Why A Brown Eyed Handsome Man?

Well, I’ve been blogging for a little while now. My first blog started in August of 2002 and was called Doc Nebula’s Eastern Oregon Dum Dum Depression Blog. Directly inspired by Tom Tomorrow and Mark Evanier’s much better blogs, mine was a pretty shabby thing, kind of imitative of both… I split pretty much equally between half assed left wing liberal commentary that didn’t do much but make me look like an uninformed idiot with too much time on my hands, and fan/geek babble about SF, comic books, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I more or less enjoyed the blog and kept doing it for a while… up through, I think, September 2002… and made the mistake of letting a few people I worked with know about it. They were people I liked and trusted, which will just go to show you that I’m pretty gullible… it’s not that they weren’t likeable, nor did either of those people deliberately try to get me in trouble, I’m sure. It’s just that it’s human nature that most people really aren’t trustworthy; if you tell them something in confidence, they’ll tell just a few other people, and eventually, you end up where I ended up… sitting in a chair in your boss’ cubicle for your semi-annual Bitch Slap Session, and finding yourself rather alarmed to hear, in the midst of all the usual horseshit about how you’re not working fast enough and your attitude isn’t very good and you’re surfing the Internet on company time way too much, an elaborately casual reference to ‘your funny funny website’.

Which, since on my ‘funny funny website’ I had been writing about local politics (while working for the City Clerk’s office and rubbing shoulders at work every day with City Councilmembers and various Department Heads and, occasionally, the Mayor) in my own inimitably irreverent style, and worse, writing about how much I hated my job and loathed my bosses, well, that kind of casual reference was a pretty clear shot across the bow. So I hit the Internet as soon as I could when I got home and spent a lot of time duplicating files and changing the URL of my first blog. That was my first real ‘privatization’ of my blog; I started keeping the blog much more as simply a personal journal, and shared the new URL with only a few very close friends from the local area, and other fellow bloggers I knew lived far away, and trusted not to pass the URL along to anyone who might pass it along again to people who might be in a position to fire me over it.

In addition to ‘privatizing’ the blog, I also dropped most of my pretensions towards being a ‘political’ blogger. William Burton, Tom Tomorrow, Joe Briefcase, Max Sawicky, Atrios, even Skippy the goddam Bush Kangaroo… these were serious left wing political bloggers, folks with intelligence and insight and something valid to say. Compared to them, I was Timmy the Dimwit, and I was just making an ass out of myself. And Mark Evanier had demonstrated that you can pretty much blog about whatever the hell you feel like and still be immensely interesting and worth reading (well, he’d proven that he could, anyway). So I dropped the emphasis on leftie political bullshit and just wrote about whatever the hell I wanted to write about…mostly petty, boring crap about my petty, boring life. I don’t imagine the blog got any better from an outside perspective, but it was a lot more fun for me to read… and no one had paid me much attention or said anything nice about it when I was trying so hard to be relevant, so I figured, screw it.

And ‘privatization’… moving the URL and only giving it out to a select few… proved worthwhile almost immediately, as well. A few weeks after that alarming talk with my supervisor, when a woman I had very serious feelings for tossed me out of her life, she made a special point of telling me that if I wrote so much as one word about her anywhere on the Internet, she’d call the cops on me and have me arrested for harassment. Now, even in Ashcroft’s America, that still isn’t actually possible (well, as long as I was a citizen, anyway, which I am; even had I outright lied about Jess, that’s a civil matter, not a criminal one) and I knew it wasn’t possible, and I suspect my non-friend knew it, also. But what she could certainly have done, if she’d ever read anything about her on my weblog, was point it out to my boss, since she worked for the City of Tampa too. And even if my boss didn’t simply fire me for harassing a full time City employee, well, my boss would then have my blog URL again, and… anyway, the fact that I’d taken my weblog ‘private’, and thankfully, my non-friend had never asked me for the new URL (or I’d have given it to her in a heartbeat) paid big dividends there. I could write about my non-friend as much as I liked (a form of therapy that probably kept me from killing myself, stupid though that sounds in retrospect) and to date, she still hasn’t called the cops, hit me with a restraining order, or simply had someone come around and shoot me, any or all of which I’m sure she’d do if she’d ever read any of my past blog entries about her.

However, by that point, ‘privatized’ or not, I was pretty nervous, and way too many people knew who the ‘Doc Nebula’ of ‘Doc Nebula’s Eastern Oregon Dum Dum Depression Blog’ was… not to mention the fact that there was a (bad) photo of me in the title graphic, and a lot of links to other material I’d written that had my real name on it. Having already been obliquely threatened by my supervisor over the blog at one point (maybe ‘warned’ is a better word) and directly threatened by someone I took even more seriously than my boss just off the possibility of me blogging truthfully about how she’d treated me, I decided it might be better to start over with a different blog, on yet another different URL, and with a different Internet pseudonym that wasn’t linked to the real me. And thus was born Major Attitude Adjustment’s Webblog, whose title was a pretty direct tribute to my deceased buddy Jeff Webb, the first Major Attitude Adjustment.

I figured, those who knew me would get the reference, but anyone else would be left clueless.

