In light of all of the stuff that's been going on starting at the end of June with the whole loot departure and then the fallout between my quit group and the mods / admins, I figured I'd put another entry into my introduction thread. This may or may not help anybody, but it'll be here for me to come back to and read when I feel the need.
During the last 192 days since I quit using tobacco, one thing has been constant on this site. That constant is that nothing is really constant. Day to day things might appear to be the same, but over time you see just how different things are today than they were just a week ago, or even yesterday. For example, between me posting roll this morning and then my next visit to the site, about a dozen more people had posted roll in May '14. During that time, two long term members of May bumped other members. I fixed them both, but that is neither here nor there. In the span of less than an hour, dozens of new posts popped up today. Numbers changed by a value of plus one from all of the various numbers posted yesterday. This board is constantly changing. That's on the molecular level, but wait there is more. On a much larger scale, things are changing all the time too. Quitters join our ranks every day, quitters fall off our rolls every day. Stalwart quitters like Loot and company totally abandon ship and leave all they've known about quitting for nearly a decade, literally overnight in a great big epileptic seizure style temper tantrum. Wedge goes from posting every day with May '14 to just fucking disappearing, only come back and say, yeah, I've been gone a while, then to disappear again. Lipi and Sapper's feud goes from the verge of the third world war to the two of them being quit brothers in solidarity against half assed cavers, then sapper drops off for a while and then comes raging back against November. May as a whole goes from being the "darling" quit group of the KTC admin / mods to being the subject of severe mistrust and concern about perceived actions of impropriety such as creating fictitious user names and blaming admins of doing the same. Again, everything changes, and not just a little bit, but drastically. The ebb and sway of the tide of change within KTC are violent and turbulent. If you don't climb out and stand upon the shores for a little bit, you'll get so caught up in the rise and fall of the waves of change that you can easily get sucked under and swept out to sea.
But in all that change, in all that chaos and turbulence, there is a constant. That constant is the core group of quitters with whom you make your way through these rough waters. That group is formed early on in the quit fog, and forged through continuous daily interaction. Think about it, some of us have probably communicated more with our quit brothers in the past 6 months (for those of us in May) than our own wives or kids. Is that right? Who knows, some psychologists would probably have a field day analyzing mayhem's antics, but it is what it is, and we remain steadfast in our resolve to remain quit. It is for this reason that we don't easily accept new quitters in and amongst our tightest inner circle, which for those of us in May consists ONLY of others in May. We allows others into the second or third order circles, but the innermost is reserved for those of us who forged this ring together. The point is that the constant is the quit group. This is why when a member of that quit group caves, it's devastating to the rest of the inner circle members, because the constant has been violated. Now, nothing is stable, everything is in flux. The board continues to be a torrent of waves crashing and capsized ships. The survivors have to band together with fewer members than they had just a day prior. The shipwrecked crew is shrinking and stability must be reestablished.
