THE DICE WERE LOADED FROM THE START

Three more days to my big anniversary with Jess. Yes, in three more days it will be a whole year since she sent me the Dreaded Email Of Total Rejection.

I’m thinking of sending her a ‘happy anniversary’ note. Now, hear me out before you start scolding me for cyber-stalking, Mel:

I have no intention of making any threats. I have no intention of trying to in any way physically interact with her. (I have no ability to do so unless she drives forty miles out into the country and pre-arranges a nearby rendezvous with me, anyway.) If I send her an email to commemorate the occasion, it will say ‘Happy Anniversary’, and perhaps add something about my sincere gratitude to her for being such a true and faithful friend. I will not make any attempt to frighten her or cause her any emotional trauma. I will not even refer, surlily, to how what goes around comes around. I will just say ‘happy anniversary, thanks for being such a buddy’ and that’s it.

Is that, to use many people’s favorite word, snarky? Is it perhaps even a little nasty? I suppose.

Is it, worse, a pathetic and futile display of pointless attention getting behavior on my part? Probably.

Would it, worst of all, demonstrate a small, malicious, and spiteful mind, since obviously all I’d be doing is sending her a little long distance cybernetic guilt trip, an electromagnetic dig to the spiritual solar plexus?

Yeah, maybe.

But it’s not a threat. It’s in no way intended to make her feel fearful or insecure. I confess I don’t like the idea (which I imagine has to be true) that she’s forgotten about me entirely in the last year or so, and I certainly don’t like the idea that it’s of no importance whatsoever to her that she hurt me grievously. And I really think that’s most of it, for me. She hurt me grievously and unnecessarily. I don’t claim to know a great deal about moral or ethical behavior, but I have always believed that hurting someone unnecessarily is wrong, and it’s worse when you do it to someone who trusts you and cares for you. And I also believe, regardless of what the rest of the world (and especially every professional editor and all the attractive non-snake handling women in it) seem to think, that I am important. My feelings matter. People should not get to simply pour napalm on me for no reason and walk away with a distant look in their eyes, more or less coolly pleased that they’ve dealt with THAT annoying insect and can now move on. I am annoying, but I am not an insect, and my feelings are not to be casually dismissed or bombed into shredded ruins at a whim and with a callous shrug.

I think, if I want to tweak Jess a little bit about the way she carpet bombed my soul nigh on 12 months ago, well, I’m entitled. And in my opinion, for whatever it may be worth, she deserves it.

Ah, but there’s other stuff, and I can hear people out there clearing their throats and warming up for their own arias. “Isn’t this a little obsessive, Darren? Shouldn’t you have moved on by now, Darren? Even if we grant you that she hurt you for no reason she troubled herself to communicate, and yes, you have as valid a right to protest such unpleasant treatment as anyone else, don’t you think maybe this is a little unhealthy?”

Yeah. I probably should have moved on by now and yes, I should just get over it and yes, yes, yes, I’m aware that you’re all tired of hearing about it anyway. But that doesn’t seem to be going to happen any time soon, and, one more time: I’m not going to threaten her. I have no intention to interact with her physically in any way, and honestly have no real desire to do anything whatsoever to hurt her in any significant or meaningful manner.

And whether or not I should be able to forget it and move on, I don’t seem to be able to, and, well, that being the case, I don’t see why she should be able to, either.

And yet, aren’t I being hypocritical? Jess pays for her email service (unlike me, I use a free service, and it’s worth every penny, too) and I have long stated that I think it should be a fundamental moral and legal principle of this country that if you PAY for something, other people should not be able to use that thing for their own selfish purposes.

Um… hold on. It occurs to me that Jess uses Yahoo and Hotmail (among, perhaps, others; those are the two email addresses I know of, though) and so she DOESN’T pay for her email service. Hmmm. But still. Doesn’t she have a right to not be bothered by email she doesn’t want? Wouldn’t I like to live in a world where I myself never got flames or spam or… I don’t know… annoying little cybernetic guilt trip reminders from people I’ve done horribly wrong? Where telemarketing was simply, flatly, illegal, except for when people had specifically given specific permission to a specific company to call them up and try to sell them stuff over their personal home phones?

Well, yeah. But I also believe in things like karma and justice, and this bitch hurt me grievously for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and that’s just plain wrong.

And, let’s be honest, folks: she probably isn’t going to understand the damned email, or remember what October 1st signifies, or give it more than four seconds thought before she deletes it with a perplexed little eyelash flicker and moves on to whatever’s next in the queue without ever giving it a further thought.

Which… ::sigh:: yes, is as good a reason as any not to bother doing it. You’re right.

But then, you knew that all along, didn’t you?

