Secundus, I would also like to know how someone gets to be as batshit insane as Doc, without taking drugs. Doc says he’s never even had more than a few sips of alcohol in his life, much less any other mind altering substance (besides lots of fat and sugar and caffeine, I mean, like all of us) and he is not only the weirdest guy I know, he is, by his own writing, the weirdest guy a lot of other fairly weird people have ever known, too. How does he do that? I’m pretty weird myself, but it’s well known I was frequently dropped onto my pointy head as a baby… and I’m still not as weird as Doc. So I want to know the answer to that first question, as well.

I also say, yes, Doc, you should finish an old novel, if the old novel is that half-written vampire thing you showed me a couple of years back. I have to agree with you it’s a really bad book, but sometimes that’s what we need. And the sex scenes were really cool.

Okay. Scenes from a Maul: horrible week at work in re: sales, but I slipped through yesterday and today without anyone really slapping me around for anything, which was a relief. My cubie got moved during my day off so now I’m over with the new kids who are still in the rookie training section, which is weird, because they seem to regard me as some kind of Ancient Mariner or something. They keep muting their mikes and leaning over and asking me questions. With big hopeful eyes and quivering chins. I swear, it makes me want to hit them with a two by four.

I re-read Time Enough For Love and then, masochistically, took down To Sail Beyond The Sunset. TSBTS is a godawful bad and truly unforgivable book/hatchet job, but, well, here I am, reading it again, and discovering that yes, it’s still godawful bad and truly unforgivable.

No, no more hints on the deranged knotty mess my personal life suddenly became mere moments after I crawled blearily out of bed this morning.

I watched Usual Suspects. The deleted scenes on the DVD are a waste of time. I also watched Training Day. The deleted scenes there are worth watching; in fact, they should stick them back in the film, at least for the DVD version; they work well. However, the director’s commentary track is full of nonsense. Antoine Fuqua makes some interesting points in various places, but when he starts going on and on about the ‘honor’ that various LA gangs have, he’s just being silly. He points to the scene where Ethan Hawke’s character avoids being murdered because he saved the life of one of the gang leader’s cousins earlier that day, and so the gang leader decides not to kill him, as an example of this ‘honor’… Hawke’s character did something for them, so they repay him.

This is, flatly, wrong. All but the most enlightened humans are, essentially, tribal, and tribal human beings are xenophobic. This quite aptly sums up the urban gang social paradigm (as well as, for that matter, that of the rural militia). Such social groups only regard those who belong to their society as being truly human. Outsiders are not human, and as such, ‘honor’, i.e., the cultural rules, do not apply to them. Outsiders may be too dangerous to mess with, or they may prove themselves useful to the tribe in some way, but that does not accord them ‘human’ status, it simply means they will be more or less tolerated… with wary respect and fear, perhaps, or the affection you might accord a pet… but never with actual acceptance.

Hawke’s character is an outsider, and therefore, the gang members have no compunctions about killing him for money. When it turns out he has done a significant service for an accepted member of the society, however, he graduates to near human status… he is, in effect, given ‘honorary’ tribal membership. As such, the gang members can (and in fact, are more or less forced to, by their own xenophobia) treat him as a human being.

This isn’t merely true of gang members; it’s very common to most human individuals. Nearly everyone has a group they consider to be ‘real people’, who deserve special treatment not accorded to ‘outsiders’. For most people this special ‘inside’ society is their family, but such social gregariousness is common. People group together at work and view outsiders with hostility and suspicion, people divide up into teams (tribes, basically) for their recreational activities, and people identify themselves with cultural sub-groups, or ethnicities, or religions. It’s very human, just as it’s very human to regard outsiders as being somehow ‘unworthy’ of being accorded the full privileges of a ‘real’ person, i.e., tribe member.

Members of one particular sub-grouping or tribe will fight amongst themselves if there are no threatening outsiders present, but the minute such an outsider or group of outsiders is introduced to the tribe’s environment, they will unite against the common threat. This is, essentially, basic human nature. Very few people are so enlightened… or civilized… that they do not instintively identify themselves as being a member of some group, and emotionally assign others who are not members of that group (in their eyes) as being outsiders, and to some extent, subhuman.

One can, to an extent, directly measure individual enlightenment… or how civilized someone is… by how large a group they ‘identify’ with. The most primitive, barbaric, and savage folks regard only their families (blood relatives) as being truly 'human’, with everyone else emotionally regarded as outsiders. Somewhat more socially evolved folks accept larger numbers of people as their ‘brethren’, often based on skin color, or geographic origin, or religion, or gender, or sharing a set of common beliefs and behaviors. But very few are capable of identifying themselves only with truly large and abstract groups, like nation-states, or the entire human race, or sentient creatures in general.

Now, me, on the other hand, I dislike nearly everyone, and if there’s any single group I identify with (however reluctantly) and cannot deny my own membership in, and will truculently admit to being part of, it would be ‘geeks’. I am, indeed, a geek… a nerd, a twerp, a pointy head, a smart aleck, a know it all, a bookworm, one a’ those goddam pansy inta-fucking-LECK-shew-alls. And I guess I don’t mind; many of my tribal brethren are socially clueless and somewhat obnoxious, but there are worse things to be. Geeks are rarely bullies, and hardly ever start fights, and while many of us simply don’t know how to act, most of us have good hearts and will be friends with anyone who wants to be friends with us… even goddam jocks, if they’ll just stop being such pricks for five minutes.

So I suppose I have my tribal identity, too. But I don’t regard outsiders as subhuman, just, frequently, annoying. But hell. I find most of my fellow geeks kind of aggravating, too. Like I said, I just don’t like most other people much.

Perhaps that makes me very enlightened indeed, although I suspect I’m actually just fucking grumpy.

I watched Three Kings, too, although really I just fast forwarded through most of it. I really like the movie, but the scenes where Mark Wahlberg is being tortured just bother me. Now, if it was Jon Lovitz I’d watch them in slo-mo… but Jon Lovitz being cast in the Mark Wahlberg part would have probably made much of the rest of the film utterly unwatchable, so I guess it’s better the way it is.

Okay, no, I’m sure it’s better the way it is, I just, you know, wasn’t in the mood for long torture in underground bunker scenes last night, I guess.

Between a rent check, a phone check, and a foolishly large order from Westfield, yesterday’s paycheck has evaporated like dew from the hemi of a championship dragster in mid-sprint. I may lose some weight over the next two weeks; certainly it doesn’t look like I’ll be eating much. Ah, well. Sometime in July I’ll get a great big box o’ comics. Surely I can live on expectations until then.

Or, you know, my fat.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.