The mathematical ratio of the width of the vesica piscis to its height is the square root of 3, or 1.7320508... (since if straight lines are drawn connecting the centers of the two circles with each other, with the two points where the circles intersect, two equilateral triangles join along an edge). The ratios 265:153 = 1.7320261... and 1351:780 = 1.7320513... are two of a series of approximations to this value, each with the property that no better approximation can be obtained with smaller whole numbers. Archimedes of Syracuse, in his On the Measurement of the Circle, uses these ratios as upper and lower bounds.
One of the numbers in these ratios (153) also appears in the Gospel of John (21:11) as the number of fish Jesus caused to be caught in a miraculous Draught of Fish, and significance has sometimes been attached to this.
The vesica piscis has been the subject of mystical speculation at several periods of history, and is viewed as important in Freemasonry and some forms of Kabbalah. More recently, numerous New Age authors have interpreted it as a yonic symbol and claimed that this, a reference to the female genitals, is a traditional interpretation.
- Wikipedia, the Vesica Piscis
Way back in the day, when AOL and Prodigy were still competing, online porn was known as alt.binaries.supermodels, and I was writing inappropriately harsh critiques on Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, I possessed the screen name Braddunc. This was the graceful combination of my last and middle names. Kids, we barely knew what computers were back then. Freshmen or sophomore year I discovered Telnet and MUDs, and had a lot of fun learning the bare bones of writing and creating games. At the same time, I was developing my prose voice upsetting depressed teenagers by helping them realize how shitty their poetry actually was. What can I say, it was a calling.
In school, I wrote two stories, The Life and The Catalyst, and my teachers and I both simulatenously discovered I had something of a passion. I was officially becoming a writer. Anyway, the name Braddunc stayed the same all the way through high school, then into college.
My stay at Oxford was very brief. It was a glorious time: Napster was in full bloom, everyone chain smoked, and every room contained a different drug. As an aspiring writer, I enjoyed conversing with my fellow students on the online forums. Sophisticated subjects, such as bong selection or which movie Peter Jackson directed, Evil Dead or Dead Alive. There were one or two interesting subjects to be found, however, because I created them.
There was one really gay post (I think the guy who posted it was gay, actually, but that has nothing to do with how gay his post was) involving AIDS ribbons. Something like, "Support AIDS day and wear your AIDS ribbon." Or whatever. So, because I have absolutely no willpower, I decided to reply outlining my dislike for ribbons. Not my dislike for the cause behind it, or for the people wearing the goddamn ribbons. Not even my dislike for AIDS, which, believe me, they somehow would have found a problem with. Just the ribbons. Why? Because something inside me was wired to lash out against all kinds of conformity, just like those fruits on Chicken Soup, and the AIDS ribbon was in front of my face at that moment. What do you expect when you give an 18 year-old a Hunter S. Thompson book?
The Universe might as well have exploded. On the Oxford online forums, anyway. A lot of people were offended, mostly know-it-all females salivating to apply a big liberal "fuck you" to the first available bigot. It's crazy, because I'm a liberal...one of the dwindling few who still considers himself a Democrat, in fact. So I was surprised to be called a homophobe and other words they'd read about in Ms., concepts that my feminist mom had lovingly drilled into my head my entire life.
I wasn't about to just accept being slandered, so I denied the accusations and attempted to calmly explain my side of it. I made light of things. I probably quoted George Carlin. All I'm saying is, I tried my best to make it something other than "I so am NOT a homophobe! My five best friends are gay!" The reply to this incredibly diplomatic public statement was a block from all of the forums by the student administrator.
What was probably just a digital fuck-gasm applied by a power hungry sophomore with a passive aggressive issue I instead interpreted as a violation of my civil rights. I tracked the girl down, I can't remember her name now, but we ended up in a pretty heated argument in the middle of the hallway. The end result was that I had learned, more or less, enough of the right people hated me. Luckily the forum system wasn't entirely fascist, and the first block was a short probationary period. The battle was on.
Things got uglier from there. I won't attempt to rehash even some of the discussions posed during the next couple weeks, or the permanent ramifications they had on some of its participants, but let's just say it would have been enough to fill an average quality LCM Original Production. The end result was my summons to the Dean's office, in which I was privately told, essentially, to shut up or they'd find a way to suspend me. Luckily for them, I would soon find ways to suspend myself.
Well...I did shut up, for a little while. In the meantime, my friends and I set about completely destroying ourselves in every imaginable way.
