Okay. Islands of Adventure.

Well, I'm exhausted, and just under $100 poorer, and I'm not at all sure I had just under $100 worth of fun. Of course, $100 doesn't go very far these days, so I suppose I actually did.

I'm not exhausted because it was such a horribly busy day, though. Oh, one of the things I always forget in between trips to theme parks (which are generally years apart on Planet Darren, so there are quite a few things I forget) is just how much theme park designers like to make people walk. There are really only, maybe, a half dozen attractions really worth doing in any given theme park, and in Islands of Adventure, they are scattered among the several different islands, so simply trekking from one to another can be grueling. And once you get to an attraction and start following the rather labyrinthine path up to and into the building housing the attraction, it can often feel like you've wound up in some really astonishingly boring version of The Fellowship of the Ring... no mystic jewelry involved, and no Uruk Hai chasing you all over the four corners of the Earth, mind you, but you're pretty much trudging endlessly on some dubious, apparently eternal quest through unlikely seeming, (and very fake) settings, often with no apparent destination in sight, until you finally turn one last corner and... oh, my!... HERE's the end of the actual line. Yay. Kind of.

Paul's friend Pat, who is a veteran of all the Orlando theme parks, wanted to get there early and that was an excellent idea. Once we got inside, he also wanted us to turn right and start with the Dr. Seuss Village (where we rode nothing) instead of turning left 'like everybody else does' (as he put it). So we walked through Dr. Seuss-land and into what would turn out to be my favorite island, the Lost Continent, where the only real attraction was the Double Dragon roller coasters, but which I simply liked the background and ambiance of best. No trademarked characters or cloyingly named booths or rides, just an atmosphere of some ancient, now unknown civilization populated by barbarians and sorcerers, with really cool fantasy backdrops like pieces of vast statues lying around on the ground and a big tree that looked like a face and some really cool architecture. I, personally, would love it if someone would just build an entire huge amusement park around a theme like that, where people could wander around in some elaborate Conan the Barbarian type fantasy and participate in similarly themed attractions and maybe, after the park closed at 8 at night, they could have interactive live roleplaying adventures set there, as well.

Leaving that aside, we did the Double Dragons. One of them was enough for me and for Kyle, Pat and Paul's big, kind of slow 17 year old friend, so we got to sit around and wait while Pat and Paul did the other one. Actually, we got to stand around and wait, which a few hours later would have been excruciating, but at that point, wasn't bad. From there, we went over and did the Jurassic Park Island, about which I can mostly say that the Jurassic Park theme song is much much too short to be played over and over again endlessly through loudspeakers the size of a velociraptor that are mounted everywhere. We waited in line for several thousand years to see the Triceratops medical pen exhibition (the line wasn't long, but apparently the Triceratops broke right before we got there, so we stood around while pretty much everyone except us and one other family group gave up and went away, and then they fixed the Triceratops and we went in) and, well, I'd like to say that the Triceratops was worth it in the end, and it did look pretty real, but it was also kind of boring. The people who have to give those set speeches while standing next to what are basically very expensive and impressive looking dioramas, some of which move and make some noise, probably don't have the worst jobs in the entire universe, but I have to imagine they're about ready to kill the next group of tourists that comes through and expects the same rote dialogue after they've put in most of their shift.

And the Triceratops broke again just as the girl was finishing her spiel, too, so she rattled off some boilerplate about how the thing was having an allergic reaction to one of us and we had to get out fast, and we left.

Then we did the Jurassic Park River Ride, which was boring until the big finish, which I have to admit was exciting and fun. Then we went to Toon Village and did a couple of water rides... the Dudley Doo Right Flume thing and the Popeye tourist boat thing... which got us soaking wet, which felt nice at first, but which got old after a while, when you were no longer feeling cool but were, instead, simply hot and uncomfortably squelchy as you slogged around to yet more attractions. (The rides themselves were a lot of fun, though.)