LIKE THE SPANISH CITY TO ME, WHEN WE WERE KIDS

Let’s see. Not much at all to report on the real world front. The Practice has its Season Premiere tonight. As many critics have noted, they fired about half the cast last season (actually, they got rid of three regulars… the lead actor, Dylan McDermott, Lara Flynn Boyle, who generally gets ‘noted Hollywood diva’ chucked in front of her name whenever a professional journalist is writing about her, and the cute blonde whose name I can never remember who played psycho-bitch/drama queen Lindsay). Alas, they did not get rid of whiney ugly fat bitch Cameron Manheim, and you should have known that because you did not hear loud overjoyed shrieks of “YES YES YES YES YES!!!!” coming from Central Florida at any point over the summer. They’ve also hired James Spader… whether or not he’s going to be a regular I don’t know, but he’s around for a while, at least, along with a memorably stunt-cast Sharon Stone as, apparently, yet another whacky client.

The Practice is another one of those shows that, after a spectacularly enjoyable and grittily credible first season, plummeted quickly and apparently irretrievably in quality and, well, believability, as well. I continue to watch it… mostly in summer re-runs when I’m bored… because I find a few of the characters on the show to be affable and/or interesting. I’ve been repulsed by Bobby’s continual descent into self absorption and Lindsay’s similar, almost parallel descent into rampant violent sociopathy, and pretty much any time they choose to focus on Eleanor (Cameron Manheim’s strident, angry fat bitch) you may as well make a long arm for the remote because the episode will be tediously preachy at best and obnoxiously intolerable at worst. But I enjoy Michael Badalucco’s earnestly likable Jimmy Berluti, and Steve Whatshisname (sorry, Steve) playing Eugene Young is always extremely watchable simply for the intensity the actor brings to the role (which is, alas, like most long term David Kelly characters, completely inconsistent and self contradictory).

I guess Marla Sokolov’s incredibly cute and perky, but also annoyingly preachy, secretary character is gone, too. Which seems fine. But it’s not Marla’s fault her character was annoyingly preachy, that’s what female characters on David Kelly shows do… they preach (when they’re not beating up, stabbing, bludgeoning, or shooting men who have committed the grievous sin of Finding Them Sexually Attractive While Being Homely, that is).

Honestly, it seems to me that David Kelly writes one good season of most of his shows, after which, the networks should really just fire him and let, I don’t know, Aaron Sorkin take over, or something. Or maybe John Wells.

Beyond that, I have, like, three different DVDs I could watch, borrowed from various people… Braveheart from Chad & Mel, Vanilla Sky from Scott, and Save The Last Dance, Julia Stiles latest adventure in teenage miscegnation, from Jeff. I’ve seen the first two, the last I keep thinking about watching… once I actually had it queued up… but then I end up going online or reading a book or writing something instead. So clearly I’m not all that interested.

Beyond that, I got nothin’, here. (Bye weeks SUCK.) Whatever’s left of the $100 Nate sent me, after PayPal and Bank of America are done ‘processing’ it, will most likely be blown taking me and Paul to see a couple of movies next week on one of Paul’s days off. The local theater has about three movies we want to see, so I think we’re going to pick two and see the early and late afternoon shows. Contenders are Underword, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, and The Rundown. (Yeah, I’d like to see Lost In Translation and/or Mystic River, but neither will be showing in Zephyrhills, trust me.)

LES BOYS GOT SS CAPS

What? Didn’t you hear me? Did you think I was kidding? I got nothin’ else here. Short entry. Turn off your damn computer and go outside for a while. Geez.

SHE WAS MADE IN HEAVEN, HEAVEN’S IN THE WORLD

Wait. I lied. I was talking about this with Paul and Scott last night, and I think I’ve blogged about it before, but what the hell, if I did it was a long time ago on a totally different blog (in another country and anyway, the wench is dead), so I’ll go over it again here:

First, someone gives me a million dollars or so. (I like that part.)

I hire a bunch of competent licensed hypnotists, buy some AV equipment to record various interviews, rent some space in a storefront somewhere, put ads in papers asking for volunteers… maybe I pay them $20 each. I bring in, say, three volunteers… people I absolutely do not know or have any connection to… a day, and we do regressive memory hypnosis to recover memories of past lives. Not Bridey Murphy shit or Lost Atlantis shit, I mean, very specific memories, of whoever it was that these people supposedly/hypothetically were in their previous incarnation, the one right before their current one.

When we get them there (assuming we do) there’s a whole list of specific questions we ask. What was their name, what was their birthday, where did they live, what did they do for a living, do they know how they died, do they know the date of their death, do they know where they were? Parents names. Sibling’s names. Where did they go to high school, were they married, did they have kids. All this pretty standard profile stuff, but all of it for the previous life… which should, assuming you’re keeping up here, have ended only, well, at least a few decades before, at most (assuming we get some senior citizens in) somewhere towards the start of the 20th Century.

Do this for a year. Pile up the videotapes and the written transcripts. Get, maybe, 900 or a thousand interviews. (Hopefully. I have no idea how easy it is to do a past life hypnotic memory recovery, or if you can do it with everyone, but amassing that kind of data would also be useful in and of itself. If only a small percentage of people can be made to remember a previous life, well, that’s a worthwhile bit of information in and of itself.)

