JUNK BLOGGING

Those of you with long hair will understand when I say that I just had to get it up off my neck, so I used a rubber band to not only ponytail it, but to more or less club it, by pulling the ponytail itself up and banding it about halfway down, to keep it all from annoying me at the moment. Right now I most likely have a U shaped stream of hair hanging from the back of my head, but it’s off my neck and that’s all I care about.

Now, my intention is to do a long follow up on yesterday’s maundering, self pitying entry about what a ‘friend’ really is and why I’m such a good one, despite many dozens of people feeling otherwise over the course of my life. And I’ll get to that, and hopefully, this one will make more sense and be more pragmatically useful than yesterday’s fatuous effort in self congratulation.

But, first, let me note that in addition to writing that nonsense, which will take hours, I also have Romeo Must Die in the DVD player (Scott brought it over a few days ago, along with that Hugh Jackman action pic starring John Travolta and Halle Berry whose name I cannot at the moement recall) and I also would like to get in a few hours playing Dead or Alive 3 tonight while Paul is at work. And I couldn’t do any of this prior to now because I had a lot of TV to watch tonight, or I thought I did, anyway… of the three Friday night shows I just got in the habit of watching this season, only Joan of Arcadia was actually on. Boston Public suffered the fate of many FOX shows during October (pre-empted for FUCKING baseball), and Boomtown, ominously, simply didn’t show up at all tonight; for no reason anyone announced, a rerun of Law & Order: SVU was in its place instead. (Most likely some network programmer pulled it because they figured most people would be watching the baseball game, and that may have been good long term for Boomtown, not making it eat a low rating share like that, but it aggravates me when programmers play defense like this, because it means that not only is FOX running fucking SPORTS in prime time messing up the shows I want to watch on FOX, it’s also messing up the shows I want to watch elsewhere.)

Anyway. Other that that, there’s nothing to note here… oh, wait, I lied. Jill Who Is Only Jill sent me an email today, expressing her enormous displeasure at me publicly spanking her in my blog for not sending me email, and also indicating that she did not enjoy being identified as Jill Who Is Not Jess. So she is off the Egregious Email Violators list, as I have given her permission to not feel remotely obligated to ever send me email again, since apparently little notions like social parity are something she finds entirely onerous.

(Jill also seems to find ME entirely onerous, which is something I will simply have to learn to live with. But, you know, she’s sitting in a big boat that is already quite densely populated, and I hope they are all enjoying their voyage, too.)

Now, as I’ve mentioned Jill Who Is Only Jill, let me mention something else that I’ve known ever since I became a blogger, but that I probably haven’t mentioned explicitly before, or at least, explicitly and often enough:

Lurkers suck.

Yes. YOU. Whoever you are, out there reading this right now, that person who keeps coming back to this blog because you enjoy it, for whatever reason, and yet, you have never once posted a comment, or, alternatively, you post comments every once in a while, but nowhere near as often as you read this blog.

Bloggers blog for many reasons, but a primary one is to get attention. If you’re reading someone’s blog and you’re not paying an admission or a subscription fee, the very least you can do is, for the sake of social parity, is to provide the person providing YOU with momentary diversion and entertainment (at the very least) with some of what they are looking for.

Which is to say: POST A FUCKING COMMENT.

Now, I have heard it all… or, rather, I have heard the same excuse from various lurkers over the years who have admitted to lurking and, knowing damned well how wrong they are, have sheepishly offered up the same tired rationalization: They Don’t Have Time To Post Comments.

Screw that. If you have time to READ a blog (especially MY goddam blog, which isn’t exactly for those with microscopic attention spans) you have time to post a comment. Or, to put it another way, if you DON’T have time to post a comment, don’t read my goddam blog. If you don’t want to do anything for me, I can’t see how you’re justified being entertained BY me.

Another excuse I have heard from lurkers is “I don’t have anything interesting to say”. Well, ‘I read this and I found it interesting’ is something interesting to say. ‘This entry made me laugh so hard I nearly had an aneurysm’ is always a welcome comment (unless, you know, I wasn’t trying to be humorous). Thoughtful disagreement (with reasons why you disagree) is perfectly valid. I don’t need flames (although you’re free to post them), and if you’re going to start calling people ‘muggles’ in my comment threads I’m going to have go into the control board and get rid of your comments, but I would only go to that extreme for, well, idiots posting Harry Potter-speak (or, to be fair, other extreme forms of fan-speak, like, I don’t know, Klingon, or something), so you’re probably safe.

