News of the Stoopid

Pluto’s Design

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There are three sorts of people. There are those who exhibit some suicidal predilection for fucking with me, and there are those who don’t. And, there are also those who run about, telling anyone who will listen that fucking with me is the act of a suicidal idiot…all the while trying to fuck with me. This latter group is my personal favourite.
Now: I could sit here and name all the names–there’s no particular shortage of idiots out there whose weird, sycophantic hypocrisy drops them precisely into my favourite group; but, for the moment, there’s only one guy I’d like to discuss.
Jason Roberts.
Our story begins in a chatroom….

So I’m sitting there, getting hit on by a crazychick. For a change. It happens; and right now there is no cure. What happened to bug me about the whole event was that the crazychick later told Hunter–my coffeechick–that I [Gremlin] was planning to replace her [Hunter] with her [the crazychick]. This is an example of fucking with me. But, to the crazychick’s credit, she hadn’t been known for warning people against fucking with me. I could conclude that she simply didn’t know any better. Some people are like that. Most, in fact.
I took care of that by posting the actual ICQ conversation I’d had with the crazychick; Hunter read it; it was evident that I hadn’t done anything wrong. Easy.
That, however, led to a bit of exposure within the chatroom. People who had never been involved in any of it read the ICQ history and posted various comments about the issue. One of them was Jason.
Jason knew the crazychick in question. Similar things, he claimed, had happened between she and himself. And now, following myriad and uninteresting events, she was afraid of him–partially because he had this habit of cracking her computer whenever she bothered him.
Okay….
Jason and I started talking. We had a few things in common, it seemed. He was a writer too–though he did magazine articles because he hadn’t managed to write a novel yet. And he was a Satanist–an ‘atheist with teeth’, as he put it. He was a member in notorious standing with the Church of Satan; he had enough power that he was able to send me his membership card without fear of getting into any trouble…since members of the CoS aren’t actually allowed to show anyone outside the organisation any official documentation and all.
And he was the webmaster of a GeoCities site. He gave me the URL; I told him how to fix the various hypertext errors. And so on.
As chance would have it, I was finally getting round to a couple of things I’d been planning for the past four years. Subheroes. An online cartoon, written in Shockwave. So, of course, I was also getting round to learning how to use the software. Mostly because I was all set to do it on the Amiga, back in the nineties, but very few computers were capable of handling anything I’d have made; ironically, Macromedia have nearly duplicated some of the Amiga software for use on Wintel machines…which is fine, except that I had no idea how to use anything Macromedia made. On the other hand, it took me an hour to figure it out. Issue over.
So the conversation drifts from writing to animating to Macromedia. Jason has less idea how to write anything in Flash than I’d had; but…he’s thinking about starting up a webdesign gig, and thinks it would be advantageous to be able to write Flash. Probably so.
By that point, the hour was almost up, and I knew enough about Flash to use it for most things. So Jason, still hoping to start up Pluto Designs–the webdesign company–hired me on retainer to handle animations.
Why not. I’ve got a webdesign company, but I’m not afraid of competition–particularly when I get paid either way.
That settled, Jason picked up PlutoDesigns.com and jammed it on a server. And I wrote the opening Flash animation for the site.
But not before mentioning my fees, which were, according to Jason, not a problem. He’d send me a cheque posthaste.
And that dropped us into downtime. We talked about various other things. One of them was Chastity–an Irish chick living in Canada [an assertion which triggers images of Judd Nelson exploiting Anthony Michael Hall at Molly Ringwald in the fictional ChicagoLand suburb of Shermer, I suppose]; Chastity was, according to Jason, insane; he only kept her on his ICQ list because she was a good guitarist and he needed her for his band. But his real girlfriend–Gretchen–wasn’t pleased about that at all. Chastity, of course, had no idea that Gretchen existed; if she ever found out, the whole sham would crumble.
Which leads to Jason’s bombastic self-reproach about saying too much; I had too much power over him now; if I ever happened across Chastity, I could ruin his life. Not that I knew anything more about her than her first name and the country in which she apparently lived.
And time passed.
Eventually, Hunter–still pissed at Nyberg for sneaking out of paying me for FaceCage.com–started wondering whether Jason was ever going to pay me for PlutoDesigns.com. To be honest, I wasn’t that concerned about it: Jason owed me about one percent what Nyberg owed me; I had better things to wonder about. But, in retrospect, Hunter may have been on to something with that.

