And I watch him fade from me, mind gone long before his body turns, and I can raise no hand in protest, no scrap of voice, I must kneel and wrap my arms around me and tell myself I will not die for want of him--

This isn't what I wanted to talk about.

I'm still concerned that the dragons on the grid now belong to the gods who set it up.

Let's be fair here--it took a friend from elsewhere to point this out, but it's true nonetheless--the Lindens don't have to respect free speech, fair practices, or even business concerns of businesses not theirs. I let myself forget this, true. But now I've remembered, and...it's more acid than the anger from earlier.

Because it's their playground, essentially, we're forming our societies, interrelationships, ways of behaving both right and wrong...as individuals who can be banned, evicted, sent home--at any time, because nothing in there is ours. Even the textures we bring in, the snapshots from other lives, the music we play, the art and objects we create--we created all of it with the tools they gave us.

The Lindens give, the Lindens can goddamn take away, and it is their right to do so. It's their home, not ours. Their rules do apply.

But it galls nonetheless. There is a small voice within me, stamping her foot and saying it's unfair, this treatment, that they don't have the right to do this to us, their citizens, the ones who have chosen to live our lives in their world...

...but fair? Fair doesn't matter in business. Fair doesn't matter, free speech doesn't matter, diplomacy and democracy don't matter. It is not a democracy, it is, it has always been, a commercial enterprise, a benevolent dictatorship.

That they've hidden the claws caught in the silks should not have let us conclude the claws weren't there.

And all this is too cynical a topic for this morning.

*spins off into limbo, curling into a small ball, sighing*