I'm enjoying the hell out of life, Marty, as I am sure Amos is. Amos, if you care to check member profiles, has had a pretty darned adventurous life (and what have you done?). A major aspect of our enjoyment is folk music and all aspects of it, and that's what draws us to a web site like Mudcat, where we can exchange knowledge and experience. But being intelligent people with wide-ranging interests, we discuss other things as well. Some people spend a lot of time on Mudcat (such as people like Teribus, who seems to have little else to do), but others of us pop in for a few minutes maybe a couple two or three times a day to see if anything new has been posted on threads that interest us.

Granted, I spend most of my day at the computer, but off-line, flogging the word processor, because I am now a writer by trade (several published magazine articles and a book in the works). Not all that much of my time is spent in cyberspace, but I do spend some time there doing research for my writing. I also pull out one of my guitars at least once a day, practice for an hour or so and sing through a number of songs, both old and newly learned, partly to keep my hand in and mostly because I love it. I don't perform three or four nights a week as I did some years ago, but I do still perform with some regularity. Contrary to what you seem to think (encountering me only here on Mudcat and not having enough imagination to think that this might be only a small facet of my life), I have lots of contact with the world outside of cyberspace. I am married to a wonderful woman, we live in a large, comfortable apartment, we have many friends, we enjoy a full social life, and we entertain often.

But what puzzles me is how someone who gets his jollies (you've said so several times, Marty) by coming into a thread in which a serious exchange of information is occurring and, having nothing of consequence to add, attempts to disrupt the discussion by posting snide and snotty remarks, replete with insults consisting mostly of references to bodily functions (invariably centered around the crotch) of people he has never met can still reasonably insist that he is a happy man with a full life. If he is indeed happy and has a full life, why does he not have anything of consequence to add? Why does he want to disrupt the discussion? Why is he so full of bitterness, nastiness, and—yes, quite probably—hatred? And what sort of perverted outlook can convince him that he's having fun doing this? This is the same sort of fun a street-corner lout gets by pulling out the spray can and defacing the front of a building. Very mature.

No. This is a person who is narrow-minded, intellectually shallow, and fixated at the emotional level of a three-year-old (characteristically fascinated by bodily functions, especially excrement), and who, again, like a three-year-old, is ego-centered, has nothing to add to an adult conversation, but demands attention anyway.

You may be be fifty years old, Marty, but Amos has you pegged. Obviously you never grew up.

Don Firth