Up until then I was fine, even with the squelching. Then we went from there to Marvel Superhero Island, which was the one I'd been looking forward to all day, because, well, I'm a geek, and I wanted to see the people in the superhero costumes and since I was wearing the Captain America jersey Kristy long ago made for me, I was hoping for some positive attention. Didn't get much of that; instead we wandered around a little, poked through a really silly comic book store holding comics that, at most recent, were four months old and a lot of graphic novels I either didn't want or already had. Then we made our first big mistake of the day (or I made mine)... we ate.

Some people get more energy from eating and it helps wake them up. However, Paul got no sleep last night, and I got very little, and eating was a bad idea, because it simply made me even more sleepy. Then after we ate, we wandered over to do the Spider-Man virtual reality ride, and discovered that the line was an hour long, and all Speed Passes had already been given out for the day, the worthless miserable wretched lousy things. So we shuffled in line along with everyone else in the Western Hemisphere, and I don't know if the wait in line actually lasted an hour, but I will say that when we finally reached the inside of the building (where the line wound through so many poorly decorated interior chambers you honestly just wanted to sit down and scream in despair when you made your way through yet another doorway or around yet another corner and saw, stretching ahead of you, yet another vista of a hundred or so people queued up in interesting loops and whorls going through yet another doorway you couldn't see past either, but which almost certainly led to yet another similar Chamber of the Damned) it was very air conditioned, and that, with the combination of my wet clothes, sucked all the energy right out of my body. I wasn't really cold or shivering or even uncomfortable, I just started feeling a bit lightheaded and progressively more and more enervated the longer I stood in that fucking line. By the time we finally made our way up to the ride, I was practically passed out on my feet (probably the fact that it was dark and gloomy inside the building for the most part didn't help).

What also didn't help was the fact that there was a really good looking chick (much too young for me, but, still, legal) wearing very little (shorts and a crop top over a bikini) shuffling along just ahead of me with her Moron Marine boyfriend. Moron Marine looked like he was on leave, so I suppose she thought he was a modern day Prince Valiant or something; he was short and muscular and very surly and humorless and looked to be maybe 19 years old and in addition to the visored cap he was wearing that said 'United States Marine Corp' prominently on it (a civilian cap, not military issue) so we'd all know what a hero he was, he also had 'MC' tattooed to one prominent bicep.

I kept cracking wise to the guys with me all through the line (I'd be cracking wise while dying of the plague, I have no doubt) and as with much of my stuff, a lot of it was pretty funny, and I saw the Not Quite Jailbait Chick start to at least smile several times at something I said, but every time she did, she'd shoot a glance at Moron Marine and apparently He Was Not Amused, because she'd instantly, with a very visible effort, make the expression on her face go away.

I suppose it could have been worse. I suppose I could have got into an actual fist fight with the asswipe.

Anyway, that ride was a lot of fun... probably the most fun thing in the park that I tried... but afterwards I was just over it. However, having gone there with three other people, and having paid a lot of money to get in, I didn't want to ruin anyone else's day, so I didn't say anything. Pat and Paul wanted to do the Hulk roller coaster, and I am not certain at this point just how much money you would have to pay me to ride that goddam thing, so Kyle and I wound up sitting around outside an arcade while we waited for them to make their way through the interminable line, ride the bitch, and find us again. Which was exactly as much fun as I am making it sound, too, with my keen and brilliant writing abilities.

After that we went over and took in the Sinbad show, which has some pretty amazing stunt work for such a cheesy production(the evil sorceress bursting into flames and falling three stories into a lagoon really stunned me; I hope they pay her a lot of money). I mostly wanted to see it because I could sit down, which is a good segue to me simply saying that I'm way too old and too fat to enjoy theme parks any more... except that wouldn't be exactly true. The simple truth is, I would have enjoyed that theme park immensely, and probably stayed until closing and gone on a lot more stuff, had I been there with some girlfriend I was deeply in love with. In that event I have little doubt I would have had boundless energy and would have felt strong and enthusiastic the whole day and would have had a truly wonderful time. Wandering around with Paul and two of his friends, however, just wasn't the same thrill, especially since a large part of the theme park experience is always watching thousands of nameless hotties who are there with the significant others that they are deeply in love with, who are doubtless having exactly the day I would like to be having, and I am certain in my heart of hearts, I deserve far more than they do.

