It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

Sunday November 2 2003

The look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper

Here’s something troublesome: my cuz in law Mel reads this thing, and I want to blog about something she may take personally, or get offended by. I love my cuz in law Mel, and the last thing in the world I want to do is offend her, but I also don’t feel like censoring myself. So, Mel, I in no way blame you, or anyone else, for any of what I’m about to talk about. This is all just on me.

Tonight we all went over to this Halloween parade thing they have every year in Zephyrhills. Paul wanted to go, and although I rarely enjoy crowds, well, I decided to go along. Then Mel was going to go with her kids, so we all went together.

Things would have been okay if I’d just gone in street garb, but I was seized with an urge to wear my cape (this lovely black medieval cloak my ex girlfriend Kristy made for me when we were dating that I love and rarely have an excuse to wear). In addition I wore a skull mask I have and draped a black t-shirt over my head to make a surprisingly effective cowl/hood, and it actually looked pretty impressive.

The problem was, Mel’s rotten little brats simply couldn’t keep their hands off my goddam costume. They had to keep poking the mask and grabbing the cape and tugging at it, and what can you do? However much other people’s children obviously need it, you cannot simply beat the hell out of them, it’s not socially acceptable. I just shouldn’t have gone along with Mel once I knew the kids were going to be there. I never enjoy going anywhere with little kids; they are always monsters in my presence. It’s like dogs who smell fear on you. Little kids know they can piss me off and I won’t be able to do anything about it, and they just have to do it. I don’t understand it myself; when I was that age I would have been terrified to behave that badly with any adult… but my mom, on the other hand, wouldn’t hesitate to clobber me or any of my brothers right in public if we misbehaved, either, which probably had something to do with it.

Anyway, the strangers we passed on the street seemed to enjoy my costume, which was nice, but also slightly melancholy… they weren’t really enjoying me, and if I hadn’t worn it, they wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention to me. Plus, there were the brats, trying to jump up and haul my mask off and grabbing my cape and yanking on it and giggling their heads off, and honestly, it was really annoying. Especially when one of them finally managed to cause the clasp at the collar of the cape to tear off, ruining the cloak for the rest of the evening.

It wasn’t all that, though. It’s mostly that I’m genuinely different from the vast majority of people, and while those differences are a product of my own decisions, and I’m aware of that, still, whenever I mingle with a crowd, it just underscores for me that I really do not, and am not going to, belong anywhere outside a very small circle of family members and friends. Tonight wasn’t any different, and it wasn’t helped by the depressing realization that everywhere I looked there were attractive women, and every single one of them would be deemed by society (and worse, by themselves) to be too young to date me. I would, of course, quite often catch sight of other people my age, and they were all homely and repellent to me, so I’m sure I seemed the same to most everyone else. Welcome to middle age.

I don’t ask much of modern science. I just want some genetic breakthrough that leads to a cheap, widely available pill I can take that will regenerate me to my physical prime and keep me there forever. Is that too much to ask for? Eternal youth? I don’t think so. Let’s get on the stick, all you boffins. Chop chop. I’m not getting any younger, and I blame every one of you for it.

Anyway. So the whole parade thing had me a little down and quite aggravated, since I love my cloak and don’t get to wear it often and here this little monster had ruined it because no matter how often I said "stop pulling on my damn CAPE” he just had to keep doing it. And I should note here that later on we went back to Chad and Mel’s and my cousin Chad sewed the clasp back on my cape quite neatly and competently and I thank him for it, too.

Anyway, at Chad and Mel’s I was relaxing, because Chad and Mel are part of my tribe and I generally feel welcome with them and, to the extent that someone like me can anywhere, like I belong and fit in with them.

Then Paul’s friend Scott showed up, which, you know, that’s fine, but, well, took away a bit from the sense of being with my family and my tribe, because, well, Scott just isn’t a tribe member, emotionally, to me.

Then they all went into the other room to get high, because, well, they all do that.