So I’m back in the chatroom. Jason’s in there on occasion; though rarely and never for long. Chastity, he says, is online a lot, and if she sees him in there, he’ll have to deal with her. So I see him mostly on ICQ. Fine.
Until, one day, someone named Chastity happens into the chatroom and instantly asks if I’m the Gremlin.
Of course I’m the Gremlin; it’s right there in the name.
But the point was that she was Chastity–the guitarist in Canada. Thus ruining any hopes I might have had of pulling the Judd Nelson manoeuvre later on.
Anyway: I’m Gremlin; she’s Chastity; now we’ve met. So she starts hitting on me. It happens; there’s still no cure.
Which I’m not complaining about, per se. It’s harmless enough. I mean…here I am among three million people; presuming I don’t give out my home address–and I never do–then letting someone flirt at me in a chatroom is meaningless. It can’t do any damage on its own.
Besides: Chastity is engaged to Jason. Which follows, since she doesn’t know about Gretchen. I, not taking the flirting seriously, don’t bother to tell her that Jason has a girlfriend.
Eventually, I run into Jason again. It comes up that I ran into Chastity. He knows, because she let him know that. He’s impressed that she doesn’t hate me–she hates all his other friends. Moreover, I tell him, she seems to have a crush on me. But that’s not an issue to him, since she’s living life only for Jason.
Okay.
And life goes on.

Of course, as simple and logical as things may seem to those involved, there are always those who aren’t involved who aren’t logical. Which is not to say that they’re not simple. People I’ve never heard of start warning Hunter that I’m cheating on her by talking to Chastity.
Which becomes predictably goofy.
But whom would you guess is the most upset by the news?
Hunter lets Jason know that Chastity is in love with me. Oddly, factoring everything I’ve heard from him, he’s upset about that.
I don’t get it either. At first.
So now Jason’s avoiding me, leaving me to wonder what the problem is. I wonder that toward Chastity, who has also been wondering. Because, it turns out, we’ve been getting different stories.
For example: Jason learned Flash, and wrote the opening to PlutoDesigns.com. Which I find odd since Flash is done in two parts–the part which you see is the compiled final version; the part which only I see is the actual coding. The actual coding is a separate file which exists only on my computer. So it’s not on Jason’s computer. So Jason didn’t write the opening. So Jason conclusively lied about that.
More good news: Jason’s doing a cartoon called Subheroes. He can’t talk about it much yet, of course; but Chastity will love the final product. Of course, I’m kinda involved; that’s why everything regarding Subheroes is at gremlin.net, and not at PlutoDesigns.com. But it’s really his project; I’m just helping out.
And so on.
Also: Jason’s getting creepy at Chastity over the whole talking-to-me thing. He wants her to stop talking to me. She doesn’t want to stop talking to me, but he scares her. No one knows anything about him; he can do anything he likes.
I find that amusing. Because I have a pretty good idea how he seems to know so much and stay so hidden. I show her a few examples–tracing her to her house in London, Ontario, for instance.
Wow. Turns out I’m even scarier than Jason. But that’s okay; I’m not that creepy.
Hunter, of course, is still upset about it all. Because Jason’s letting Hunter know everything he couldn’t know about the situation–that something’s up between me and a chick I’ve never met who’s a thousand miles away. So that’s a mess.
Jason’s keyboard pukes out; he can’t talk to anyone anymore. More convolution.
Enter Gretchen.
This is where things go from goofy to stoopid. Gretchen is upset about Chastity, because Chastity is fucking with Jason.
Okay?
So: from all involved sources, Chastity is fucking with Jason, Jason is fucking with Chastity, Chastity is fucking with Gretchen, Chastity is fucking with Hunter, Jason is fucking with Hunter, Gretchen is fucking with Chastity, Gretchen is fucking with Jason…and someone is clearly fucking with me. I dislike that.
So I get all five of us into a chatroom at once.
The synopsis: Jason is in Freeman, South Dakota. Chastity is in London, Ontario. Gretchen is in Seattle, Washington. I’m in Denver. None of us has ever actually met any of us. Hunter, of course, lives with me. That’s immaterial.
Although no one’s ever actually met: Gretchen and Jason are together. Chastity is single. Jason doesn’t like the idea that Chastity’s single. But that’s how reality works.
He still doesn’t like it. And his keyboard still doesn’t work–he’s using the mouse to copypaste from a dictionary wordlist to get anything said at all.
Then he decides that it’s all his fault and disappears.
Then I get the Email from Gretchen.

On the night of January 20th 2001, at 9:54 p.m. Central Time, Jason Roberts was pronounced dead upon arrival, due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head from a 9 mm round, at Freeman Community Hospital in Freeman, South Dakota. Parties close to Jason will be notified by his family about wishes carried out in his will. As far as I know Chastity is going to receive Jason_s Series Ten Six-string Stratocaster guitar. I will be receiving a collection of his artwork, poetry, and literature. His website design business is no more. Sis (Shawn Casey) will receive a book that was going to be published entitled_Complitherion._ This is hard for me to say, but as far as I know, Scott gets the 9mm handgun.

As this event has devastated me, I will no longer be carrying out relations involving communication via the World Wide Web, and although my external e-mail will still be functional, I am no longer going to be participating in direct communication. I am receiving support from my family and friends in the _real world,_ and suggest you try to do the same. Jason was a real person, and if you have any sense of humanity I would not take this event lightly. I loved Jason, and I know that some people loved him too, and though some of us didn_t always get along with him, I think in the end we shall all miss him.

Now that he is gone, my days are going to be a little bit shorter, my nights are going to be a little bit colder, the sound of his voice is the only thing I will have to remember, and the marks of his pen on paper that he has made. I remember the times that we shared together, even though he was so far away, and we were so far apart. The dream that I was ever going to meet him and see that he was real, and hold his hand for once to know that he is not just ones and zeros, is now dead and gone, just like him.

Sincerely,
Gretchen

---

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Which has its own problems.

• Someone dying of a gunshot wound to the head would more likely be airlifted to Sioux Falls than driven to the Freeman Community Nursing Home.
• Someone calling from Seattle to report a likely suicide wouldn’t be told anything unless she were a relative.
• You can’t own a pistol if you’re under twenty-one–even in South Dakota.
• The pistol wouldn’t end up in this will.
  

But, Gretchen’s going offline for good. So there are no more answers from her. Instead, I hit the Freeman Courier’s website to watch the obituaries.
We assumed it was a scam. Jason’s not the type to kill himself; he’s the type to claim that he’d come up with something I trademarked in nineteen ninety–six. Figuring I couldn’t lose either way, I posted the news at gremlin.net; I also mentioned it to various mutual acquaintances in the chatroom; Hunter forwarded the Email to various concerned parties–the clients whom had hired Jason to do their FlashBased websites.
And life goes on.
Reports start coming in. People assure us that Jason is very much alive. His mother, for example, with whom he lives, assures us that someone’s joking–and has a very strange sense of humour.
Jason’s brother Michael, assures us the opposite by EMail. Oddly, Mike and Jason have the same writing style and typo technique.

From: “Michael Roberts” <mroberts73@hotmail.com>

To: Chastity

Subject: Losing my brother.

Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 20:49:03 -0600

Hello Chastity,

On Saturday night my brother Jason had shot himself in the head over two girls, and you happened to be one of them. I found your email address in his Outlook Express program, and after having our keyboard fixed I thought that I would write to you.

