From: mbr2@quads.uchicago.edu (Curious Of All Natures)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Interactive musings [long but deep]
Date: 12 Sep 92 22:50:43 GMT
Reply-To: mbr2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: Universtiy of Chicago


	Wooden and metal legs define a quiet space around Curious Of
All Natures.  He remains beneath Nick Chopper's chair, watching with
interest the influx of still more wondrous persons.  Tap, tap.  

	He has no glass to throw with the toast to diversity, even
though he's legal now.  He hasn't morphed in so long that several
newer folk don't even realize he's one of the resident shapeshifters.
A slow-motion feline blink.  Tap, tap.

	He is bemused and slightly troubled, tap.  An intuition of a
few months ago is climbing back up his spine, tap.  Something about
the thinness of net.communication, the joys and pains of challenging
emotionally laden conversation, and his reasons for being here, tap.

	Flick-flick.  

	Tap he doesn't know really what to make of this intuition.
He'd answered it before by swearing off, with Suzanne Vega, direct
language, and delivered himself the challenge of forging his
communications otherhow.  Tap but it's difficult, he's discovered,
for folks to interact with depersonalized phenomena - interactiveness
is definitely part of Callahan's magic for him.  Tap tap swish.

	("Damn"TAP, he thinks, "here I am trying to put more of myself
into the Place, striving to reach out for involvement and risky
interaction, yet doing so by delivering my thoughts to an omniscient
narrator who doesn't seem to follow anyone else around.  There's no
dialectical inroads to my story!")

	He's got a point there... wait, I've got it.

	Under Nick's chair you notice COAN sprawled out and gazing off
into space.  You wonder what's going through his mind.  Watching his
metronomic tail for a while, you are suddenly overcome by the
certainty that he's thinking all this.  Somehow you know that COAN
would not be at all discombobulated if you responded to his
mentalatings as if he'd said them aloud.  Thrilled, actually.

		Tap tap tap.  Tap tap tap.
	He's troubled by an internal conflict too.  He's been learning
that challenging fruitful dynamics are the fulfillment of his life.
But so often that constitutes himself or other people waving around
their scary painful fears and scars... it is good to seek these out?
He doesn't want to dig around in other people's gardens.  He knows
it's far better telling people how they're beautiful inside, rather
than telling people how they're off-track or screwed up in some
fashion.  But he's into nurturing, and helping people turn their lives
to new directions.  And it's not happening much.  Somehow, through the
ubiquitous ASCII filter, he can see off-trackedness far better than
beauty.  And there's a paucity of scary painful anything visible nowadays.
		Tap tap shiver stretch...... recover.

	Did he come to the Place solely for other peoples' benefit
tap?  Surely not, given Spider Robinson's narrative predestination of
patrons.  COAN too (attn, sjane!) has an unburdening that scritches at
the recesses of his mind from time to time.  What holds him back tap?
Isn't he into nurturing and new directions, don't those involve scary
painful fears and scars from time to time?  Tap tap giraffe tap.

	It's trust, he knows.  He trusts them - they've earned it.
But would they still trust him?  Would they understand and believe
that this is no longer a force in his life, that the person he is now
is so different, so so different, from the protagonist of those
decade-old memories?  Stillness silence sadness sigh.

	It's a dilemma.  Life is built of them.  Perhaps others have a
similar reservation.  

	Curious Of All Natures stands up, cricks his jaw, licks his leg
to rub his face with, and is at a loss for words.


Matt Ryan, anyone for a game of duelling narrators?,
mb-ryan@uchicago.edu                Curious Of All Natures
==================================  ====================================
If I'm dreaming, never let me wake. You'll never see the end of the road
If I'm awake, never let me sleep.   When you're traveling with me.
               -old chinese fellow                        -Crowded House     
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Organization: Sophomore, Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA