We’ll get back to that in a moment. While I’m here, though, I wanted to toss in my follow up to that note, which I think states my overall feelings and viewpoints about this specific situation, as well as potential romantic entanglements in general, fairly succinctly:

Now, I said we’d get back to the thing where SHE says a romantic rejection is not a complete and utter rejection of me as a person. So let’s do that.

Guys often complain that don’t understand girls. Girls tell me they don’t understand guys. I’ve written many thousands of words trying to explicate what I have come to understand of the perceptual dichotomies between the two genders, at least, as I have come to understand them within the context of my own particular experiences. And in that spirit, let me tell the ladies in the audience this:

When a guy asks you out, and you say ‘no’… especially when you say no with absolute, merciless finality, as in ‘I am not interested in you romantically’… there is no necessity for you to add ‘you poor pathetic worthless loser’. We get that. Or at least, I do.

And, again, maybe that’s just me. But I don’t think so. I tend to suspect that the average woman, if ever she finds herself in a position where she has to screw up her own courage and ask some guy out that she finds desirable, would probably take him saying ‘no, I am not interested in you romantically’ as, well, a total and utter rejection.

But I could be wrong. God knows enough women in my life have said they ‘just want to be friends with me’. So perhaps women have this thing in their head where they think, ‘well, I can tell him he’s completely worthless as a male human being to me, and always will be, but, hey, despite the fact that I’ve just cut his balls off and handed them to him in a Mason jar, nonetheless, we can still be buddies’.

Let me put this as bluntly as possible, and, doubtless, draw the ire of every female reader I have:

I understand the code. ‘I am not interested in you romantically’ means, ‘I will never ever sleep with you’.

Following that up with ‘but we can still be friends’ (or this latest, rather innovative, variation, ‘but that isn’t a total and utter rejection of you as a human being’) means, ‘but despite the fact that I will never ever sleep with you, and do not regard you as an actual male human being, nonetheless, I will still allow you to pay flattering attention to me, for which you will never get much of anything you want in return’.

It’s kind of enlightening. I’m starting to see that, perhaps, when Jess completely shut down all forms of social intercourse between her and me, she may have actually been being more honest with me than is the norm. Of course, she’s still a complete moron for not falling madly in love with a wonderful guy like me, but still. If you’re going to be a complete moron about who you do or don’t date, I guess it’s better not to throw them any kind of really patronizing bone when you do it.

However, leaving all that aside… and again, let me be blunt:

Girls… guys want sex.

Now, some of us, including me, prefer our sex in the context of an intimate and ongoing emotional relationship, but still. We want sex. You may euphemize that as ‘romance’ if you choose, and I don’t object to that, as long as we can agree that ‘romance’ is, basically, a more intimate and intense form of friendship that necessarily includes sex.

Now, I know, women the world over (or, at least, the five or six who read this blog) are now all shrieking at their monitors that this is SUCH a guy way of looking at things; it is perfectly possible to have a romantic relationship without sex.

In the Chick Flick Dimension, sure. But I’m talking about actual reality here, so let’s get back to that.

When you tell us ‘I will never, ever have sex with you under any circumstances not involving you pointing a gun at my head’ (which is EXACTLY what ‘I don’t have those kind of feelings for you’/’I just want to be friends’/’I am not interested in you romantically’ actually translates as) you are rejecting us. Completely. Totally. Utterly.

It’s nice that many of you will allow us the great privilege of continuing to be sweet to you and making you feel good about yourself, in exchange for, well, nothing we really want, ever. But, nonetheless, when we, however tentatively (but sincerely) offer ourselves as potential paramours (especially to those of you who bitch endlessly about how shitty your current love life is, and who label yourself ‘lonely divorcees’, and who go on and on and on about how much you like our writing) and you respond with ‘I have no interest in you romantically’, that is pretty much the equivalent of Dropping The Bomb.

As a resident of post-Lean Boy downtown Hiroshima, let me say this:

I understand that we males are, somehow, supposed to be able to separate our masculinity and our sexuality from the remainder of our humanity, and allow you chicklettes to continue to relate and socially interact with us as sentient beings somehow completely detached from our genitalia. And perhaps women can do that when interacting with men. Perhaps women could even do it while interacting with men who they find attractive, where the attraction is not mutual.

All I know is, when I interact with a woman I find attractive, who regards me as ‘just a friend’, and who isn’t dating anyone, and who tells everyone who will listen how lonely she is, and yet, who simply, for whatever inexplicable reason, has no interest in me romantically… that makes me feel completely worthless.