I never thought I would see him leave us so soon and when he was so young, just over you and a computer. It is not your fault, and no one is to blame for what happened. Jason just never took cheating very well and developed a depressive disorder because of it. Even though he himself cheated very often. I guess now he was pushed over the edge finally. I am sorry you done this to him.

I cried over his bed for hours along with my mom, dad, uncle, aunt, cousin, and grandmother. I could not believe he had a little hole in his head that done so much to everyone. I will miss him forever. Even as much as we’ve faught, I still loved my brother. Who has now been taken away from me. Just over urges and territory. No matter how many girls say they loved him, and sob over him, no one will love him as much as I have. No one. Even if you married him, I would still have loved him more. He was my flesh and blood, my other half, my life’s partner. He never meant enough to you girls to even visit him.

His Funeral Service will be held at St. Paul Lutheran Church next Thursday at 11:30 AM if you could make it, which I doubt. If you don’t care or ever had feelings for him, please don’t show up. It is important to us to weed out those who are not sincere about this. If you would like to express something to his memory you are welcome to show up.

Let me know how you are about this.

Thanks,

Michael Vernon Roberts

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So…Jason’s occasionally dead…depending on the source. No real need to post a retraction to the news of his suicide.
Until now.
Jason returned to life on 24th January. The news from Jason to Hunter: he didn’t have to pay me at all for the Flash opening–in fact, he’s going to sue me for libel…presumably because I posted the details of his death at gremlin.net. Fine.
So consider this the official retraction. Jason Roberts is not dead. Gretchen EMailed me to tell me that he was; he didn’t contest that for nearly a week.
Which is not to say that he wasn’t involved.

You [Chastity] have received a message!
Ejacula (ICQ#74661831) Wrote:
Did it take faking my own death to teach you something? That perhaps for these past few days things have not at all been “just about Chastity”. In fact anything and everything about yourself disapeared behind you. That for a moment in time you really stood in Jason Roberts’ shoes. Everything stood still, and death became very real to you. You thought about death and dying for days, what my family would have felt if I died right in front of them, what my body looked like when I was found, where I am now, where I will be burried, “did he really finally do it?”, and the memories I left in your head. Those things that I given you that rest in a box somewhere; my hair, my writtings, my face, my voice — Never to lay hands, or eyes on them. You realized that there was a part of me deep inside you, and you felt it die with my body. That eventhough I cheated on you, like you had feared all this time, that in the end it really didn’t matter — You loved me just as strongly and if not even more than she did. And you knew deep down “she didn’t deserve him”. You sat and reflected on your actions, and tried to ignore them and the pain. Everytime you came online and seen what remainder of my name was there, you wretched and heaved inside. You looked at the things you said to me, Gremlin, Hunter, Gretchen, and everyone in the past. You were affraid of me and everyone who was “too close”. You ran away when the truth became too hard to prove anymore, when it became too much work, eventhough you felt it digging a hole in your brain, slowly but surely, regardless. You said “I love you” to people you didn’t even know why you did, you felt it was what would get them to show you affection, and perhaps say it back. You never actually thought that someone would also mean it when they finally said it back to you — that’s why you shed tears the night you heard it from me; It was unsure, diferent, new…

And I am hardly innocent. I’ve burried myself under my own bullshit until I sufocated, and tried to drag you under or get you to accept it, or die from it in an act of desperation and my own self-disdain. I am a deciever and liar, more-so than anyone should ever be, or will. I am a hater of myself, and try to justify what it is about me by reflecting it outwards onto other people that I pretend to ‘love’ or ‘hate’. When in fact I felt indifferent to anyone but myself. My ego is the most destructive piece of shit that I own, and will try forever to control, but yet never will. It is my reins, my love, my hate, my indiference, my will to live, and my will to die. It is a breathing, living, bleeding, dying, and contravened entity that is the terminal disease that I will one day TRULEY die from.

