Okay. I’ve got the Packers/Rams game as background noise, a picture of Britney Spears tongue kissing Madonna as my Windows Wallpaper, and a lot of stuff I want to crank out for this page before the Bux come on at 4:15. In the meantime, I’m sincerely hoping that the Packers put a severe smack down on the vastly overrated Rams and terminate with extreme prejudice this nonsense sports commenters have been gushing over the past few weeks about the ‘Greatest Show On Turf’ being back, which is entirely driven by the fact that for their last two games, the Rams decisively beat two of the worst teams playing in the current season.

And if Britney Spears or Madonna wants to drop by and tongue kiss me sometime this afternoon, that would be fine, too.

Evicting the tribal elders

My mind works in odd ways sometime. Last night, while I was trying to sleep, I started out reflecting on the fact that I have yet to seriously date a woman older than the age of 18 at the start of my relationship with her (and, in fact, when I go over the appallingly short list of my casual affairs, I find that most of those women have been around 18, as well… older chicks just don’t dig my style, I guess). From there I went to the notion that if I were to start dating an 18 year old now, or even, say, a 19 year old or (wonder of wonders) a woman in her early 20s, a long term relationship would see her, maybe ten years down the line, dating a guy in his early 50s while she was still in her late 20s or early 30s, maybe.

All of which led me, eventually, to a rather startling and unpleasant conclusion:

Our culture does not seem to regard the elderly as fully human.

No one wants to look old in our culture, and, well, yes, it’s a question of social attractiveness, sure. But it goes deeper than that. It seems to me it’s also simply a question of continual acceptance, on a general level, of your validity as a human being.

Something happens to people when they become unmistakably, discernibly, inarguably elderly. When they get the grey hair and the age spots and the wrinkled visages and the stooped, infirm posture. It’s not just that all the hotties stop regarding you as being in any way a valid human being, it’s that, well, nearly everyone not directly related to you by blood does as well.

Oh, there are pleasant, saintly people out there who regard the elderly as being human beings like everyone else, but I suspect they are quite rare. For the most part, those of us who are not yet hunched over with age have great difficulty emotionally accepting that the white haired geezer (of either gender) in the walker is still an actual person. They are more like some sort of background object to our lives… some are pleasant, most are annoying… and those of us still fortunate enough to be… well… not yet undeniably elderly, regardless of how we feel or how much we posture about our aching joints and onrushing senility… simply do not regard them as… well… real people. That, you know, we want to have real personal relationships… friendships, family bonds, and especially romances… with.

Oh, age bias exists at all entropic levels within the human experience. In childhood, you can’t be friends (except under special circumstances) with anyone who is so much as a year older or younger than you are. College kids cordially (or not so much) despise high school kids, and, with fine democratic disregard for anyone outside their own very narrow perceptual sphere, equally disdain anyone as ancient as their mid-20s. 20-somethings loathe college kids and high school babies and dread/dismiss 30 somethings. Around 30 one finally starts to realize that getting older is not, in fact, a clerical error that will eventually be discovered and corrected in your favor, and one starts to be willing to acknowledge a wider range of ages as being real valid human beings just like you, but the younger folks no longer regard you with much more than affectionate disregard, and the older folks are still bewildering to you.

And so it more or less continues all through life, with the only constant for everyone being that all of us, once we get past the age of 24, yearn to return to that age and stay there forever, while insisting out loud at every opportunity that we’re just fine with getting older, we’re doing it graciously, we enjoy and look forward to our approaching middle years… yeah, right.

But the real bias kicks in when the undeniable physical decrepitude of advanced age has set in. Gnomelike senior citizens, either wizened into stick figures or padded with the unhealthy looking fat of our golden years, balding or topped with snowy manes of hair like dandelion ruffs, wattled, staring about querulously and truculently with time dimmed vision, moving slowly and creakily when they move at all… these people don’t look like us, they don’t act like us, hell, they don’t even smell like us… and, well, as I said, I discovered, rather to my shocked alarm, that emotionally, when I think of the discernibly, noticeably elderly, I don’t really regard them as fully ‘human’.

