7 January 2003: Send in the Clowns

Wrote a huge amount on the Moot Zoo discussion board yesterday.  More of the ongoing Kabbalah discussion (most of my posts to that thread will eventually get cleaned up and added to the Notes page of this site), and a discussion of fantasy films that turned into a discussion of Jodorowsky.  And Opsimath, who is creating a roleplaying rules system, offered up the first chapter for group critique, and I stayed up too late writing up my critique. 

The Moot Zoo rocks.  For a while, I had a link at the bottom of my Tribe page, that would take you to a page of instructions for how to register for the Moot Zoo.  Opsimath wrote to me a couple of days ago and asked me to take that link down, because he didn't want random creepy strangers coming into the Moot Zoo and being all sucky.  I wrote back and said that I didn't think that this site had any appeal to anyone outside our circle.  He responded by sending me a report, provided by his web host, of the search criteria that various random creepy strangers had been using when they stumbled upon his personal site.  It turns out that all manner of horrid people had ended up at his site as a result of searches for such unwholesome topics as "erotic interrogation," "free spells to make you thin," and "Andrew Reichart."  And many of these visitors had apparently ended up exploring his site extensively.

As an experiment, I picked a page from this site at random and skimmed it for phrases that might lead random creepy strangers to this site.  The page I picked (the poem "The Loser's Choir") contains the phrase "pederast clowns."  Immediately my mind was flooded with images of all the pederast clowns out there, looking for pederast clown 12-step programs or pederast clown porn sites or pederast clown discussion boards, whose Google searches would bring them to my site... and thence, driven by the sort of desperate alchoholic loneliness that only a pederast clown truly knows, to the Moot Zoo. 

Naturally, after considering it in that light, I took down the link to the Moot Zoo registration instructions, as Opsimath had requested.  If you want to join it now, you'll have to email me for instructions, and also convince me that you're not a pederast clown.

I just had the disturbing thought that many search engines return their search results starting with the sites that contain the greatest number of occurences of the search criteria.  Which means that every time in this entry that I've used the phrase "pederast clowns," I've further increased the number of pederast clowns who will eventually stumble onto this site.

For the sake of all of them, present and future, let me say right now: get help.  Being a clown is a sacred trust, no different, at its core, than being a priest or a physician.  Don't give in to the Beast that drives you, and don't give in to despair and hopeless self-loathing, either.  Help is out there.  Redemption is one of the few things in this world that is available to anyone at any time, and all it takes is a choice. 

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I'm an especial fan these days of reciprocal links - everyone with a website puts up links to their friends' websites, and if you find out that someone has a link to your website, you put up a link to theirs. 

Support your friends' creative ventures.  This is one of the core principles by which I live. 

If you're reading this, and you've got a website, check out the Tribe page and make sure your site is on it.  If it's not, send me the URL.

Please note that I will not put up links to pederast clown porn sites.