I blogged away at MAAW for months… right up until yesterday, in fact. At any given time, I don’t think more than 8 people had the URL, and only two, maybe three ever gave me any kind of feedback… but I blogged primarily simply as a place to vent, and that was fine.

Then, this last Monday, I was told (by the supervisor who had originally given me the ‘funny funny website’ warning) that Thursday (yesterday) would be my last day on the job at the City Clerk’s office. Now this was a job I’d held since September of 2000… very much the longest running temp assignment I’ve ever had… and frankly, while I really hated the office I was working in, and wasn’t wild about one of my supervisors whenever she decided to be a supervisor (but she was mostly okay, because she didn’t supervise much; most of the time she stayed in her cubicle in the back and watched soap operas on her monitor), and truly loathed to the depths of my soul my other supervisor (who supervised far, far too much, and who had hated me since my second day on the job)… well, suddenly finding yourself without a paycheck is never a good thing.

Still, it wasn’t all bad, either. Without the political job of being a temp word processor in the Tampa City Clerk’s office, suddenly, I was no longer restricted in voicing my opinions about anything I felt like, as loudly as I wanted to.

As Wilson Fisk has noted in an entirely different context, “a man without hope… is a man without fear”.

So, here I am, taking my blog public again… albeit it under a completely new name.

And I think that was the original question… why A Brown Eyed Handsome Man as a blog title? Why not just take Major Attitude Adjustment public, or go back to the original Doc Nebula’s yaddity yaddity yaddity title?

Well, you can blame Elayne Riggs for the blog title… she ran a lyric snatch from the John Fogarty song “Center Field” and the goddam thing has been playing on and off in my head ever since. And I am brown eyed, and I am a male adult human being. As to handsome… well, I saw a brief snippet of myself on the FOX 13 ten o’clock news last night, and let’s just say, apparently, I have a deeply ironic sense of humor, and leave it at that.

As for why I felt the need for yet another new blog title/incarnation… I don’t know. You move forward, not back, which is why I didn’t return to the ‘Doc Nebula’ logo. As to why I didn’t keep the Major Attitude thing going…

Because Major Attitude Adjustment’s Webblog was, from the start, a ‘private’ blog, whose contents were shared with only a very few, well known, and implicitly trusted individuals… well, my writing there was not particularly filtered for a social environment. Oh, I knew a small number of people would be reading it, so it was somewhat toned down… but for the most part, it was pretty raw. Childish, petulant, often nasty, more often than I would have liked, quite mean spirited… MAAW was a place for me to vent, primarily, and a lot of that venting was ugly.

I would not want to publicly link to the archives of that ‘semi private’ writing, but if I brought MAAW public without archive links, that would have seemed wrong to me, too.

So, we have ABEHM… a fresh start, with (perhaps unfortunately, perhaps not) more of an eye towards being a tiny bit more considerate and diplomatic than I was in the bad old days as Major Attitude Adjustment II.

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MANDATORY FLASHBACK

I did skip over some stuff in the above sequence. I actually changed the MAAW URL a couple of times, too… most prominently, when my other supervisor at work, the one I really loathe, came into the office one day in January and informed me she wouldn’t be buying my bus passes for me any more (as a permanent City employee, she gets them for half price; she wasn’t doing it as a favor for me, but to suck up to our previous boss, who had been deceased for a while at that point) because she’d found out about my website, on which I was writing uncomplimentary things about her.

How she found out about the blog, I still don’t know. I had just prior to that sent the URL out to someone I’d known well at one time and thought I could trust, along with a note telling that person where I was currently working, to try and ‘catch up’ with her… and maybe that’s just a coincidence, or maybe it isn’t. I’ll never know. And I doubt this particular supervisor of mine had actually managed to read the blog, or if she had, she must not have checked the archive pages, because one particularly entry I’d written about my job in particular, and my attitude towards being forced to spend 2/3s of my waking life doing nonsensical crap I don’t want to do, with people I don’t want to associate with, for an amount of money that does not even amount to a fraction of the actual value of my work product to my employer… well, had she read it, I’d have been fired, not just bitched at, and told that from that point on, I’d have to pay twice as much for my transport to and from work.

And for a brief, intoxicating while, after a blow up with an utterly psychotic female blogger that you can find in excruciating detail in the MAAW archives, I actually had two blogs… the ‘privatized’ MAAW, with its very small audience of half a dozen or so, and an even nastier, meaner, far rawer version of MAAW that I kept for a week or so, where I let myself vent about everything that pissed me off, in complete and utter privacy.

It was a nice release, but eventually I got tired of keeping two separate blogs, so I dropped it, and those pages have since been deleted…. I didn’t even keep copies of them.

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THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally acceptable 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… even when I’m talking in ‘public’, to an unknown audience, nearly any of whom may be almost as crazy as that whackjob female blogger I mentioned running afoul of previously.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude that most bloggers who know their opinions are going to offend people tend to take… namely, if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read them or it.

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. Oh, I firmly believe that if you really don’t like something, well, you must have hit a link or typed in my URL voluntarily to get here, and you have a back button on your browser… you certainly don’t need to flame me just because something I’ve written here has gotten your shorts all in a bunch.

Nonetheless, 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 style and panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded if you write me, okay?

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