Anyway, after the Sinbad show we wound up debating back and forth a bit, and wandering around a little, and upon realizing that the time of the short lines was now officially over and if we stayed we would spend the rest of our day for the most part shuffling slowly through huge queues, we left. We had a brief scare when Kyle, who really just isn't all that bright (nice guy, but neither smart nor wise) wandered off from the rest of us, but we found him again eventually (without really looking, since an actual search effort seemed pointless in a place that size, so we just trusted to luck, and it worked) and left about 3 in the afternoon.

On the trip back we stopped off at a Barnes & Nobles in Lakeland, because Zephyrhills has no sort of bookstore except a really lousy little second hand one down next to the really lousy little comics shop I think I mentioned before, and Pat wanted to look at books. I noted that the new S.M. Stirling, which supposedly my editor from Joe Bob Briggs is going to get me a reader's copy of, was out, and nearly bought it, but decided not to. Although if I had, I would doubtless have found it waiting for me here when I got home, as well.

I mentioned things I tend to forget about theme parks in between visits, and another one of those that came back to me most strongly while we were there today is the sheer tacky crassness of them. They charge you a simply astonishing amount at the door to get in, and then devote probably more square footage on the inside of the park to trying to sell you gaudy, generally worthless and over priced crap, than they do to the rides you came to go on in the first place.

I'm more or less immune to the 'throw all your money away at the theme park' syndrome because they pretty much never have anything I want. (I have, for example, never understood why it is apparently verboten to sell t-shirts at a superhero theme park that actually replicate in some detail the costume of the superhero the t-shirt is devoted to. If someone actually printed up t-shirts that looked like Spider-man's costume, at least, the part he wears on his chest and upper arms, I'd buy one, because I think that would look cool. But they never, ever do this. Instead, they print up every imaginable scene and vista on the t-shirt featuring the character, or various idiotic and simple minded variations on the character's costume, like a red t-shirt with the Spider-man symbol on the chest but no webbing or blue piping to make it look authentic. And of course I had to get Kristy to make me a Captain America jersey, because you can't buy anything that actually looks like his jersey anywhere, you can just get t-shirts with pictures of him on it.)

However, while I'm immune, generally, to the call to consume garbage at my own great personal expense in such environments, I'm not immune to the generally queasy sense I get at being surrounded by so much constant hucksterism... which sits on the shoulders of the queasiness I fight the whole time I am in such environments at the obvious and overwhelming artificiality of the places (everything is made of plastic, no matter what it looks like)... and that, combined with the vague sense of near-panic I always feel when I find myself in the midst of vast crowds of People Not Of My Tribe, generally makes for an interestingly nuanced emotional experience.

One important tip to remember is, if it's at all possible, buy your tickets in advance outside the park. The line to get tickets, even early when we got there, moved extremely slowly, and I didn't realize why until I got near the front and saw the last couple of groups before us move up to the ticket window, at which point it became obvious... when you're taking your family to a theme park and spending something like $250 just to get you, your spouse, and two or three kids in the damn door, you put it on your credit card. And processing credit card payments just takes longer, especially since the technology inside the ticket booths looks like it was installed in early 1982 and hasn't been upgraded since.

Of course, I also discovered that the girls selling tickets are benignly rude, too. When I bought my pass, my girl wasn't at all shy about simply stopping what she was doing (punching whatever she had to punch in to her antiquated computer, or counting out my change) to blab to some other girl standing somewhat behind her for a minute or more at a time, before going back to doing her job. She turned what should have been a 90 second cash transaction into something that lasted four minutes or so, with a line perpetually building longer and longer behind me the whole time. But she didn't care, obviously, and I couldn't reach through the glass and smack her, so there wasn't much I could do to correct her lousy attitude.

Paul has to do his training thing horribly early tomorrow morning, so no visitors tonight (I don't think, although I swear I just heard someone pull up out front)... and indeed, Paul's friend Scott, whom I do not much like for many reasons, probably all of them petty and unworthy of me, just made Paul wake up and answer the door and tell him that we weren't socializing tonight since Paul had to get up early tomorrow. (Scott said 'oh, I forgot', which is yet another reason I don't like him... he's not particularly considerate; he knew Paul had to get up at 5 a.m. tomorrow because we've been telling everyone who comes over here for the last week. He just kind of blithely didn't store the knowledge because it wasn't particularly important to him.)

