I was alone and fueling my own self-destructive spiral. Now, I did have one thing which granted me solace: my MUD. For those of you who don’t know, I have invested several years of my life into an online roleplaying community. Yeah, I’m a geek. I own 20 sided dice, too. Anyway, what offered me my greatest joy at that time was a collection of items I had on the MUD. These items were unique, most of them one of a kind. Each of them represented a player who had come and gone that I had known and liked or memorable events to me. Each item of this massive collection held strong sentimental value for me. One night as I was sitting on the MUD, as asshole named Horak decided to exploit a bug in the code of the game that he used to deliberately destroy, irrevocably, all the items in my collection. All my memories of people I actually connected to over the past several years of my life when there was no one I could find outside of the MUD to. And those memories were all I had left of those people, each of them gone for good from my life. Those items destroyed were what I found comfort in during times of depression. Now they were all gone and never coming back.

So let me ask everyone who said she was justified this question: when that happened, should I have found Horak and strangled him in his sleep? Would that have been my best option? Could you honestly support me if I’d’ve done so? If not, how the hell can you support Mrs. Wright? —John Fish —“That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was ME! (John Fish)

John is a student in my Intro to Literary Study class, where we discussed Susan Glaspell’s Trifles. It’s a one-act play about the murder of a farmer, told from the perspective of two women who unravel the crime, which the playwright presents as revenge for the death of a canary.

Most of the class thought that the death of the canary was the last straw, and that the murder of John Wright was justified.

In class, I had the students all stand up and move to one side of the room if they thought the murder was justified, and the other if they thought it was not. When I asked of the John Wright had killed a baby, would his murder have been justified? There was a huge motion from “no” to “yes.” Then I asked whether the murder would be justified if, instead of killing his wife’s pet canary, he had killed a cricket. And what about if he had killed his wife’s pet worm? The class was far less willing to excuse Mrs. Wright for wanting to get revenge for the death of something less valuable than a canary.

John’s question goes even further… what if Mr. Wright had destroyed Mrs. Wright’s virtual property?

We’ll have to revisit this topic in class next time…