As I say, that shocks and appalls me. What’s worse is my belief that this is a common misperception.

Ultimately, of course, this is a case where instant karma is definitely going to get us all… if we disdain the elderly while we aren’t among them, we cannot with any moral consistency expect to be treated any better when we get there ourselves… as we will… unless we die first.

And that’s all I got on that.

Goddamn baseball once again

FOX is gearing up its commercials for the Fall Premiere Season. Yes, Malcolm in the Middle is having its Season Premiere… on November 2nd. Following that Season Premiere will be the Series Premiere of Arrested Development, and on that same night will be the Season Premiere of The Simpsons, which will, in fact, actually be the Halloween Special.

If this doesn’t seem hideously and appallingly wrong to you, then, well, you probably don’t have a temporal perception largely shaped by TV scheduling, and congratulations to you, now get off my planet. It certainly seems hideously and appallingly wrong to me, and don’t even get me started on how badly I want to bang someone’s head against a wall for making me wait two extra months to see Eliza Dushku in her new FOX series Tru Calling.

Why does FOX routinely (for about the last ten goddam years, in fact) delay their Fall Season until November? Because they carry baseball, and the World Series is always in October.

As I’ve noted before, it’s not bad enough that FOX’s insistence on carrying fucking goddam useless piece of shit worthless wretched miserable pathetic BASEBALL in prime time completely fucks over their normal fall TV schedules. But because other networks don’t want to program against the fucking World Series because far FAR too many people who should know better watch the shit, this nonsense causes shows I want to watch on other stations to get pulled off the schedule, too.

Now, yes, the solution is simple… I should turn off the goddam idiot box and get a life, or at least, start reading books and writing and drawing and taking walks and doing other stuff and stop letting so much of my existence revolve around, once again, the goddam idiot box.

But, well, that’s not going to happen.

FOX also isn’t going to stop carrying a broadcasting event that gets them sky high ratings, and other networks aren’t going to stop pulling their shows to keep them from being destroyed in the ratings by that broadcasting event, so, honestly, this is just pointless.

But hey, that’s what we do here.

Just a stranger on the bus

Okay. While we’re on TV, let me note that I have now seen three episodes of Joan of Arcadia and it’s starting to get a little threadbare in spots.

High points: Amber Tamblyn, last seen as Dawn’s cheerfully irresponsible friend on a Halloween episode of Buffy from the sixth season, is pretty delightful in the lead role. She can do comedy, and she can also go from exasperated to sensitive to very tender in a heartbeat, and do it with a lot of convincing nuance, as well.

Joe Mantegna and Mary Steenburgen are excellent, too, but honestly, it would only be notable if they weren’t. I just expect high levels of performance from both of them, especially Steenburgen, and the fact that both have consistently delivered so far in this show is, well, not unusual for either of them.

Bad points: the only gimmick that makes this show work is God showing up as various different people to talk to Joan. That’s pretty much all there is. The rest of it… the loving but dysfunctional family with it’s built in soap opera conflicts centering around the big brother ex-jock who is now bitter about being in a wheelchair for life (or is he?), and the father who is the new chief for an underachieving, apparently corrupt city police force, as well as the rather tired, cliché adolescent high school melodramas… is all entirely predictable. In fact, cliché and predictability got so bad so fast on this show that in the latest episode, when the mandatory cop/father subplot opened telling us there was a serial cop killer on the loose, I picked out who the killer had to be without even really thinking about it as soon as the character made his first entrance.

Geez. The Rams are leading 14-3… but the NFL has been all about big comebacks so far this season (something that makes Paul surlily suspect the games are fixed, and I’m naturally paranoid enough to buy into that, except when I reflect just how good at acting every single professional football player, referee, and sports journalist in the business would have to be to carry that off). So I still have hope, although, honestly, I really don’t much care.