Anyway, I think I'll blather on about the boy-girl thing and the prospect of Never Taking A Girlfriend To A Theme Park Again In This Life a bit in my next entry, and you all know how much you love it when I do that, so keep on readin', True Believer.

THE 'A' LIST

It was Woody Allen, of course (all we geeks have this quote pretty much by heart) who said something like 'My problem is I'd never want to join any group willing to have me as a member'. (Geeks, at least, geeks of my generation, tend to have a few Allen quotes burned into our memories, like the one above, and 'don't knock masturbation, it's sex with someone I love'.)And Allen's observation pretty much sums up how nearly all us non-A list guys feel about the whole dating thing... the women we're attracted to are always out of our league; the women who want us, on the other hand, we tend to shoot horrified glances at and then hide from behind awnings. The groups we want to join won't have us on a bet; the groups begging us to sign up simply appall us.

I put all this in the plural to show that I'm aware this isn't simply a problem I have with women; if Woody Allen has made the same observations, then this has to be nearly universal among us non-prime specimens of beefcake.

One of the more intelligent women I know once marveled to me in an email conversation that I was still single. She knew guys far less attractive than me, she noted, who had girlfriends, and some of them had pretty hot girlfriends, as well. She simply couldn't figure out why I had so many problems hooking up.

Now, there are a lot of reasons I have trouble hooking up... I'm surprisingly shy (that's actually not true, what I truly am is, not at all surprisingly terrified and simultaneously sick to fucking death of rejection, so I don't overtly try much any more), I don't drink (nearly the kiss of death for hooking up in our culture, especially since I also don't do any other sort of drugs), I don't drive (chicks like powerful men and despise weaklings; in our society, a man with no car is peculiarly powerless and therefore, completely unattractive), and I have no money. Factor in that I'm simply not very physically attractive (physical attractiveness in a mate isn't as important to a woman as it is to us shallow males, but I'm sure if I looked a great deal more like Pierce Brosnan and less like John Candy's slightly younger, much hairier brother, I'd get a lot more female attention), I'm fat (no one likes a fat person in our culture, and for that matter, I don't want to date one either), I'm deeply deeply weird (pretty much meaning that a good 95% of the potential dating pool is Not My Dream Girl for various reasons, like, they're all fucking stupid and shallow and boring), and, frankly, I'm old (which is a big factor in and of itself; the women who don't mind my age are around my age, or older, and I'm generally not attracted to such for various reasons; the younger women without all the goddam baggage -- kids and exes and, well, many many skill levels of Veteran Bitch -- think I should be arrested just for looking at them, and executed on the spot for talking to them).

But I didn't go into all that with this very intelligent woman, because when you go into all that with an attractive and intelligent woman who has no intention of ever sleeping with you herself and yet who is still determined to convince you that that doesn't mean you're as repellent as you obviously are, what you end up with is long and tedious arguments about each and every point, usually with her claiming that women aren't really like that, and you (or me) since you like this woman and don't want to alienate her, refusing to use the one really convincing argument you have, which is that SHE wouldn't sleep with you for a million dollars in cash and genetic rejuvenation to the age of 18, so why the hell does she think any OTHER remotely attractive woman on the planet wants to?

So I didn't go into that, but I didn't have to, because the answer was actually much simpler. Yes, there are a lot of guys out there Even Homelier And More Annoying Than Me (difficult though that is to believe) and they have girlfriends, and some of those girlfriends are even good looking. (A lot of them aren't, at all, but that's a different subject.) And you know how those guys manage to hook up, sometimes with very attractive women?

"They all date women who have kids," I told my dear friend wisely and cogently. "I'm not gonna do that."

I know I won that argument... or at least, carried that discussion... because my friend shut the hell up about it and never brought it up again. And well she should (and shouldn't), since I cannot personally think of a single guy I know who is, in my opinion, a fellow non-A lister, and who is in a relationship, who is not, in fact, dating (or married to) a woman with at least one kid from a previous relationship.