I prefer witty, funny, intelligent, thought provoking comments, of course (who doesn’t) and I would really like to hear from totally hot women who long to have sex with me, but, let’s face it, in the absence of that, I’ll take whatever I can get. So if you read my work regularly and you enjoy it, post a goddam commment.

If you REALLY don’t want to post a comment, but you are determined to keep coming back here and enjoying my work, there is a Pay Pal link right over to your right, and probably up a little. Hit it and go through the process.

I don’t expect this diatribe to cure lurking, because lurkers are, basically, people with no sense of obligation or appropriate social behavior. But I myself never read a blog regularly without leaving comments; I understand that if the blogger has comment threads, the reason is is, they want feedback.

Now, many bloggers learn they don’t want MY feedback, see RULES OF THE ROAD, below, for some of their names. But I have never once told a single person that I didn’t want their comments on this blog, no matter how badly they’ve annoyed me. Even emotional retards like Tuxedo Slack are welcome to post to my comments threads. Other than truly obnoxious fan geeks and out and out trolls (whom I will use the control board to get rid of if I have to) everyone is welcome to comment, and by God, if you read my work regularly and you get something out of it, you’d BETTER comment, or you’d better send me some money, or you’re a deadbeat and a lowlife.

Lurkers suck. Stop being one.

While my opinions are generally quite controversial, I believe many if not all bloggers would agree with my sentiments in re: this issue.

YOUR DAY, YOUR WEEK, YOUR MONTH, OR EVEN YOUR YEAR

Yesterday I put up quite a lot of tedious yammer about exactly how I define the term ‘friend’ and how I don’t, and it wasn’t until a while ago that I realized how entirely useless (other than as fatuous self congratulation on being such a swell human being) that whole thing was. Here, then, is a hopefully more useful discussion of exactly what friendship is, in pragmatic terms suitable for relationship engineering applications and general quality of life enhancement:

‘Friendship’ is a voluntarily engaged, continually interactive, locally initiated social field in which two (or more) people reliably provide each other with as much genuinely felt positive attention as every member engaged in the field wants, needs, and/or can supply at any given time, more or less on demand, and with the amount provided being in roughly approximate parity and proportion at all times.

If that sounds complicated, well, it’s a more complex thing than people realize. For example, I originally simply wanted to say that a ‘friend’ is someone who provides you with as much positive attention as you are willing to provide to them in exchange. However, that doesn’t work, because a stranger on the bus is willing to provide you with pretty much exactly as much positive attention as you are willing to provide them, assuming a mutually equal level of interest/attraction in each other, and a stranger on the bus is not your friend.

Similarly, acquaintances… co-workers you don’t hang out with outside work, email correspondents, frequent commenters on your weblog, etc… also provide you with a roughly equal level of positive attention as you provide to them, assuming you answer their email, put comments on their blogs or respond to their comments on yours, etc. And as I stated yesterday, that does not mean they qualify as ‘friends’, either.

No, when someone is your friend, they care about what you need and want, and they provide for your needs and wants, and they do it because they care about you. However, friendship IS a continuum and must be equitable; if Person A is providing more positive attention to Person B than Person B provides back to Person A, then that is not friendship. (Such cases usually do not exist between mature and compassionate people; generally, if one part of a social interrelationship wants to give more than the other one wants to give back, there is tension and discord, because the other person will be uncomfortable with it.)

Some may note the perhaps confusing phrases ‘voluntarily engaged’, ‘continually interactive’,’locally initiated’ and ‘genuinely felt’. So let me get into those a little:

In terms of ‘voluntarily engaged’, I mean, everyone involved in the social field we are defining with the word ‘friendship’ is there because they want to be. This rules out professional relationships like doctor/patient or courtesan/client, or anything else (lawyer/client, I suppose) where people get together and there is an exchange of positive attention, but it is financially motivated for at least one of them.

‘Continually interactive’ is my way of saying that old saw whereby people are ‘friends for life’ even if they don’t see each other for years at a time is horseshit. ‘Friendship’ requires some nurturing and frequent interaction. If you were close friends with someone in college, and you haven’t seen them or had any reasonably frequent contact with them since college, and it’s been a while, you have changed and they have changed. You and they might be friends again, if you get back into touch (and you’ve had personal contact, so further personal contact, while nice, isn’t necessary) but while you are out of touch for long periods, you are not ‘friends’ in anything except, at most, a potential sense.