Maybe it would be different for a woman. Maybe all you chicks just don’t get that. Maybe, if you were all fat and lonely and miserable, and some guy who looked rather nice and who seemed really like your type came along and started telling you how much he liked you and how he couldn’t meet a really nice girl and how lonely he was, and you kind of tentatively allowed as to how you liked him and might like to go out with him sometime, and he completely shut you down, you wouldn’t take that as a total and utter rejection. Maybe you’d be fine with it. Maybe you wouldn’t feel like complete humiliated dogshit with NOWHERE NEAR GOOD ENOUGH YOU PATHETIC LOSER printed on your forehead in bright red ink every time you saw this guy or heard from him after that. Maybe, when he said ‘well, I just want to be friends with you’, and then continued to wail to everyone else you know about how he just couldn’t meet anyone and he was SOOOOOO lonely and miserable, maybe you wouldn’t take that personally.

I don’t know.

All I know is, when I ask someone out, and they say the equivalent of ‘if the North Koreans initiated a global nuclear, biological, and chemical holocaust from which you and I alone emerged as the sole human survivors, I STILL would not under any circumstances not involving hypnosis or force of arms have sex with you, EVER’, well, I take that as a complete, total, and utter rejection.

As always, your mileage may vary.

Now, I do want to make one further specific note: as with Jess’ rejection of last October, I regard this one as being something I really can’t take personally. Jess’ personal life is a mess, and I believe had she been capable of appreciating my good qualities, she and I would have been very good for each other. She chose to categorically reject that possibility without making the slightest effort to explore it, and frankly, I think that was a truly unwise decision on her part. But I don’t think it had anything to do with me or my behavior, I think it had everything to do with the fact that she’s got serious emotional issues and is most likely one of these people who will do everything in their power to make certain that they are never, ever in even the slightest danger of being really happy.

I regard this latest rejection as being in a similar vein, except even more so, because the person doing the rejection has never actually met me in person, and, apparently, would rather eat the entire Antarctican subcontinent, including all native wildlife, currently resident military personnel, and transient exploratory expeditions, with a salad fork rather than get in her car and drive forty miles to meet me and see if there’s a remote chance she and I might get along in person.

Given the givens, that strikes me as foolish, to say the least.

So… this is on her, and has little or nothing to do with my worth as a human being.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt; logic and reason have little to do with emotional pain. Rejection is always humiliating and unpleasant. However, ultimately, it’s not my call, and while I have no choice but to respect her right to make this decision, I certainly don’t have to respect the decision itself, and, well, I don’t.

Please note my heroic levels of restraint; not once in the 2,381 words I have typed so far on this subject have I sunk to using the ‘b’ word.

CONFIDENTIALITY CLAUSE

I said it was a good day for email, and I really meant it. It was, however, a bad day for interesting items on this blog, since the ex lover I mentioned yesterday did, actually, follow up with another email, which means, as promised, I shan’t be printing nor dissecting her interesting and noteworthy email from Thursday here on Monday.

Yeah, I’m bummed too. I could have gotten a pretty good article out of it.

I have no idea if she actually read yesterday’s blog entry and that prompted the follow up (she’s a subtle person; if she had, she still might not mention it). The follow up wasn’t particularly warm or friendly, either, (nor was it cold or hostile, it was just, kind of, there) and I sincerely doubt this is going to see the establishment of any kind of ongoing exchange between us. But, she did take the time from her busy schedule (said business of said schedule which she noted in the email, and all reports to the contrary, I can take a hint, sometimes) to send me another note, so I shall not (alas) dissect nor analyze her emails in this public forum.

AND IN LOCAL NEWS

Watched the Bux game with the fam yesterday evening. The Bux won, although they got very sloppy in the second half and allowed an obviously inferior Miami team to come waaaaaay too close to beating them, in my opinion. However, Chris Simms looked really good… in fact, for all that Shaun King also looked good, I think Chris actually looked better, and Chris is a rookie straight out of college ball.

It was nice seeing brother Sean again, and lovely to finally meet sis in law Erica, who is in all ways a jewel and a delight. My latest nephew Austin is pretty cute, too, although he wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. Hmmmm. I should introduce him to some women I know; I think they’d get along splendidly.

My Uncle Bob was there, and he and I don’t get along on any level at all, really (he’s a very successful man in the field of marketing and advertising, specifically in the field of marketing and advertising tobacco company related sponsorship of various sporting events, and a devoted Republican, and yes, it is weird to have someone that utterly amoral in one’s immediate family, thanks), but we were cordial with each other and avoided political/philosophical discussions, so things went well. His lovely wife Carol, who is apparently equally evil, was, as always, very pleasant to me (she’s pleasant to everyone; she is also a very successful person in the field of marketing and public relations, so it’s pretty much what she does for a living and she’s very very good at it), and, again, since politics didn’t come up at all, everyone got along swimmingly.

It’s sad. I remember when I was a kid, I didn’t see my aunts and uncles very often, and I pretty much worshipped them… especially Uncle Bob, who for some reason simply seemed unutterably cool to me. (Whenever we visited him, he always just seemed to have really cool apartments or houses, and he always dated or was married to these spectacularly gorgeous women, which, as a preteen, I deeply admired him for.)