My mom briefly went through a phase where she tried to fix me up with a few women she knew. These women always had kids. I always refused to even meet them. I could go into a long (and frequently hilarious) discussion of why I won't date women who have kids, but there isn't much need for it... I've done it fairly often in past blog entries, and pretty much every one in the world understands my reasons anyway without me explaining them... at least, every single guy in the world, and every single mom in the world, understands them.

What I find interesting about the fact that all these women that my mom tried to fix me up with had kids, though, is that, well, it tells you something about how boy/girl social interaction in our culture works, and brings up the really Major Reason why I can't, and probably won't, hook up, again, in this life (barring winning the Lottery, of course):

All non A-list people are supposed to settle.

I'm not going to.

It's honestly as simple as that.

Guys like me, who have either never been on the A-list (I think everyone out there, all maybe six of you, who are reading this know what I mean by A-list -- the hotties, male and female, the eligible bachelors and bachelorettes; the babes of both genders, the ones that everybody wants and competes for but, alas, only one of us can have, unless we're Hugh Hefner) or who have, for whatever reasons, fallen off (simple process of entropy will do this every time, our culture worships youth, however much those of us who no longer have it want to kill all the little fuckers who now do) are supposed to simply accept the fact that we are never going to hook up with our Dream Girls. We are supposed to Accept Reality, Darren, and Lower Your Standards. And most of us, yea, I say unto thee, my brethren, most of us, do.

Most of us choke down the annoyance and hostility we feel at having to put up with some other guy's DNA incarnate on monstrous little rug rat feet living under our roofs, and, worse, the other guy himself having a legitimate reason to come around and hang with OUR chick on occasion when he's visiting his damn kids. Most of us eventually shrug and say something like 'yeah, okay, she's really [fat/stupid/dull/bitchy/shitty in bed/homely/shallow/annoying] but she's good to me and she's really [sweet/nice/kind/funny/whatever]'.

And what that all means is pretty much the same thing it means when a chick says pretty much the identical words about her non-A list guy... the one that she Got Realistic And Settled For... it means 'Yeah, this person isn't really at all what I want, but they're what I could get, and it's better than being alone'.

And everybody sings along with that one song about how 'she lies and says she's in love with him, can't find a better man' furtively and under their breath, and we call this romance, and tell ourselves we're happy. Yay.

And for most people, I'm certain that the whole 'it's better than being alone' thing is true. Believe me, I'm not all that wild about being alone. I can deal with it, for the most part, when I'm actually alone and keep to myself. But eventually you have to come out of your room if only to go get more TV dinners at Wal-green's, and when you do, you will inevitably run into that gorgeous 19 year old who lives with the guy across the hall, and she'll smile at you and say 'hi, how are you' with that look in her eyes that tells you eloquently that she not only would never ever watch a movie with you, much less get naked and tantric with you, for any amount of money, chattel, goods or services in this universe, but she can't even remember your name and doesn't really care, because you're just the fat old geek-toad who lives across the hall and you are in no way actually real or in any manner valid on her particular planet. Or you go to a theme park with your buddies and spend 45 minutes or so shuffling around in the air conditioned gloom behind a very pretty girl who actually thinks you're funny, but won't laugh at your jokes or talk to you because her Moron Marine Boyfriend Who Doubtless Moves His Lips As He Sounds Out The Instructions On MRE Packages wouldn't like it. And that makes being alone, and the knowledge that you will pretty much always be alone for the rest of this incarnation, pretty hard to take. Because, my friend, trust me, I tell ye this in faith... if a complete geek like me hasn't hooked up by the time he hits his forties, forget it, because the maybe hundred or so women out there (out of, you know, four billion possibles) who might actually be compatible with me have long since been snatched up by more fortuitiously placed geeks than I. And those lucky, lucky geeks will never, never, never let them go.

And yet, still, regardless of that, I would rather be alone than settle, and that's just how that is.