Assuming you now have a pile of data, the experiment enters its second stage: confirmation. We start researching. You have one guy who tells you he was a firefighter in Buffalo NY in his most recent past life. He was born in December of 1932. He died in June of 1965, in a building fire in Lackawanna. His name was Bill Thompson, he had a wife named Susan and two kids named Julie and Greg. His parents were named Sam and Frieda. He went to Orchard Park High School and graduated in 1950. So you start checking basic records, going through birth certificates and death certificates, checking newspaper microfiche for wedding announcements and graduation announcements. Hell, you do a Google search.

Do this for all 900 to a thousand interviews you ended up with (if you ended up with that many). Remember, you’re going for RECENT past lives, stuff that should be documented in our culture. If you get this kind of wealth of trivial detail, and there is anything to survival after death and reincarnation, at least some of this should check out.

What would happen? I don’t know. If none of it can be verified, though, well, that would seem to me to be pretty clear evidence that reincarnation doesn’t exist, or, at least, that a population of random Americans picked off the street in Tampa did not have access to said celestial spiritual recycling process. And that, I think, would be worth doing in and of itself.

On the other hand, if it ALL checked out, well. Suddenly, death isn’t so mysterious any more.

But if even half of it checked out… hell, if even, say, 30% of this data you compiled after a year's hypnotic regressions checked out… well, that’s definitely food for thought.

Is there a practical application (besides learning something scientifically verifiable about the greatest and most terrifying mystery of all, Death) to all this? Sure.

Let’s say you do all this and come up with hard data that indicates that reincarnation DOES exist. And let’s say, as standard reincarnation lore seems to already imply, that you discover that people's times of death in their previous incarnations seems to accord pretty exactly with their times of birth into their current life. That’s important. Know why? Because if you were, say, Joe Wilson in your last life, and as Joe, you died at 7:58 p.m. on December 5th, 1973, and in your current incarnation you’re Charlotte Johnson and you were born at 7:58 p.m. on December 5th, 1973, well… that means that souls do not attach to infants until the moment of birth.

That means that the fetus does not have a soul.

Which means abortion is no biggie.

On the other hand, say you discover that, oddly, your previous date of death seems way off from your current date of birth… say… um… nine months off. Or, well, really, anything. If your previous date of death was significantly before your next date of birth, and if that period lined up with every other case, well… that would indicate that at some point, a soul does attach to the fetus, at which point, it would become a sentient and self aware being. Which would tell us that abortion IS murder, and, perhaps, specifically at what point it becomes murder.

So, maybe the soul attaches at the moment of conception. Or maybe it attaches when the infant brain is, in the womb, reaches a certain point of complexity. Or maybe the mother’s own soul creates an aura that prevents other souls from approaching until the child is physically separated from her.

Either way, one way or another, it would settle the whole abortion controversy.

Which is, I think, very much worth doing.

It isn’t without risk, though.

The consequences of actually establishing reincarnation as a scientific fact to our social structure are staggering.

Forget lawyers and doctors. The next huge boom in professions will be past life regression specialists. But lawyers won’t be left out, because once people start finding out who they used to be, the next step is for them to go into court and start suing their past life heirs for their assets. Not to mention, in the case of wrongful death, suing the people who killed them to get their money.

Can you imagine the effect on the murder rate, when ten or fifteen years down the road, your victim will routinely go to his or her first regression session, and then immediately turn you over to the cops?

(Well, that’s a good thing, though.)

Regressions will become a rite of passage. Everyone will be going in to their local specialist to find out who they were last time around. The very meaning of ‘family’ will break down as, a few decades down the road, the siblings and parents and children we lost reappear in their new incarnations, wanting to re-establish the previous bonds. Computer databases will be set up by grieving parents, children, and spouses, so that their loved ones can get in touch with them when they find out who they are at some point in the future.

We’d either have to simply forbid kids to have regression sessions done on them, or resign ourselves to endless custody fights, as the families of previous incarnations file to have their ‘lost’ children restored to them.

Life will become cheaper, too, and suicide will be FAR more popular. After all, if we KNOW we’re going to reincarnate, why stick around in a seemingly futile or unfulfilling existence? Next time might be better, and if it’s not, well, jump on the merry go round again until it does get better.

And how can you make a murder sound heinous, when we know it’s not final? The fact of murder will become far less meaningful than how someone is murdered. Torture and suffering and financial damages will be far more important than taking away someone’s life, because, well, we know they’re just coming back.

It would be a big thing… a HUGE thing. And I haven’t even gone into the enormous impact that establishing the reality, or non-reality, of reincarnation would have on various organized religions.

But wouldn’t it be worth it, to know?

But I wouldn’t even want to try to get funding for that project, and if I did, and I went through with it, I know that every effort would be bent by The Powers That Be to completely discredit whatever my results were… assuming they were at all disruptive.

I guess that seems paranoid, but I’m pretty sure if I wound up with any data confirming the existence of reincarnation, it would only ever be published in the National Inquirer.

Okay. NOW turn off your computer and go outside for a while.

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.