They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed

And now for something completely different.

I went to a Ren Faire once. I didn’t really much want to go, but I was dating my second (and best beloved) girlfriend Kristy at the time, and as we do when we’re in love, we end up trying stuff out we wouldn’t if we weren’t. Kristy wanted to check out the Ren Faire, and Kristy is an extraordinarily capable seamstress, so she made us costumes and off we went.

I had an okay time. I wasn’t expecting to like it much because, well, I’m snotty about stuff like historical authenticity and even snottier about people having fun while making a concerted effort to recreate and glorify a time period that was, actually, mostly about repression and mass murder in the name of religion and general human misery… but still. I went, and pretty much only because I went with a beautiful girl what at that moment in both our lives was in love with me, I had a decent time.

However, there was a moment at the Ren Faire when I got pretty aggravated. Fortunately, I was with Kristy and it passed pretty quickly, but still, there was a moment.

See, there was this other girl there. Her name was, perhaps remarkably, also Christy, although, as you see in text, it is spelled differently from my Kristy. Other than spelling, there were other profound differences between the two K/hristies, which can best be summed up by saying that Kristy was and is a sweet, generous, pleasant person who would die by slow torture before she’d ever go out of her way to hurt anyone’s feelings, while Christy was (and probably still is) a self orbital and utterly conceited little bitch who lived to find ways to subtly knife other people while batting her big blue eyes and looking entirely innocent.

So my lady and I are wandering around holding hands and looking at this and that and chattering back and forth cheerfully to each other and we run into Christy, whom I know… well, whom I know from previous history, leave it at that. And I say hi and Christy says hi and I introduce the two K/hristies and we chat a little and suddenly, out of nowhere, Christy starts talking about how she and the other Ren Faire regulars (Christy had a stall there, selling I cannot at the moment recall what) simply cannot stand these wannabes who show up at the Faire dressed completely wrong and out of character and who are too ignorant to know that they are making the most basic of mistakes… like, for example, these poor fools who, because it’s currently fashionable to dress all in black among the gothic crowd, will trick themselves out head to toe in black ‘medieval’ garb, never realizing that in the actual 12th Century, only the Queen of England might actually own a black garment, because the only black dye known was India ink, which had to come all the way from (you guessed it) India.

Now, Christy is good at what she does (plant daggers in your kidneys without you realizing she’s doing it until you get weak from blood loss) and she worked this so well into her stream of consciousness “I’m a blonde except I have red hair and I have no idea what I just said or how it might apply to you giggle giggle aren’t I pretty” bibble-babble that it wasn’t until about thirty seconds afterward (in Christy-time, thirty seconds is about four hundred more words, either about herself or the shortcomings of other people she and you both know, or never named ill behaving sorts who, you may shortly realize, resemble in some particular she is discussing yourself) that I realized she had just comprehensively kicked the living shit out of both me and Kristy… me because I was dressed from head to foot in a lovely tunic, leggings, boots, swordbelt, and particularly gorgeous collared cape, all of which were black, and Kristy, because Kristy had made the entire outfit from scratch (and done a fantastic job) and Christy knew that because the two of them had discussed garb making at the opening of the conversation.

Once I realized what she was doing (and it came as no surprise when I did, other than the typical dull surprise I feel when I realize an adult that I know is behaving poorly, which I always, being gullible and naïve, find to be something of an upsetting shock; as I said, I’d had previous experience with dear, dear Christy) I pretty much just disengaged from the conversation. Kristy, who had pretty much gotten all along in that feminine way we men are so clueless about exactly what Christy was doing, was happy to follow my lead, and we left the Queen of Bitchful Thinking where she was standing and didn’t go back there for the rest of the day.

