At "Hidden Beach" on Cedar Lake this past summer I was minding my own business and catching some rays for the bod when a guy clothed in greasy-seamed denim from head to toe came up and chatted the hell out of me. He was the kind of guy who keeps talking even when you have tuned him out but is so nice that you can’t tell him to go away. He did not look like a homeless person but like someone who spends a week on one friend’s couch, a week on mom’s couch, and so on.
After hearing about his current and past living situation, his bike trip up north, his past alcoholism, his current drugs of choice, and other parts of his life story, he began to complain about how Hidden Beach has changed. It’s not what it used to be, he said. "Back in the day there weren’t all these young people, the stroller crowd, the police, blah blah blah. We used to be able to drink and smoke out here all we wanted and sleep in them bushes over there before they cut them down."
Though he didn’t say so, it became clear that what he missed was this: the days when he could get black-out drunk without having the police or paramedics being called. Eventually a cop did come around, and (surprise, surprise) they knew each other by name. This dirty strip of sand was so precious to my chatty new friend that he was willing to hold forth on how it had been ruined until he was red in the face. He joined with some others there, who also looked semi-homeless and a little drunk.
In a similar way I have noticed that on 4chan b/, a message board devoted mostly to anime, jerking off, and trolling which I visit every once in a while for these purposes, there are vicious comments directed at anyone perceived as a "newfag." Commenters on the site are constantly complaining about newfags, which they also refer to simply as cancer. Yet most people on the site seem to be teenagers, despite the huge amount of gore, pornography and cruelty there.
Both places – the dirty little beach and the fapping website – show how strong emotions get when people feel something is their own, no matter how pathetic it is. People get so upset when their own little mountain of shit is threatened.
pseudoisaac 