‘Locally initiated’ is just my way of saying what I said yesterday: if you have never met someone personally and your only contact with them is via some form of intermediary communication, no matter how immediate or response that communications media seems to be, whatever you have with them isn’t a ‘friendship’. It’s easy to think you love someone from another continent. That doesn’t make it true.

‘Genuinely felt’ is my way of ruling out sycophancy, by which I specifically mean, people sucking up to other people because they want some form of positive attention from those people beyond mere mutual emotional validation. When you’re pretending to be ‘just friends’ with a gorgeous chick because you’re hoping to get lucky, that’s not friendship. When you’re laughing uproariously at your boss’ jokes because he can make you miserable in the office otherwise, or when you’re acting as if some rich guy you just met is the most fascinating person in the world and in fact you think he’s a boor, again… not friendship. The positive attention you provide must be heartfelt, as much the positive attention you receive in return be, and that should be ALL you’re getting out of the relationship.

Got all that? Good. Let’s move on to:

A key word in my definition is ‘reliable’. This is the element of trust which I think is paramount to what I consider to be a valid friendship. Your friend is a RELIABLE provider of positive attention, just as you are similarly reliable to your friend. This means you can tell your friend that, oh, you are gay, or you wish they weren’t married, or your HIV test just came back positive, or you really think they’ve been drinking too much, or you absolutely cannot stand Harry Potter books, and they will remain your friend. Similarly, they can tell you the same sort of things and you will not gasp and denounce them as unclean. If someone is a friend by my definition, well, you can rely on them to remain a friend, barring grotesque acts of personal betrayal on your part (which, if you’re their friend, you will not commit).

But the other key here, and we’re going to spend some time on this, is the notion of ‘parity’.

I talked about this briefly above, but it’s worth a fuller exploration. If you are friends with someone, then in addition to being able to rely on them for positive attention when you need it, they must also be able to rely on you for positive attention to the same extent, when they need it. To the same extent.. If you are engaged in a relationship with someone in which the amount of positive attention you are comfortable with paying them is disproportionate to the amount of positive attention they are comfortable with paying you, then you are not that person’s friend and they are not yours, no matter what you or they want to think, and some sort of adjustment should be made to your way of regarding the relationship.

Now, as a general rule, when I’ve been in this sort of non-friendship masquerading under the façade of friendship, I have been on the deficit end. Which is to say, I am generally the person who is willing to provide far more positive attention than my ‘friend’ wants to give back to me. This profoundly sucks, but I suspect we all know and understand what this is like, and that furthermore, we all know and understand that when we find ourselves in situations like this, we should, for the sake of our own emotional welfare, get out as soon as we can. This can be surprisingly difficult; sometimes the people who are unwilling to provide us with as much positive attention in return for the positive attention we are giving them do not want to give us up as positive attention providers. Other times, even when they are understanding of why the ‘friendship’ just isn’t working for us, for whatever reason, the circumstances of Person A and Person B may make it difficult for them to maintain distance from each other, and while it is emotionally unhealthy for one of them to be in continual social contact with the other, it’s also difficult to keep avoiding. And if Person A is willing to provide Person B with SOME positive attention, and to tolerate Person B providing them (or longing to provide them) with more attention than they really want, and the two of them are forced to remain within close proximity fairly often (as with, I don’t know, co-workers, or sometimes relatives who live nearby, or when your ex girlfriend you have a really big thing for still starts dating your housemate), this can be an extremely hard unhealthy dynamic to avoid.

But, again, I’ve been there a lot, and probably so have you, so I’m not going to talk about that much. We all know that if hanging out with someone a great deal is causing us pain, we should stop hanging out with them, however much we would miss them, because it will be better that way (even if they give us wistful looks and say ‘well, but I’d miss you if you went away’).

No, what I am going to talk about is the other end of the dynamic, because I don’t think the people who are on that end often realize that it is as impingent on them to realize what’s going on, and rectify it, as it is on their ‘friend’.

Look: if you are in a relationship in which someone wants to pay more attention to you than you are comfortable accepting, or willing to pay back to them, guess what? You are not that person’s friend, and you are hurting them by continuing to foster the illusion that you are their friend… that you are, in fact, a reliable provider of whatever positive attention they want or need at any given moment.

It is hard for us to accept this, because if we accept this, we must accept that if the other person is not willing to accept it and move away from us for their own sake, then we have to accept it and move away from them. We do not like to do this, because we are all socialized from a very early age, and every human society, regardless of its peculiar cultural do’s and don’t’s, has one major tenent in common: It is unacceptable to ever prefer solitude to the company of others.

