Kettleman, California.

We’re at (an air express) facility, waiting on a load bound for Abilene, Texas. Mara is sleeping. Or I hope she is. She’s supposed to drive out. That’s a good thing, since I haven’t had much sleep and I have too much on my mind to get any.

I’ve been lying awake for the past hour or so thinking about Pagan Tea House. We have discussed washing our hands of the whole crowd. We thought about either canceling the domain name or turning it over to someone else, and just walking away. Neither of us is involved in any of the PTH’s anymore. We’re on the road all the time. How could we be? Most of the friends we had online have moved on. There really doesn’t seem to be much in the way of PTH to appeal to us. So why waste our time, energy and resources on something that we don’t really care about anymore?

Up until this morning, I still thought like that. Then an idea hit me. Mara will probably want to smack me for thinking like this, but I’m not quite ready to give up on the idea of the Pagan Tea House.

I think my biggest mistake was in assuming, naively, that the PTH Group could build bridges between the various PTH chat rooms. I genuinely thought that the people in those different locations would feel a kinship with one another; a shared history and sense of belonging. But, of course, I found out rather quickly that, if anything, what existed between the PTH’s was rivalry and prejudice. That’s why the PTH Group failed. You can’t build a bridge between two opposing shores of a river if you’re in the middle and no one will let you come ashore. I think people liked the idea of the PTH Group, but no one really cared. Like most people, the denizens of the various PTH’s just wanted to be entertained. They didn’t care about the history of the Pagan Tea House.

So here I was, just about ready to wash my hands of the whole thing, when I had a sudden idea. It must have been an interesting one, because I haven’t been able to get back to sleep.

Essentially, I don’t want to give up on Pagan Tea House. Or, more specifically, I suppose I want to make sure that no one can cash in on it financially. We had sort of forgotten that bit. Bridges be damned, one point of the PTH Group was to serve as a calculated bluff to convince people that the name “Pagan Tea House” had been trademarked, and that therefore no one could use it commercially. That’s still a noble enough goal in my opinion. I couldn’t care less what PTH users are doing on EFnet, UnderNet or on America Online. But I do still care, passionately, about the legacy of the first Pagan Tea House and the ideals and aspirations which surrounded it. I don’t want to see that die. And I certainly don’t want to see it used by undeserving persons for their own personal gain.

So. What do we do about that?

I think that there needs to be a new Pagan Tea House. That’s what.

The UnderNet crowd has nabbed the domain paganteahouse.org for their web page. The EFnet crowd talked about grabbing paganteahouse.net, but never did. I’ve kind of taken to the idea of different PTH's having their respective domains. Of course, the PTH Group is a little out of place with paganteahouse.com, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

I think there should be a Pagan Tea House on the Internet itself, that reflects the qualities of the original PTH instead of serving the interests of folks on a particular IRC network, or the fun-seekers on American Online. I had tried to implement something like that with the Virtual IRC server that our Internet Host, VServers, had provided. But I could never get an PTH alias to lay over windhavennetwork.com to make it look like there was a PTH IRC server (which is kind of what I was shooting for). Since that didn’t really work (and the IRC program seemed to have a nasty habit of disabling itself) I gave up on the idea. But what if we tried to make it float again? Instead of trying to make it look like there was a PTH IRC server, why not just put a PTH on the Windhaven Network virtual IRC server? Admittedly, I would still rather have a dedicated PTH server, but that’s not really an option at this point.

Well, that depends, actually.

Here’s the crazy part.

I’m thinking about reserving paganteahouse.us if it isn’t already taken. If I can find a Virtual IRC type script that will let us turn it into an IRC server, there is your PTH IRC server. Park paganteahouse.us on its own space and use that as the new Pagan Tea House. Everything on that server could be slanted toward Pagan Tea House, and that might give the idea accessibility to the larger public. The paganteahouse.com domain could then be used as a web page for the Pagan Tea House channel on that PTH IRC server. And that channel would benefit from the traffic with the paganteahouse.com domain still generates.

It would mean getting another server, though. That would be a touchy issue with Mara, but I think it might be worth running past her. Especially if I abandon the idea of getting a dedicated server from Gossamer Threads (which is an idea which has caused quite a few fights between us).

The point here is that I could get something up and running in a short period of time. Then we could always do something more dramatic later on, such as move things over to a dedicated server. Or, hell, we could actually move the PTH Virtual IRC thingie over to a dedicated server and make it an actual IRC server. There’s an idea, huh?

Well, there’s a lot of ideas to work out between now and then.

Right now I would be satisfied to create a new Pagan Tea House on Windhaven Network’s Virtual IRC server, and turn paganteahouse.com into a web page for the channel. The more elaborate idea of creating a dedicated PTH server will have to wait. But I think that I should see if the name is available and, if it is, nail it down.

I suppose that, in a roundabout kind of way, I’ve just stated to myself that I’m not ready to give up on the idea of Pagan Tea House. I think it deserves a chance to flourish. And if we could do something on our own, completely divorced from any existing channel politics, it just might have a chance of working. If we start from scratch, we can keep a hand on things and make sure that this Pagan Tea House doesn’t become what all the others have.

Now if I can just talk Mara into it.