Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The REAL Story About Why I'm the Wrong Monkey

The name seemed like a good idea at the time. But you've got to consider that I was kind of upset.

The time: 2008. The world was younger then, and so was Ronny Cox. (What? He was.) George W Bush made us all laugh with giddy joy at the thought of his administration ending soon. I mostly hung out at one Internet forum, as opposed to splitting my Internet-forum time pretty evenly between several. That's how I usually roll: one forum at a time. And this was a fine forum, full of sophisticated and polite people -- extremely polite compared to many if not most Internet cliques. And so perhaps I didn't see as clearly as I might have that I didn't fit in. This wasn't the sort of situation where one of the other forum participants was going to tell me, "Steven, twenty of us had a secret meeting and talked it over and held a vote. Four people abstained, two said they liked having you around and sixteen said they wanted you to stop posting here and leave us alone. So, if you don't mind... Skedaddle, please." That just wasn't going to happen. What actually happened was that someone said to me that I might like this other forum. And I took that to mean: "Steven, twenty of us had a secret meeting and talked it over[...]" and so forth.

And my feelings were hurt. And I did leave that forum and go to the other one, and instead of calling myself Steven Bollinger I logged into the new forum as The Wrong Monkey, because I had sublimated my sadness over not fitting in into anger and grandiosity, and was saying things to myself like, "I'll show them! I'll show them ALL! I'm going to be a huge superstar and they'll be sorry they dissed me, but it'll be too late! THEY DONE GONE AND MESSED WITH THE WRONG MONKEY!" All in all, it closely resembled the process by which Butters became Professor chaos.

That's the ugly truth. That's where the handle came from, and the blog name came from the handle. (Which is sometimes abbreviated as TheWM or TWM.)

Did I show them all? No, I don't think so. Not yet, anyway. Did I completely mis-read the first forum, and do sixteen of them actually miss me terribly, while only two are glad I left? Gee, I'd sure like to think so. It's possible. But I don't think so. Am I glad that I've been referring to myself for several years now as The Wrong Monkey? Yes, although at the same time I find it very strange and somewhat embarrassing, if that makes any sense.

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