See, guys fail to make the A-list for various reasons. In high school, we don't get on it because we're not athletic, we're not really good looking, we don't wear the right clothes (high school is, for those of you who've forgotten, deeply unforgiving of those who don't dress correctly every minute of every day), our hair is the wrong length or style at any given time, and/or we're interested in things that aren't 'cool', whatever cool may be at the moment.

After high school, not being A-list material may simply continue to be a question of appearance and interests and activities, but more and more, it also starts to change into a personal and financial success issue... because the chicks pretty much all evolve precision sensor packages as to personal and financial success in potential boyfriends/husbands by the time they're 17, and the 'I'm poor and struggling but I love you and will try so hard to make you happy' thing wears off with them really really quickly.

And through it all you have a pretty brief window to hook up, because once you get past your 20s and into your 30s, well, if you haven't made the A list yet you aren't going to, and even if you were on it all through your teens and 20s, you're suddenly going to find yourself bumped off it pretty rudely sometime in your 30s.

Chicks make the A-list, for the most part, on looks alone. Yeah, that's unfair and it sucks but that's pretty much how it works here in the real world. Good looking women can get away with a staggering parade of foibles and character flaws and horrible behaviors. Moderately pretty chicks have to cultivate sweetness and good head giving skills, and homely chicks are pretty much doomed no matter what they do, unless they learn to Get Realistic And Settle really really early on, grabbing hold of the first Seriously Non A List Guy they can manage to pin down for a few seconds of heavy breathing and never, ever let go off again.

But what's hard for the A List girls is suddenly finding themselves betrayed by their A List Dream Guy in their 20s, or 30s, when the Perfect Marriage turns into just another shitty divorce, and suddenly, they are Off The A List... because they may do the gym thing, and they may have the well developed cosmetics skills, and they may know how to dress to flatter their figures, and they may be unbelievably good in bed, and sweet and generous outside bed, and know just how to flirt and tease and say really nice, supportive, ego building things to a man, and they may even still be undeniably gorgeous... but...

Now they have kids.

And they will never be on the A List again.

And this is why all the Non A List Guys I know, who didn't manage to hook up in their twenties, and who now have girlfriends or wives, are dating or married to women who have kids from previous relationships. It's why my lovely cuz in law didn't even bother to argue with my cogent and pithy observation as to why I can't hook up when so many other of my fellow male losers can, and it's why every single woman my mom ever tried to set me up with had kids... because once women have kids by a guy, they are permanently off the A List for every other male in the world.

Which means, women with kids Get Realistic And Settle in a hurry... and hey! there are doubtless quite a few out there who would even settle for me.

And that's another thing. I won't settle...

And I'm goddamned if I want to be a guy someone else settles for.

I want my Dream Girl. Yes, while that means many many things, including wit and intelligence and wisdom and sweetness and sexual compatability, it also (I'm sorry, I'm just a shallow bastard like the rest of my gender) means I want her to be gorgeous, too. And since my standards of beauty are pretty much the same as every other male's standards of beauty in our culture, well, that means I'm going for, well, A List Females, because in our culture, beautiful girls are automatically A List... until they have kids.

And I don't want a woman with kids, sorry again, they're annoying little buggers, not your fault, I know, horrible of me to be so narrow minded, but babe, you shouldn't have mingled your DNA with that of a loser who was going to dump you if you wanted to date me somewhere down the line, and that's pretty much that.

And no A List female is going to date someone like me when she can have an A List Guy, and, as far as that goes, the vast majority of beautiful women out there would bore me to tears, anyway. (Don't get me wrong. I'd sleep with them. I just couldn't possibly marry any of them.)

But worse than that, I want my Dream Girl... and I want to be her Dream Guy.

And those of you who know me at ALL know just how ridiculous that is. Oh, sure, there may be very nice women out there who would settle for me... but the idea that some woman is actually looking for me, just me, and will accept no substitutes? Some smart, funny, literate, witty, insightful, sweet, amazing in bed and, yeah, drop dead gorgeous woman out there, with no annoying baggage, honestly wants someone like ME?

Oh, please, Darren. Just Get Realistic And Settle, Already.

Hmmm. Well, I can still hope to win the Lotto, I guess.

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.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.