-quite-wrong details in the "Spencer"
>posts suggested possibilities other than that presented, three of
>the more likely being a sting of some sort, a graduate student in
>one of the "social sciences" doing research (or at least telling
>himself that he was doing research) in paedophile newsgroups for
>a doctoral dissertation, and a boy-lover of uncommon perspicacity
>wishing to point out that some boys are extremenly uncomfortable
>with their increasingly-hard-to-ignore sexuality, to the extent
>that they may panic in a situation where they *cannot* pretend
>IT isn't happening.
>
>Taken at their face value, the minimum-assumptions sense to be
>made of the Spencer posts seemed to be that Ricky was looking for
>Something The Right Temperature to be next to that wasn't a Mum
>or a Dad (or a *girl*), and that Spencer's strong feelings for
>Ricky included a strong desire to make Ricky happy/feel good:
>not explicitly sexual, but definitely very physical. It was
>not, then, so much that Spencer misread Ricky as that The Fort
>misread both Spencer and Ricky -- not surprising, considering
>The Fortsters.
>
>And so Ronin unshipped oar.
>
>Parenthetically, all this illustrates splendidly the fatal
>defect in *do as be done by* as a general ethical principle:
>it works only for *others* essentially the same as *ye*.
>
>As it happens, the matter of what may cynically be described
>as *seducing a shy boy* is dealt with at length in the Niklas
>story "Homesick"; google
>
> niklas homesick
>
>for a link. (This story is an outlier in the Niklas canon,
>both in its length and in its inclusion of explicit boy/boy
>eroticism; perhaps it is to some extent autobiographical?
>But the outcome is at least hopeful.)
>
>As may be: it still hurts; and one remembers a lost tooth.
>
>
>Ronin
Hey Ronin,
Two things happened with Spencer's saga that made a huge difference.
1) Spencer Dad realized how badly his son needed him. And they bonded
as never before.
2) Other boys saw us helping Spencer, or trying to help, in our
swirling, unfocused way, and emerged seeking help. Do you remember
who?
For the hole in your jaw:
I had the honor of being able to correspond with Spencer during his
brief visit to The Fort and for awhile afterward. I also corresponded
with Spencer Dad. Spencer was aware that his blunder was one of not
taking Ricky's feelings into proper consideration. And he 'wanted'
things to be a certain way so badly that he ignored the signs that
should have warned him off. Spencer's later troubles were a result of
a divorce that was already underway and an ugly custody battle that
Spencer Dad was going to lose no matter how perfect he was.
You did your best. You were not the only one urging caution where
Ricky's feelings were concerned. We all did our best, and Spencer
acknowledged that he was being selfish in how he handled the event.
The irony: if Spencer were 13 today, it would have happened
differently. In the age of Facebook and texting, a teen's sexuality is
not the potential scourge it once was. Schools enforce tolerance rules
and kids are much more open-minded than they were ten years ago.
Chin up. There are others to help.
Love,
Doc
NP-f31
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