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There Aint No Justice 081
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| There Ain't No Justice |
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| #81 |
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- Eulogy -
by Lazarus Long
I don't even know why I'm writing this, in this way, except that Tal would
have wanted it this way. He loved this magazine... he called it his own
personal slice of freedom. So here is my tribute to him, told in the way he
would have wanted the story told.
Tal Aaron Meta was born in Orlando Florida on August 31st, 1965. His birth
mother, for reasons unknown, gave him up for adoption to Edward & Joan Meta,
a young Navy couple. Perhaps one of the reasons his mother gave him up for
adoption was that she knew, somehow, that he would be born deformed. Not in a
gross, obvious manner, but deformed nonetheless.
The first few years of his life he spent in hospitals, while doctors worked
to correct the deformity he had been born with. After six years and nine
major operations, they succeeded. But the strain of the medical care and the
long days of seperation sometimes encountered by his adoptive parents caused
them to drift farther and farther apart, until they finally divorced.
He lived the next few years of his life in the small town of Browns Mills,
NJ., just outside Fort Dix, an Army training center. He attended the local
schools, and was generally accounted as being an excellent student. In those
days, he was an avid reader of mystery novels, ranging from The Hardy Boys,
Ellery Queen, Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie. Electronics also
interested him, and he became quite good at designing listening devices and
"bugs" with which to investigate his neighbors for possible secrets they
might be keeping. He was something of a "wild child"... a latchkey kid with
plenty of time on his hands. The sort of kid other kids mom's weren't exactly
thrilled to have their children hanging out with.
At the age of nine, his mother urged him to go and live with his father for
awhile, while she tried to put her life back in order (she'd suffered a minor
"breakdown" shortly before making this request). Edward Meta had remarried in
the years since his divorce, and had had two kids with his new wife, Dorothy.
So Tal moved away from Browns Mills and joined his father at Lakehurst Naval
Air Station.
It was at Lakehurst that Tal really began to become the person he would
always be in later years. Thrown into an unfamiliar town, one where everyone
was from somewhere else, or going somewhere else soon, he withdrew almost
totally into himself, and made very few friends. He also learned, over the
ten months he spent living with his father, just how much he hated the man.
Family disputes eventually led to his father's second divorce, and six months
later Tal himself ran away from his father to return to living with his
mother.
Joan Meta had moved to Jackson during this time, leaving Tal with all of a
mile and a half to run. After a years worth of generally slacking off and
being rebellious at school, Tal finally began pulling in straight A's again,
much to the pleasure of his teachers. It was also during this time that Tal
turned even further inward, denying himself the throes of adolescence to
explore the inner workings of his own mind.
The first years of his High School career, Tal was an avowed pacifist, albeit
one with a wiseass attitude and irreverent sense of humor. He studied such
eclectic courses of inner mastery as Zen and Yoga (although too far out of
shape to really use most of yoga, the breathing and centering techniques were
easily adapted to other things). He also studied the writings of Confuscious,
Machiavelli, Sun Tsu, and discovered science fiction, whereupon he left all
other reading-for-pleasure behind.
Tal was doing well at his mastery of the self until he began to notice that
more and more his mind kept wandering in a certain direction. A direction
often refered to as "behind himself", because thats where she almost always
was sitting. Angelique. She wasn't "beautiful", but she was intelligent,
pretty, and had a certain way of half-smiling at him that left him unnerved.
So he did the only thing he could do... he maneuvered his mother into moving
as far away from Jackson as they could get.
Somwhere between Jackson and Seaside Heights, Tal underwent a different sort
of metamorphisis. He ceased to be a pacifist, and began to openly study
"war". Not just physical fighting, but the mental gymnastics of debate and
dominance. He took up fencing, and some karate. He took to skulking about the
rooftops, usually to stargaze. But eventually came graduation, and Tal set
off to see the world courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.
Once firmly ensconced in Basic Training, Tal began putting many of the things
he taught himself in High School to use. He used his skills with "making
people do what he wanted" to maneuver himself into a position of moderate
authority in the pseudostructure of BT. When the leader of his flight began
to annoy everyone, he saw to it that that person was discredited and
"recycled" to another flight. But Tal did make one "mistake" during all of
this, he thought himself finally strong enough to take on an old "rival". He
got back in touch with Angelique.
Now, I'm not going to go into what that episode led too; Tal did that himself
in TANJ.074, and I am not competant to add to it. But during the years he
chased after Angelique in vain, he did many other things. He underwent
training to become an Inflight Refueling Specialist, or Boom Operator, flying
onboard a KC-135A Tanker. During his tenure in the Air Force, he was awarded
the Good Conduct Medal and the Achievement Medal, flew reconnisance support
missions in Alaska, played tag with Soviet "Bear" Bombers in Iceland, and
spent the month he was grounded in England seeing the countryside. To him,
the crowning achievement of his Air Force career (aside from getting out
early) was being a part of what was humorously called "North Africa Bomb Comp
'86", but known to the public as the raid on Libya.