Of course, it could have been worse. Christy could have delivered all her subtly snide and snotty insults in an authentic Old English accent, and then, ten or fifteen years later, she might have gone out on the Internet and bragged on someone’s weblog about how she hated medieval wannabes who came dressed up to Ren Faires in completely inauthentic garb, and gone on to gloat about the manner in which she had put these people firmly in their place, managing to preen and strut a bit in the comment about her wonderful vocal training that allowed her to do it all in authentic medieval accents, as well.

Now, here’s the thing: I don’t know for sure that Christy was, as she delivered her carefully calculated and cagily conniving putdowns about the inauthenticity of my garb, dressed in unauthentic garb herself. It is possible that the cloth of her outfit was not some sort of modern acrylic fiber, that it was not chemically dyed, that the fabric was not cut and sewed by machine, that the thread was not a polymer, that the footgear she was shod with was authentically cobbled using authentic medieval techniques and authentic medieval materials, that the stall she was selling her wares in was constructed of hand sawn wood and put together with the typical nail-free, peg-and-socket method common to the 12th Century, and perhaps she was even delivering her insults in authentic Old Englishe, although I doubt it because I would not have understood them if she had been.

All of that is possible, and if all of that was true, then she had every right to put me and any other passing stranger in not-entirely-correct period garb down for our inattention to detail and lack of consistency. Assuming, of course, that she herself had not taken a shower in hot water that morning before coming to work, had not used shampoo, had not fixed her hair and her garb in a clearly reflecting mirror, had not brushed her teeth with a toothbrush and toothpaste, had not ridden in an automobile to the Faire grounds, and was not going to have a carbonated soft drink and some kind of meat for her lunch, after having cold milk and some kind of meat for her breakfast. Assuming all of those things, yes, she had every right to stand there and get really supercilious with me and my significant other about our spectacularly ignorant and unforgivably stupid faux pas in wearing black ‘period’ garb to a 12th Century period Ren Faire.

However, even if she had the right to do it, exactly what purpose did it serve? This was a fantasy setting. People were there to have fun. Kristy and I had paid an admission fee, while Christy was, at least nominally, making money from her attendance. In exactly what way was her attempting to hurt me, and worse, hurt my girlfriend, so that she could feel smug about her own (entirely hypothetical) superiority, justified? By what civil covenant did she claim the ‘right’ to be hurtful and mean simply because she felt she knew a particular historical fashion fact that apparently Kristy and I did not? How is that cool? How is that appropriate or acceptable? And how, especially, is that kind of behavior something that, years later, one is still so proud of that one posts a message bragging about it on the Internet?

Now, I told you that story so I could go on to tell you this:

I don’t go to geek conventions. For one thing, I get genuinely uncomfortable in crowds. It doesn’t rise to the level of a phobia; I’m not scared of them or anything (although I’m scared of nearly everything that’s even remotely dangerous), I just find that too many people in too small a space makes me profoundly… well… uncomfortable. It adds to my stress levels to an extent I find precludes my enjoyment of nearly anything. (This isn’t unusual. Colin Wilson often talks about ‘competition pressure’, whereby people in densely populated areas feel near constant stress simply from being continually reminded of all the other people there are around them at all times, competing with them for the attention that we all need or want from others in our day to day life.)

However, the major overwhelming reason I don’t go to geek conventions is, I admit it, I’m snotty. I don’t like many of my fellow geeks. I embrace them as my spiritual brethren and would defuse a bomb for any of them, if I had to. But I don’t like them, and the simple reason for that is that geeks, as a community, are not very likable.

Oh, we have good traits. We generally are not bullies, we do not start fights, we are usually rather non violent, we read for pleasure (well, we used to; lots of geeks these days are like Paul and Scott; movie and TV and video game fantasy geeks who rarely or never crack a book) and we usually have considerably higher levels of active imagination than most non-geek adults. All of these are good things, and I admire them in my fellow geeks.

