He was a hacker, a true denizen of the Internet, and a poet at times. A word in one poem told all: “peripheral.” It means a printer, a modem, a scanner, or any other gadget that plugs into the main computer, yet is not one of the _very_ most important parts. And that’s how some women on the Net saw him, the human equivalent of a printer, someone on the peripheries of their minds. He was among their friends but not their lovers. His own love went unreturned. So he called his poem “Song of a Peripheral”; he posted it to alt.romance, soc.couples, alt.support.loneliness, and alt.support.shyness. It read, in part: _You feel you’re nothing special in her life. You never get a sense that she wants you to be close to her. You’re just a pleasant, polite friend around the periphery of her world. But you still care for her, because she is that special woman—_ _A sweetest heart who cares for the well-being of others. A most sensuous soul who is full of life and passion. And a beautiful intellect who brings realist precepts to balance out those disillusions in the world._ _... It’s painful to feel you’re just a Peripheral, isn’t it?_ “How could I _not_ print part of ‘Song’ in this chapter,” I thought, and wrote Lee Chen for permission. Back came a letter from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary in Canada. People on the Internet love to end messages with “signatures” telling how they see the cosmos, and Lee had picked a quote that looked as gentle and logical as his poem. The speaker was the President of the United States in the movie _Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love the Bomb_. And the words went, “You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room.” Sometimes I thought that in the battle of the sexes, certain areas of the Internet could be that war room. No man could claim to be a superhunk or millionaire without risking a female retort in the vein of, “Yeah, sure.” The Net was rich with put-downs worthy of an old Tracy-Hepburn movie. Clearly the men had started this war, however. “When a female shows up,” said the author of an explanatory file on alt.sex.wanted, “clueless folks tend to e-mail ‘wanna fuck’ messages no matter _what_ she has said. This means many of them don’t post, only listen.” Fights had also broken out between the gays and certain heterosexuals, who came up with the witless fag jokes, and who, in turn, had drawn equally stupid remarks about “breeders.” In this sexual war, the biggest losers were SMHGs. That was Netspeak for Straight Male Horny Geeks, who, as noted earlier, suffered from the laws of supply and (lack of) demand.