After he got out of the Air Force, he came "home" to Seaside Hts, there to
chase Angelique until at long last they split up. Once home he spent a month
or two hopping from job to job, doing everything from working in a deli, a
liquour store, shovelling dirt (for all of four hours) until he finally came
to rest at the local lumberyard as a truck driver and jack-of-all-trades.
After the breakup with Angelique, as he has already said, he finally got
himself involved with computers. His earliest modem exploits involved the
Commodore 64 oriented Q-Link system on Telenet, which is where he wound up
meeting Ground Zero of A.T.I./Red Phone fame. This brought him into contact
with people like Android Pope, the Unbeliever, Horseride, and other members
of the "underground". When he finally began to call boards local to himself,
he found them childish and unfulfiling, so he decided that the only way to
show the locals how to REALLY run a BBS was to do so himself.
While he originally intended to call his first BBS "CyberSea Productions",
"Tessier Ashpool" was a much more fitting name for someone who called himself
Neuromancer at the time. Debate over the name brought him in contact with
local personalities like Midnight Raider and Sage, with whom he was good
friends for quite a number of years. They later together helped found the
group "Panther Modernz" that was the original driving force behind the
"Modernz" e'mag.
Eventually, Tal's explorations of the computer underground drew attention to
himself, and he was busted courtesy of U.S. Sprint. Again, Tal did the story
of his own bust, arrest and prosecution in previous TANJ issues, so I will
not cover old ground here. By the time of his bust, however, he had already
met and been dating Cool One (better known as Judy to most) for almost a
year. As he'd declared bankruptcy only a few months before he was busted, he
had enough free cash on hand to rapidly put together an even better computer
setup and put his next BBS, "TANSTAAFL" up in short order.
With the return of Tal to active BBSing came the birth of this very e'mag I'm
writing for right now. Originally founded by Tal so that he wouldn't have to
endlessly retell the story of his "persecution", it eventually grew into a
well established fixture of the electronic scene, with a score of writers and
who knows how many support sites. Sometime early the next year, Tal and Hegz
finally solved the complexities of echomail & fidonet technology without
benefit of pestering anyone else, and founded TLSNet. A month or two later,
Tal used the same knowlege to found what he called "MontyNet", a small, two
BBS network that eventually grew into the monstrosity now known as GodNet.
GodNet, like TANJ, was part of Tal's vision of freedom of speech. A place
where anyone could say anything, where no belief was too silly to be
ridiculed for sheer spite, and where (mostly) he could do as he damn well
pleased without fear of censure from above. While GodNet was initially just a
fixture of the local area, he eventually interested a sysop out in Arizona in
joining (Grinning Coyote) and GodNet suddenly became semi-national.
Soon after "going ld", GodNet was offered a merger with another network
called SoftNet. In theory, the merger was a good one; GodNet was strong on
messages, but had no visible file echoes, while SoftNet had a great file area
but weak message areas. However, relatively soon after the merger, Fetus,
SoftNet's ZC and then in charge of GodNet's file echoes dropped out of sight
after several cross country bounces. Tal tried to keep both ends of the
network running, but eventually was forced to settle for a median level of
activity in both areas.
As the years passed, GodNet eventually spread until it was nationwide, with
systems in several states, as well as Canada and finally, Australia. Tal was
fairly well pleased with it as a whole... while it had its occasional
problems, for the most part he felt it was a success.
In TANJ.074, Tal spoke of his life entering a "new cycle", but,
unfortunately, unknown to him, it was the final cycle. Several weeks after
writing 074, Tal did indeed hear from Angelique again, and for the last few
months of his life he and she had come to understand each other far better
than they ever had before. Mind you, she was still married, and happily so,
and Tal was engaged himself, but he learned many things. Like why she'd
REALLY broken up with him so long ago. And that the love they'd felt for each
other had never really died.
But, since they were both happy in their current relationships, they showed
an amazing amount of adult restraint and learned at last how to be just
friends. (Although Tal had a fairly rough time of it <g>) And his life with
Cool One was really just beginning to take off itself; they had moved in
together early in January '94, and were living together blissfully until the
middle of the month when Tal was involved in a near fatal accident involving
stairs and a refrigerator. Unknown to either of them at the time, during
Tal's convelesance he finally fullfilled a lifetime dream and fathered a
child.
However, earlier today, March 18th, 1994, Tal was struck by an out of control
car and killed. He leaves behind his fiancee, Cool One, and their unborn
child. it is my hope that both TANJ and GodNet will continue without Tal to
guide them.
Tal was a real whirling son of a bitch. He'll be missed.
Tal Meta - 8/31/65 - 3/18/94
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