At one point in my teens, I saw him for the first time in years, and I was really psyched to see him and very enthusiastic, and he just… wasn’t. In fact, he obviously was embarrassed by me and had no idea how to deal with me, nor any real desire to, at all. It was a really enjoyable encounter for me. Oh yes. And, ever since then, I’ve kept my distance, and, well, since his success has mostly come in facilitating the interaction between tobacco companies and large automotive racing events as a marketer and public relations guy (and, like Carol, he’s really REALLY good at it) and that’s just not something I have any respect for at all (nor can I respect his politics), I guess it’s just as well.

I don’t know. It’s not his fault. Nobody wants to be anyone’s idol, right? I mean, who needs that shit?

Passing on to other relatives, my Aunt Denise didn’t show up last night, which… well, I don’t know what to say about that. Aunt Dee is kind of a pain, but I’ve always liked her anyway. My Aunt Roseanne, who remains just as cool as she always seemed to be when I was a kid (unlike Uncle Bob or, alas, Uncle Fred, who once upon a time was a really nifty uncle with an excellent Silver Age comics collection and a good library of SF, but who has since turned into another fucking Republican, and worse, one who tries to sell Amway to everyone who says three words to him) wasn’t there last night either. She and my cousin Ashley (her daughter) will be going to the restaurant today with most of the family, but I’m not going along on that for various reasons. It’s kind of annoying to miss out on seeing Roseanne and Ash, but, well, I imagine they won’t even notice, and I’ll survive.

I may go back over to Pat’s house (the family nexus point, now that Mom’s house is sold) tomorrow afternoon, but it looks like nearly everyone will be gone by then, so there may not be much of a point… and the problem is, while I can ride over there fairly easily (Pat will be stopping by tomorrow to pick up Paul so they can go visit Bill, my mom's second husband and Paul’s father, and I can ride back with him when he drops Paul off), if I go out there, it forces someone, at some point, to drive me back here again… and after the entire family has been in and out all weekend long, I suspect Pat and Janette would most likely enjoy some peace and quiet. And if no one is there, I’d just end up sitting in a corner reading all afternoon, anyway. And hell, I can do that here.

BOOK ‘EM, DANNO

Speaking of that, with very few of my books not in storage, I went through the few boxes I still have left over here (mostly comics related stuff) and dug out a book called EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY, which one time email buddy Mike Norton gave me for Christmas back in 1994. As I’m a geek and rather narrowminded in some ways, and tend not to bother with much non-fiction, I never really did much more than desultorily glance through it. But I have nothing whatsoever to read, so I dug it out, and actually, so far, it’s a fascinating read. So thanks, Mike, nearly ten years later.

There’s a paragraph in the introduction by editor John Carey that struck me as being interesting in the context of blogging:

Personally, I’d argue that the transformation of human consciousness from a unintegrated bi-cameral state in which the left hemisphere of the brain communicated through clearly audible ‘voices’ with the consciousness living in the right hemisphere, to a more wholly integrated one in which such communications now come in the form of subconscious ‘hunches’ or sudden impulses, was a more profound one than Carey’s advent of mass communication. After all, the psychological fusion of the brain’s two distinct hemispheres is probably the reason we stopped being pagan, as a race, and started being monotheistic… when the voices in our brain went away, we most likely stopped investing every individual feature of the world around us with specific and unique animating spirits, which led enormously to the idea of the world as a collection of natural resources… literally, clay for man to mold, instead of as a composite living creature we should respect and live somewhat in awe of. And that led, naturally, to the evolution of man as an engineer and the fundamentally Western/Christian concept of humanity at the top of the food chain and the natural dominator of Earth and all its lesser inhabitants.

Which makes me wonder if, perhaps, that’s the reason Asians and European Caucasians leap frogged ahead, technologically, while Africans and the Mongoloid tribes who became residents of the North American subcontinent remained, essentially, non-technological. Did the left and right lobes of the more primitive peoples remain unintegrated for centuries after Asians and European Caucasians grew closer together? I suppose it would explain why those peoples remained pagan.

It could explain the essential dichotomy between Native American and European points of view. Native Americans always claimed that the wilderness spoke to them in many voices, and they invested everything with spirits and god figures. Europeans, on the other hand, just saw trees to chop down, animals to trap and skin and cure and eat, rivers to dam up and build bridges over, and minerals to dig up.

Hmmm. I wonder, were the ancient Chinese, who invented all sorts of advanced technological artifacts (like gunpowder) long before the Europeans did, pagans? Or did they have a more monotheistic religion? Did they have any religion at all? I don’t know much about what god or gods, if any, the mandarins worshipped.

Nonetheless, Carey’s point is a good one, and blogging has become a significant part of that process of mass communication.

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.