However, geeks generally don’t know how to behave, and a lot of us don’t have good hygiene, and, well, I just don’t like most of my fellow geeks enough to want to spend any period of time in a limited space with several hundred or thousand of them.

Now, I’m going to hypothesize here a bit, because I haven’t gone to a con of any sort since… um… I’m going to say 1981, when I believe I worked as a security guard at a con put on on the SU campus by Marilyn King, who was not, at that point, actually Marilyn King, and whom I did not know at all well back then, but whom I later became better friends with when I joined her roleplaying group… well, never mind all that. Haven’t been to a con in over 20 years, leave it at that.

Still, I assume these days, if you go to a comic book or even an SF con, there are people wandering around in costume, and some of them will be dressed as the X-Men, and some of THOSE people will be dressed in costumes obviously patterned after the costumes in the X-MEN movies, rather than the comic books.

Now, I’m a Silver Age fan, and in my earlier days, I could certainly get a bit snotty when talking to fellow Silver Age fans about the goddam new X-Men. Oh, I’d say loftily, they aren’t the REAL X-Men, they’re just imposters. The REAL X-Men wear blue and yellow costumes and are drawn by Jack Kirby. Yaddity yaddity.

So I’d have to figure that there are old school fans out there who, when they see these poseurs wandering around in movie X-Men costumes, and they realize that these guys, my God, they probably weren’t even buying the NEW X-Men comics until they saw the movies, well… said old school fans probably feel a fine and unbridled sense of contempt for these johnny come latelies, these bandwagon X-fans who don’t even know what the X-Men REALLY look like, by God.

I admit it. I’d probably feel somewhat similar.

And yet, even were I simply a fellow fan, I am hard pressed…

No, wait.

Mandatory disclaimer: I am, and I freely cop to it, an asshole. (I don’t regard myself as an asshole, mind. This isn’t self pity. I think I’m a pretty cool guy, albeit one who still has some flaws that need more work. However, I am capable of detaching my perceptions enough, and I have sufficient empathy, to realize that to many other perceptual viewpoints, I am, indeed, an asshole. And I’ve discussed that recently, so let’s just let it drop at that.) Once upon a time I was completely clueless as to appropriate social behavior. I’m more clued now, but sometimes I deliberately disregard conventional social mandates where adhering to them would cost me self esteem points. And I am aware that if you were to ask any number of people to describe me, the words ‘rude’ and ‘unpleasant’ and ‘jerk’ and ‘mean’ and ‘creep’ might well figure prominently in those descriptions.

Okay. Having said all that, even were I simply a fellow fan at a convention, I am hard pressed to imagine myself ever walking up to one of these wannabe bandwagon Hollywood X-fans and sneering at them in my best Patrick Stewart tones, “Ohhhh, look at YOU, you must be an Evil Mutant in all that black, oh my, we don’t really know how a real X-Men dresses, DOOOOO we?”

If I actually worked at the Con, and these were my customers who had paid good money to be there… I mean, holy shit. How would that work?

Even at the age of 17, I don’t think I’d have been that rude, and I was pretty rude when I was 17. (Mind you, in my own marginal defense, I was never deliberately rude when I was 17; I hadn’t the courage. I simply did not understand appropriate social behavior.) I cannot imagine deliberately being that rude to anyone, and I absolutely am staggered and astonished by the very notion of being so rude and boorish that after committing these grotesque serial discourtesies over and over again over the course of a summer of attending various different SF cons, some years later, I would still be so proud of my ill mannered behavior that I would go out on the Internet and brag about it in public, while at the same time fatuously self congratulating myself on just how excellent my Patrick Stewart voice had been when I did it.

On the other hand, apparently I am a pretty rude guy, because I’m doing this entry and I am as certain as I can be that this entry is hurting at least one person’s feelings right now as they read it. And believe it or not, I regret that. I went back and forth for a while about writing and posting this entry, and, well, all I can say is, the first proposed mental draft was considerably more barbed than this one, in that it pointed specific fingers and named specific names and employed considerably more personally insulting and offensive terms.