Or, in other words, if someone wants to hang out with you, and you’d rather just be alone (for whatever reason… you just want to read a book, or you’re not in the mood for company, or you really wanted to watch the latest GIRLS GONE WILD DVD and jerk off, whatever), you’re wrong. And it is never, EVER considered polite or courteous to simply choose to be by yourself when someone else wants to hang out with you.

We all do it from time to time… or so I assume, but that’s just me, I’m a very solitary person and I suppose there really are people out there who love to party and abhor being alone so much that they simply NEVER turn down any invitation to hang or do something social ever, under any circumstances.

But most people I know have, at some time or another, wanted to turn down some social opportunity, and when they do, if it’s just because they want to be alone, they NEVER admit it. You cannot simply reject someone else on the grounds that you would rather be by yourself (or, politely, that you would rather spend time with someone else, except in special circumstances). Social custom mandates (with an iron hand) that if you are going to turn down a social opportunity or invitation, you have to provide a reason that indicates you are doing it involuntarily… “I have to work” or “I have this family thing and I can’t get out of it” or “my spouse will divorce me if I go out with you one more time” or “I’m sick” or… whatever.

You are NOT allowed, EVER, to simply say “I don’t feel like going out tonight” (unless you follow it with ‘but you can come over here and hang out if you want’; sometimes you can get away with that). But to simply say ‘no, I don’t feel like hanging out with you tonight, I just want to be by myself’ is never acceptable. I know, written down like that it seems perfectly reasonable, but if you think back to times when you’ve felt like that, and you remember what you’ve said to people who wanted to interact with you at those times, you will realize that you have NEVER said that to anyone. Either you bit the bullet and went out with them even though you didn’t feel like it, or you lied.

All this, because in every human culture, every human individual is taught from the cradle, without it ever being explicitly stated, that YOU ARE NEVER ALLOWED TO CHOOSE TO BE ALONE WHEN YOU COULD BE WITH OTHER PEOPLE.

And this is why, when you find yourself in a ‘friendship’ with someone who wants more attention from you than you are willing to provide, and who would like to pay more attention to you than you are comfortable accepting, you find it so difficult to tell them that. Because it is, essentially, a very selfish act… you are putting your self ahead of someone else… and by the very definition of the term, it is an entirely anti-social act… and every single person reading this text has just flinched back from the words ‘selfish’ and ‘anti-social’. They are very nearly curse words in our (and every) society. None of us want to be either of those things. And when you turn down someone else’s proffer of positive attention, you are being selfish, and you are being anti-social… and rather than admit to being either of those things (which pretty much all of us are, at some point or another, me more than many others), you will go to nearly any length of circumlocution to maintain the illusion and charade of ‘friendship’ that really does not exist.

To say, ‘I’m sorry, I simply do not want to spend as much time with you as you want to spend with me’ is very nearly unthinkable. And it is not, as we all try to tell ourselves, because we are concerned for the feelings of the ‘friend’ in question. It is because we are always entirely obsessed with our own self image and our own self esteem, and very few of us have a self image, or enough security in our own esteem, to be able to simply say ‘okay, sometimes I’m selfish and it’s because I need to be and I have a right to live my own life on my own terms’.

No society anywhere has ever taught that anyone has a right to live their own life on their own terms. That is, by its essential nature, an anti-social belief.

But here’s the thing: if you’re in an unbalanced social relationship, one without parity in the amount of positive attention and emotional validation that is being exchanged, you owe it to both yourself and your ‘friend’ to accept the situation and deal with it. If you are the person being hurt, then it’s much easier to understand this, although it’s sometimes very difficult to give up even the small dregs of positive attention your ‘friend’ is willing to dole out in a miserly, grasping fashion to you in exchange for the huge dollops of affection you continually try to lavish on them.

On the other hand, if you’re the person having huge dollops of affection lavished on you, that you don’t want, well, that’s often uncomfortable (if you have any kind of empathy) but it’s rarely actively painful… at most, it’s a nuisance…and it can be very difficult to see that you need to shut this thing down, for your sake, and your ‘friend’s sake as well.

At the very least, if you truly have feelings for this person you are calling your ‘friend’, you owe them an honest, face to face discussion of your real feelings. You need to sit down with them and respectfully tell them, ‘this is how I feel, this is what I don’t feel, this is what I can give you, and I cannot accept more than that back from you, and if that is going to hurt you then it hurts me as well, and we should disengage until circumstances change’.