No one started this mess but myself. This would have never happened if my ego would have never existed. My ravenous lust to control others and pretend that I could control myself all the while I tried has destroyed my relationship. It decayed from the inside out because of an errosion I could have stopped so long ago when I had the chance. Instead of finding a “Substitute Net-Girlfriend” while you were gone and away from me, and covering it up with passive-aggressive suspition, fake admiration for the both of you, and liberal doses of good acting to make myself try to “feel better about it”. When all in all, it wasn’t others I loved — It was once again my ego that I truley wanted to sleep with, adore, take care of, and raise. Not some human being, and nothing else — Just me, ME, ME. I loved the chains that were attached to you two, not the human beings at the end of them. I felt a lust for my control that tenured those leeshes, not those who were suffering at the far-end of them; As my ego sat on my shoulders whispering mind-numbing self-deceits into my ear: “You really love her Jason, yes, you really do…

Let all of the doctors, self-professed ‘intellectuals’, psychologists, and ‘specialists’ give you all of the advice their short-sighted hearts can muster, and try to pass it off as a cheap imitation wine/pain-suppressant. I am for once telling you the way things are to me, the way I see them. And I will tell you how I lied, what I done wrong, and why I did. As a final explaination:

I met you in August, and it was the most passionate relationship I have ever been in, in my life. There was enough magnetism, lust, potency, and charisma to keep it going for years. We talked nearly every night, and could not do much at all without being around eachother. I finally felt welcomed again by someone, and finally a part of someone. We even made serious plans, ideas for children, houses, moving in and living together, even were engaged at one point in time.

You then left to Calgary after telling me you just wanted to get out of London, and wanted to get out of that town. Moved in with your grandmother, spent a summer vacation, and began to distance yourself from me slowly; Leaving me clueless as to why you were. Things became more odd and disbanding as time went on. The phone calls started to stop, the contact started to slow down, and of course I obviously thought something was wrong, or you were showing signs of cheating like ‘the others’ have in the past. But verytime I braught it up, you would be so deffensive, angry, and combative I had no choice but to supress it for another 3 weeks — Letting it build and fester inside me. All because you took it as an offense. Than an incident at a bar with a guy named Ryan, a Jason fellow that professed love to you, and other things that began to wear on me. But DARE I say anything until I finally exploded and cornered you. And at the peak of this, you ironically just vannished into nothingness for months. At which point I officially thought you left me finally.

Durring this time, I thought you were never ever going to come back and I needed some way to deal with the loss. So I turned to my then long-time friend Gretchen, who I knew as an old Satanism Chat regular from the YaHoo room that I created years ago. I believed that it was it, no more Chastity…She’s gone now. And I slipped into a deep depression for about 40 days having Gretchen talk me out of suicide twice. This slowly made her grow on me, and I later found myself attached to her, seeing as somone like you was never likely to come along again. So I told her what was wrong, and what my story was — And that i thought you cheated on me, left me, and was never coming back. This braught us together.

So.
A few other things.
Jason was never a member of the Church of Satan, according to everyone–including himself; on his website, hidden in one of the little files about himself, he mentioned that he wasn’t with the CoS, and never had been. Some people speculate that his admission that he’s not involved is a defence against anything the CoS might do to him legally for claiming to be part of the organisation.
Jason was never particularly involved in Subheroes; I mentioned that we were doing the cartoon, and he asked if he could help; I told him what I tell everyone: if you can do one of the voices, feel free.
Jason didn’t write the Flash opening for PlutoDesigns.com. I can prove that I wrote it if necessary; he hasn’t paid me for it at all. Which is why I’ve never sent him the fixed version; the one at his site has a few problems which I’ve since fixed. But that version exists only on my computer. If he ever pays me, he can have it.
Otherwise, there’s not much else to tell. Gretchen is missing, but not missed. Hunter and Chastity have become friends–which is good, since she’s doing the music for Subheroes. And Jason…Jason is Pluto.
No man is an island. But Jason may well be a distant planet which everyone’s heard of, but which no one plans to visit; no one sees a need.
Of course, that’s just my opinion; don’t believe everything you hear….

–Gremlin

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