A sad goodbye to Virginia

[agate]

Virginia, who was a member of this board for over 20 years, passed away on April 2 at the age of 88. She had had MS for over 40 years.

I will miss her and I'm sure everyone here will miss her too. She was always upbeat and cheerful even when things weren't going well at all for her.

Rest in peace, Virginia.

[Prot]

That is really sad news. I liked her.

[agate]

She was a great person to have on any message board--always supportive and helpful.There will be quite a gap here without her.

[Prot]

There will be a big gap. I'm not proactively able to contribute much. I need people to respond to. You're fine, but more than just you.

[agate]

I've always known that if this place dwindled down to just me, that would be the end of it. In fact if it dwindled down to any one person, that would be the end. Nobody is going to stick around for just one person running his/her mouth.

It looks to me as if most message boards are doomed to fail unless they can have a committed group of people loyally adding content REGULARLY, and the group probably should consist of at least 20 people, preferably more. I suspect that nobody among those remaining here could muster up a group that large.

[Prot]

It's sad. I was on a lot of forum/message boards at one time. Many either closed due to dwindling activity/members or were ruined by trolls. Ideally you want people with things in common.,at least 20 people,and at least 5-10 new topics a day.

[agate]

That does sound ideal. One problem with people with MS is that they might have fewer contacts than many other people, and so we don't know anyone we can invite to form a message board--or to join an existing one.

If BrainTalk doesn't get shut down, I guess that those few who are still interested will be keeping it going, as has been happening for quite a while. Now we have even fewer people. There were funnylegs, houghchrst, and a couple of others--flatfish posts sometimes even now--but they haven't popped in lately. There are also several who show as logging in but they're not posting much. soul wandered in a few times not so long ago.

So if anyone from former times is reading this, don't hesitate to say something here. Maybe a few committed people can restore BrainTalk. It probably wouldn't be realistic or smart to expect it to be the way it was back in the early 2000s, when there was so much activity that it was hard to keep up with it, but a few dedicated people could still liven things up here.

[Prot]

Falling star

I saw despair in a black bag
Felt it,touched it and threw it away
But once again it stood beside me
Crying out for a taste of anguish

I laughed,it was a joke,a fantasy
Then i looked down on the floor
The room shook and the fragments sharp
Tumbled on to the once golden floor

I bent down to pick up the pieces
And like a rusty needle they went through me
The earth went dark,oh so dark
I tried to smile,a vacant pit.

Laughter,what is laughter?
I cannot tell,it avoids me
There is just the darkness
And the broken fragments on the floor


(A poem written when i was 15 in 1972)



American dream

The American dream-fat ladies on therapists couches
health food obsession meets psychologist's candy
The American dream- guns for sale executions to
follow,
Your right to shoot and your punishment to die,
The American dream- personal neurosis,
collective self assurance,
anti abortionist gas chamber caressing.

The American dream-mom's apple pie
classrooms of children waiting to die
The American dream- wholesome and clean
liberal thoughts and reactionary deeds
The American dream-bizarre and mundane
continuous movie for the normally insane

1975

I remember nineteen seventy five
chasing emptiness just to stay alive
hopes shattered and broken,
words of salvation never spoken,
I remember blame and then more blame
no panacea to soothe all the pain
I remember parental warfare
I remember no one was there
I remember the post mortems they'd hold
so much to say but emotionally cold
I remember confidence shattered day after day
Nineteen seventy five when blue turned to grey

From many years ago. What little creativity I had has long ago disappeared.

[agate]

Thanks for sharing these! I'm sure you must have been told that you have talent?

When I was teaching English composition, where the class was expected to learn to write coherently and maybe even well, 99.9% of my students (aged 18-85) probably couldn't have produced anything approaching your efforts.

[Prot]

I may have had talent at one time. I don't have it now. I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say that a long term,toxic, effect of the bullying related trauma is an obsessional neurosis/insecurity as to how able and intelligent I am.