You should NOT do this in an email or a letter, although many people, having finally gotten annoyed enough with the unbalanced ‘friendship’ to do something about it, resort to such cowardly alternatives, preferring to hurt their ‘friend’ at a safe distance where they don’t have to see the expression on their faces and they do not have to give the ‘friend’ an opportunity to respond.

Nowadays, when people do this sort of thing, they often attempt to curtail ANY attempt by the friend to respond in any way by various means, ranging from ‘I’d really rather not hear from you again, and if you have any feelings for me you’ll honor that request’ – emotional blackmail from someone you trusted who has just dumped you, how lovely – to a simple ‘I am requesting you make no further attempts to contact me and if you don’t honor that request I will take any and all legal and professional action necessary to secure your compliance’, which is, basically, a threat to go to your boss and/or the cops or the court system to force you to, essentially, accept that your ‘friend’ has so little regard or respect for you that they won't even grant you the courtesy of a dialogue regarding the relationship.

Whatever the case may be, my main point is this: friendship isn’t casual, it does not begin at a safe distance nor continue in a vacuum, it cannot be based on insincerity or fraud, and it has to be both trustworthy and equitable.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot… friendship doesn’t exist in increments. You cannot be ‘kinda’ somebody’s friend. You are not friends with someone to an extent; like, you’ll help push his car out of a ditch, but you won’t lend him money or let him give your wife a ride somewhere because he’s such a letch. I’m not saying you can’t have people like that in your life, if you’re at all social you probably do. But if someone is your ‘friend’, and you are theirs, it’s total… if you need them, they’re there, and vice versa.

Which brings us back to that whole ‘I’ll be there for you’ thing, which is where I left it last time, and may as well leave it tonight.

MORE JUNK BLOGGING

Well, I’d just started writing the thing on lurkers, above, which has doubtless annoyed many by now, when Paul’s friend Pat dropped by, for the first time in weeks. And for the first time in longer than weeks, he actually wanted to hang out for a while before he went to work, which kind of sucked for him, because Paul is working 11 to 7 tonight, so he just had to deal with my obnoxious and anti-social ass instead.

He brought over a game demo disc with lots of new games on it, and one of them, Magic the Gathering: Battlefields actually seems pretty cool. Pat kicked my backside at it despite the fact that he has never played Magic, because I couldn’t figure out the game controller very quickly, but still, it looks like fun. In the demo you can only play either Red or Green, and I imagine the Black, White and Blue spells must be pretty cool (Blue must be aggravating as hell too). I couldn’t make stuff happen fast enough and I didn’t know how to do basic things, like make my creatures attack, block his creatures with mine, or, you know, other stuff. Pat is really good with these kind of games and he figured out how to do a lot of stuff much faster than I did. What I saw of it looked like a pretty good adaptation … Green multiplies its mana very fast by quickly casting Elves that give it more mana, while Red creates small creatures quickly and can do direct attacks like Fireballs and such… but there are no turns, both players just do stuff continually to each other, so you have to learn to cast things and block his stuff and fight off things he’s sending at you and put up your shield, and there are a lot of different spells and its very confusing… which is, come to think of it, another very accurate feature of Magic…

Anyway, it was nice to see Pat again, however briefly.

At some point I’m going to sit down and write an essay on how the DC superhero universe is basically monotheistic and Christian both thematically (in that its characters all more or less exist in their own separate sub-continuums in which they are the only ‘gods’, coming together only in specific team up books that never really have any effect on the various separate ‘realities’ they inhabit as solo characters) and overtly (several DC concepts make explicit reference to the Christian God as an all powerful entity, specifically, the Spectre and the Hawk & The Dove, among others), while the Marvel Universe is both pagan and agnostic… which is to say, there are many pagan pantheons existent in the Marvel Universe, the most prominent example of which is Thor’s Norse mythology, and, thematically, Marvel’s superheroes have always existed in the same universe as an interactive ‘pantheon’ of superbeings, rather than existing in their own separate sub-continuums. In addition to that, however, the Marvel Universe is also agnostic, in that all the various pagan entities are defined very much as non-divine figures with very mortal, comprehensible whims and desires, and all of them can be killed, and no mention has ever been made in Marvel’s continuity of any kind of truly valid religious belief or divine overbeing, and certainly, Marvel has never made any attempt to incorporate Jehovah into their continuity in the manner DC has.

Or maybe I’ll just let that paragraph, poorly worded though it is, stand on its own. Which I imagine would be a relief to everyone but David Fiore.

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.