WRECK.

In a past life I was aboard a pirate's ship. Our ship was somehow sabotaged or wrecked so I was stranded on an Island. This would account for the sense of Identification that I felt with Guybrush Threepwood at the start of the second half of Curse of Monkey Island: that of the wide-eyed, mouth-agape young pirate hurtling towards a crash on Blood Island.

Upon this Island I made the acquaintance of several of the locals. They might very well have been native to the place, never having seen the World Beyond.

Not unlike Prospero, I civilized them. I taught them every thing I knew. And I was betrayed. I had to escape the Island. It is possible that they had all ready arranged their own escape. I tagged along, but they had forgotten their debt to me. They regarded me as a parasite and left me stranded upon the shores of an intermediate Island: one that has been a recurring motif in my amateur game designs.

Somehow I finally made my way back home. Perhaps I was rescued by my fellow pirates. At any rate, the matter is clear:

The Bullies were the Islanders. The Pirates were my true friends. Our social justice system all ways sides with the Islanders: the squatters who are of a less civilized breed and are unfit to operate in contemporary society without becoming parasitic. They abandoned me to my own devices, and what tools they left me with I could not use.

The TRUE liberals are the Pirates: those who partake in society but who do so in a way that shifts the power into the rightful hands.

The Islanders BECAME bullies via the contributions I had made. They stole of my magick stores. They joined the Mainland and promptly became agents of Evil. All ways weak of character, they were easily led, easily bought and sold. And I could never understand them. Their egalitarianism could only live in Fascism. My elitism became the only chance at redemption.

This explains the rift in my Spirit Circle.

Most of my false friends were "gifted" in some way. But they abused the gift. They were drawn to me with a degrees of self-entitlement that I could not comprehend, be it Freedman's initial slavishness for want of friends, K's sense of entitlement when his Mother OSTENSIBLY called me a "fair-weather" friend, or Tony's bold and outright insults, which transitioned all too smoothly into transparently narcissistic displays of "generosity".

That all stands in contrast to the hours I've spent in spirited conversation with my Soul Sisters etc. Not only women have impressed upon me in this way. Mendez was so as well. Perchance he can be redeemed still.

The Bullies took and took and left me with nothing. It was not after they gave that they began to act entitled; they had kept records on what I owed to them or to their "friends" and "society" from the very start. I simply mirrored them. I simply tried to hold them to their own standards. And they behaved as though they did not owe me that. They only tried to lord their artificial favours over me after I defied their much more arbitrary wills. It was never an inconvenience to them. And they had no overlying, heroic motive according to which to inconvenience themselves. They all ways wanted something back, and they ended up turning a profit at my expense.

By contrast, the Pirates showed me honour even in thievery. They did not pretend not to be thieves. They simply understood Loyalty and Justice. And they never weighed one against the other as though to choose one or the other.

I held up MORE than my end of my dealings with the Islanders. But they never gave me the proper credit. So as my resources and my wits dwindled, I would become more and more dependent upon them. Finally I forgot myself and what I'd had to offer, never having taken stock of my own greatness. They left me stranded as though I had been a scurvy leprous beggar. And that was what I believed myself to be. Until my pirate friends came. And like a Phoenix I rose again from the ashes. I remembered who I was. And I saw, with unprecedented equanimity, who my traitors had all ways been.

Dm.A.A.