"As the last astrological sign, Pisces is associated with...the advent of not only death but, the Zodiac being a wheel, reincarnation, leading to the premier sign of Aries and its representation of birth. The sign of Pisces is, in effect, the alpha and the omega - a phrase associated with Christ, the primary archetypal figure associated with Pisces - as depicted by the sign's opposite-facing-fish symbol. From an early age, guys born into this sign live their life in a metaphoric womb-tomb state where they let dissolve the unwanted memories of the past as they reincarnate, indeed breed themselves, into somebody new." - Starsky and Cox, Sextrology
One specific occassion involved an AOL IMing session with a complete stranger (kids, this is where we come back to the original story), a friend using my screen name: good ole' trusty Braddunc. In the interest of protecting the guilty, the specifics of those events will be saved for another story. Let's just say I had a really good reason to create a screen name that had absolutely nothing in common with my real name. There may have been some immediate inspiration at the time, but to my memory it just popped into my head: JimmyLex. I don't know. See what comes to your head when you're trying to come up with a name that has absolutely nothing in common with your name and you're having a panic attack at the same time.
Then college and I parted ways for a year or two. That's another story for later.
JimmyLex puttered along as a screen name and later, an Earthlink email when everyone jumped ship from AOL, until I happened along a website called Elftown. For those of you who don't know what Elftown is, and nobody does, I will attempt to temper your collective groan by saying that it isn't as bad as it sounds. It's basically a Myspace for artists, especially fantasy artists (hence the name Elftown), but with more freedom when it comes to putting up artwork. There's the added benefit that, like I said, nobody knows about Elftown, so there are not as many douche bags to weed through. I met a lot of really talented artists on there, the cream of the crop as far as I could tell, and ended up with one or two people that I would consider friends, of the internet sort anyway.
At the time, I was deep into writing my comic book, still as-yet-unpublished, Bitter/Sweet, and I wanted to find an artist to draw it. Yeah, I was pretty naive back then. Regardless, I was prompted to invent a new handle. I was working on something of a persona then, as a budding young writer, so I didn't want to go with the usual JimmyLex. Any problem with personal identification that had concerned me before had expired long ago. Still, I didn't want anything too obvious in case enough people decided they hated me again. I'd seen The Wicker Man.
So I wanted something that sounded like I might be crazy and unpredictable, so I accidently misspelled the word delirium with an extra "e," delerium. I decided to keep a little something from the old name, so I put the original J on the end. Thus was born DeleriumJ.
See, the thing about nerds is (and yes, I do qualify), when you get a lot of them together at once, they tend to do some really nerdy things. Take LARPing, for instance. Personally, I would never dress up like a dwarf and go hit people with a nerf bat. I've already been 5. But when the best group of artists on Elftown formed the White Rabbit Society, I admit, I got caught up in the popularity contest.
I became Delerium, the only writer in an imaginary club of artists pretending to be rabbits. The whole thing was a lot of fun, filled with a ton of art with all kinds of influences, from Alice in Wonderland to Hellraiser. A bunch of them drew characters from Bitter/Sweet for me. One lady, the co-founder, asked me to write a twisted rendition of Snow White to go in her illustrated storybook. My favorite part of the White Rabbits was what eventually became Polyphonic Prose. I can't take credit for it; in fact, I don't even know the dude's real name, but Bonedust was the first and the best. I clumsily joined in and eventually got a little better. I'm not really a poetry guy; and I'm really not a freestyle guy; so it was virgin territory, but more than anything it was fun simply trying to communicate in a clever, lyrical, and sometimes cryptic language. Non-writers would probably find Polyphonic Prose almost unreadable, but I think other writers can appreciate its bizarre twists and turns.
The comic book thing fizzled. I was shocked to find that, yes, artists actually want to get paid for their work, and it isn't so easy after all to simply bowl them over with your talent. Also, the ancient parable, you show me an amateur comic book artist, I'll show you a comic project that will never be finished. Attention turned away from comic books, over to screenplays, then back around to prose.
A lot of real life happened around here, a lot of shifting friendships, mostly because I was a flaky, antisocial bastard. I got a new girlfriend, who intruduced me to her circle of friends. One of those friends was Kristie, who, through a series of events once again reserved for a later story, became the love of my life and is sitting next to me as I type.
DeleriumJ had officially faded into obscurity. My mood at Elftown is the same it's been for a while: "You'll see me again some day."
Almost six years later, in 2010, a lot more life has happened, and here I find myself sitting in front of a new laptop, with a new blog entitled Life and Times of DeleriumJ, wondering what the hell I'm going to say to you.
I don't know what we'll find here, but I promise, we'll get through it together.
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