Tag: Family

In D&D and other nerdy table-top RPG games I used to play, we play different characters. Knights, dwarfs, vampires, super heroes, gunslingers. Those characters never last forever. They’re not real. When they are done, we hand in our character sheet. One rule in RPG’s was that things that happen in character shouldn’t affect the people we were in real life. When we handed in our character sheet, that character’s exploits were reduced to memories, but the people we were in real life lived on.

We all play characters in our lives. You may play a different character at work than you do with your family. On the Internet we play characters too, known by their Internet names.

I have to say that the character known as Hubbard Squash/Broke and Unemployed/whatever will be no more. This isn’t like the GBCW I posted on DailyKos. I am deleting my Twitter account, and will have no more dealings on political blogs or any type of social media tied to Hubbard Squash. Not as Hubbard or any identity tied to, or not tied to, Hubbard. Why?

Because a few on DailyKos, led by Denise Oliver Velez, have made it clear they are taking steps to ruin my real life. They want me to be put in jail for posting on DailyKos after being banned. One of them may be filing a fake police report right now. I don’t have time to work out the HTML but the comment thread is here:

http://www.dailykos.com/commen…

I wouldn’t be scared of these bullies normally, but this isn’t fair to my family. My wife is sick and about to go thru major surgery. After years of being Broke and Unemployed I’m about to start a real middle-class job in my field. Finally my wife won’t have to work so hard. Finally, we won’t be poor. They want to destroy all that because I posted on a blog and they didn’t like it.

To be clear, I never stalked anyone. I never took this Internet quarrel outside of Dailykos and Twitter, and few posts here at SHG. But there’s no limit to how far they’ll take it. They want to see me suffer financially. They want my family to suffer. They literally want me dead or in jail. And are taking the first steps to do that.

So Hubbard Squash and anything linked to that identity is gone forever. Any political activism, outside of local stuff I didn’t talk about on the Internet, is gone forever too. To protect my family from those who want to harm them.

Sorry for any trouble I caused at SHG. But I’m gone from the political Internet. For good. Because the most important character I play is that of being my wife’s husband. She needs me. Not in jail because some vindictive assholes gamed the system to put me there.

I have to protect my family above all else. So goodbye, and thanks for all the fish. At SHG you treated me with respect, and I’ll remember that.

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

Several folks who follow this regular series, my Pique the Geek one, and my Popular Culture one know that I often use obsolete or archaic spellings for certain, common words.  This is intentional.

Perhaps it is no longer standard English to use these old words, but neither is it incorrect to do so.  I do so partly out of respect whence came I (“whence” is “from where” in a single word, so if you say “from whence” it is sort of like saying “from from where”, sort like folks calling MSDSs “Material Data Safety Sheet Sheets” when they say “MSDS sheets”), but I am not being completely honest.

Another reason that I use them is to try to grab the attention of my readers.  I find it interesting to read pieces from contributors who are sort of off the beaten track.  I do not know if it works well for me or not.  I do believe that my readers realize that I do this not out of ignorance for standard English, but sort of in protest of the conformity to it.

Am I an nonconformist?  As Gibbs would say, “Ya think!?”

Following is a list of words that I often use that are not standard, but not incorrect, and then some recollections that I have for some of the old talk that NEVER was really correct.  This is quite subjective, but here we go.

I originally was going to write about the new Dark Shadows motion picture, but circumstances have intervened.  It turns out that my dear friend’s mum’s twin brother died either late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning, alone except for his little dog.  My friend called me around 9:30 Thursday morning to go next door and try to comfort her mum, and I was honored to do so.

Her mum was a basket case.  She and her brother were Christmas Day babies, 65 years ago Christmas past.  I have a brother, but not a twin, and my brother and I are separated by 14 years.  She and her brother were separated by fewer than 14 minutes, so they grew up together.

I did comfort her, and she cried in my arms.  I could not do much except to try to let her know that I really care, and she appreciated that.  Now for the culture part.