I did not have to write this entry, and to an extent, I am sorry I felt it was necessary, or at least, appropriate, to write this entry. But, having just spent my entire previous blog page fatuously self congratulating myself on how I do not suffer fools gladly, and how if you come onto my blog page or send me an email and you say something that I find egregiously obnoxious and offensive I am going to let you hear about it, well… I’m not going to say I had no choice.

I am going to say that ultimately, I decided I would be hypocritical if I didn’t address what I am addressing in some way. And, again, in my own marginal defense, I could have made this entry a great deal more blistering, and was originally inclined to do so. And, given the way I’ve ranged in the textual howitzers on various other wanks and weebles who incurred my… well… disapproval, at the very least… in the past (the name Tuxedo Slack just leaps RIGHT to mind there) I have to wonder just why, in fact, I’m being so restrained on this occasion. (Some of you who are keeping up with me may think this isn’t restrained. Others who have more experience with my verbal pummeling style will realize, though, that this particular diatribe has, indeed, been relatively subtle and civil compared to some past textual body slams I’ve handed out.)

Honestly, I don’t know why I’m being so (comparatively) nice about this. It may be that I have a history with the person I’m more or less writing this about and to, and in the past I’ve mauled him badly (with what I thought were good reasons at the time) and I just don’t want to do that to him again. Maybe I’m just tired of it. Or maybe it’s just that he’s been so earnest, so determined to be pleasant and cordial and cheerful and bring his best game to my weblog, that I don’t want to point a finger or name a name, thus humiliating this person publicly more than… well, than I absolutely had to by writing and posting this entry, anyway.

I realize that this particular guy meant no harm, and in fact, he thought he was simply agreeing with something I’d said and posting his own, similar experience in support. I acknowledge that he in no way intended to offend me, and I’ll even acknowledge that maybe I’m out of line telling him with this entry that I think the behavior he described in the entry I am responding to was horrible and wrong headed and entirely inappropriate.

But, again… if I’m going to haul off and bitch slap someone who wrote me and compared the preservation of the Alaskan North American Wildlife preserve to the hateful repression of alternative sexualities, then I think I need to say something when someone comes on my blog and says “Say, look, I was really really rude to some people I didn’t like some time ago, because I feel the same way you do about something, and isn’t that cool of me?”

For the record: no, it’s not cool. I was ‘rude’ to someone who came up and put an offensive social opinion in my face, apropos of nothing, in such a way as to invite my forthright response, which that person then got. I did not intrude my own particular emotional bias against people I considered to be overly trendy into their good time at a social event they had paid to attend.

Also, just to clarify: yes, like most people, I dislike those I perceive to be climbing onto bandwagons, especially when I’ve been walking for years in the parade that the bandwagon just pulled out of nowhere to lead. However, my point in bringing that up was not to put down ‘Lord Corwin of Amber’, but to point out that although I had (probably spurious) reason to be immediately prejudiced against him, I found his letter to be generally thoughtful and intelligent, enough to overcome my initial disdain for someone who would borrow a literary cognomen from such an obvious source. I was complimenting Lord Corwin, and, well, I was also, as I always do on this damned thing, talking about myself, because that’s what I love to do.

It’s not my intention to be rude here, or to hurt anyone’s feelings, or infuriate anyone, or to start up any old feuds again. It is my intention to be consistent with my own (pompously publicly stated) ethics and codes of behavior, and to communicate (for all the good or lack thereof it may do) that I, personally, don’t think it’s appropriate for someone at a fantasy event to put their nose in the air about anyone else at that same fantasy event… at least, to the point of snubbing them for not being the ‘correct’ kind of geek.

And that’s it for this time. Bucs game in an hour, so I need to go get something to eat beforehand.

Everybody be good.

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.