For the last three years I’ve had a mysterious visitor to my web site whom I’ll call Chris (not his real name, but an alias he uses occasionally). Chris started posting to several of my web sites back when I was just using a simple scrolling CGI guestbook script, and posted vociferously when I was using the Ultimate Bulletin Board. When I switched to Conversant he disappeared for awhile, but after several months he was back.
It wasn’t hard to tell that Chris was a troubled man. He posted in a very ranting style. He used to repeatedly post these very long arguments in favor of pedophilia on all of my sites. He constantly sent me e-mail — I probably get 25 to 30 e-mails from this person every day, all from free e-mail accounts like Hotmail. And he did it all from one or two public libraries, almost always in Ohio, but recently occasionally traveling to Canada. But I had no idea who this man really was or what his story was.
Until tonight. Somebody sent me an e-mail out of the blue a couple hours ago saying he had a way to get Chris to stop e-mailing me. I said that was great, but did he know anything about Chris because I’ve been wondering what his deal was for three years. And then he told me everything I was curious about and more.
Except, of course, it was kind of a let down finally learning the truth about my mystery guest. The person who e-mailed me knew his real name and met him in the early 1980s when he seemed like a pretty normal person, even if a barely employable one with few future employment prospects. Somewhere along the line, though, something snapped. I heard about the friend of my correspondents who had to get a restraining order against Chris, and about how with no employment prospects, Chris apparently sits around public libraries all day.
Like me, the person who e-mailed is very angry at Chris but at the same time can’t help but feel sorry for such a troubled individual. Its obvious that Chris is very intelligent, but very, very unbalanced.
Unfortunately my e-mail correspondent seems prepared to take a course of action that’s probably not very safe — a personal confrontation. Like I said Chris always posts from one of two libraries, with 90 percent of his posts coming from what are clearly a bank of public terminals on a specific floor of a university library. He’ll probably be there tonight e-mailing and posting his rants.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to confront Chris, so I hope this person knows what he’s doing.
In calling the structure of the chromosome fibres a code-script we mean that the all-penetrating mind, once conceived by Laplace, to which every causal connection lay immediately open, could tell from their structure whether the egg would develop, under suitable conditions, into a black cock or into a speckled hen, into a fly or a maize plant, a rhododendron, a beetle, a mouse or a woman. ,