Well, let's see. It was the mid-90's. I had been running an online magazine via BBS for about 5 years. One of the features I'd started was this . . . well today you'd call it a weblog. I was making posts as a 600 lb Siberian Tiger named Shaman. It was a complicated story. It was all about the aftermath of divorce and post-divorce dating and the whole schtick was known to my readers and it borrowed heavily from other fiction projects that were going on at the time on my BBS. Shaman was kind of a "spinoff" from a virtual after-hours scene called "The Spanish Moon." You could find me usually laying at the feet of a gorgeous woman named Red who sat in the shadows in the back of the bar. The Spanish Moon was, in turn, a spinoff from a virtual coffee house called "The Little Further Inn."
Somewhere about mid-95, I decided that I needed to expand my real-life dating horizons and I asked some friends about using other BBS's and the new thing, the Internet, to find dates. Somebody pointed me to a place called The Jungle Vine. Being a Cincinnati-centric kind of guy, I thought it was a Bengals bulletin board. I used the handle Shaman. Suddenly, I had all kinds of women wanting to date the new tiger. It did not occur to me until waaay to late that . . . what do you do on a Jungle Vine? Yep, it was a swingers board. Ooops.
The actual name, Shaman, comes from the fact that I became a practicing shaman at some point after college. It a long, long story, but it has to do with my dalliance in the neo-pagan community. It's not a proper name, like Fred or Jake. It's more like calling someone "plumber" or "mechanic."