Now, look. There is nothing wrong with them doing that. For God’s sake, I understand that. It was their house, and honestly, I am not judgmental of what other people do with their own consciousnesses. And I would absolutely have been welcome to go into the next room and get high with them, and while everyone there knew I wasn’t going to do that, I was also absolutely welcome to simply go in and hang out with them while they did it.

However, if there is anyone out there who has ever been the only person at the bar or party not drinking or smoking out, well, you will understand that the melancholy, excluded feeling I experienced at suddenly having my tribe withdraw from me completely would only have been exacerbated by going in and sitting around with them and being the only person in the room not hitting the pipe.

But, again, this is all on me. I would have been welcome; I chose to leave, and to an extent, I chose to feel excluded, and that’s just how I am and how it’s going to be. My solitude is always a result of my own choices and my own volitional behavior, and I get that, really I do.

But still, it often sucks.

So I’m feeling a bit depressed tonight, but thank God I’m much saner than I used to be twenty years or so ago, or I’d be clinically depressed, manically sobbing, and wishing fervently I was dead. Since Basic Training I just don’t wallow like that any more, and it’s one thing I’m very grateful to Basic Training for giving me.

All right. There has been no good email lately. Yahoo found the club where I’d been uploading my extremely taboo porn cartoons and deleted it peremptorily, and they also disabled the Yahoo ID I’d used to manage the club from, so that sucked. In blog news, Britchick Vanessa is still having problems with her blogroll so I have, for the moment, removed her from mine. I’ll put her back when her own blogroll reappears, assuming I’m still on it, which, well, is never something I’d actually assume.

I’d been concerned, based on past experience, that I’d alienate Vanessa and her crowd within two weeks anyway, and now, well… I’m not at all sure I haven’t, but I am starting to feel like I really don’t belong over there with that group, whether they have any feelings about me or not. (I’m really not as egotistical as I often seem. I almost never assume anyone has any feelings about me at all, which is why I was so stunned to find Aaron Hawkins and at least one of his sycophants were still writing about me a year after the last time they’d interacted with me.) But I don’t belong with any group, so that’s hardly anything new.

Still, V’s latest posts seem to emphasize for me that this really isn’t my scene. So I think I’ll just leave that to those who feel more at home there and retreat back into my lonely cybernetic shell over here once more.

I have, as the various quotes should attest, started rereading 1984. I’ve only read it once before, and I was about 14 at the time, so I thought a re-appraisal was overdue. I’m very aware that it’s a horribly depressing book, but as I go through it again now, I’m struck, as I don’t think I ever was before, by just how amazingly talented Orwell was as a writer. His prose is beautifully nuanced and he has this astonishing capacity to completely immerse you in the tiniest details, right down to the odors and the textures, of his fictional world, in only a sentence or two. Every word seems chosen as carefully as a brain surgeon picks through an array of scalpels, looking for the absolutely perfect one to invoke whatever subtle emotion he’s aiming to make you feel at any given moment.

Beyond that, the tyranny of 1984 is a horrifyingly plausible and well conceived one. Orwell has obviously given considerable thought to even the most minor details, and it’s not just the televisors in every room that are scary and oppressive. Each succeeding fragment Orwell provides of Winston Smith’s world steadily accretes into this truly numbing, utterly appalling mosaic of sheer psychological domination and utter spiritual oppression; the world he shows us is one of such existential misery and ongoing despair you have to wonder why people don’t just commit suicide en masse… while realizing that in fact, most people wouldn’t, they would just, as human beings do, endure, and capitulate, and adapt.

As I’ve read it before I know how thoroughly grim and depressing the book’s final culmination is, and how difficult it will be to actually read through to the end. Yet like all dystopian novels, 1984 is ultimately an optimistic book, if only because it shows us that however bad things are in Ashcroft’s America, they could be much much worse.

I’m sleeping better lately, which is good, because the Bux are playing early again tomorrow (1 p.m.) so I’ll need to be in bed, you know, at a reasonable hour (i.e., before 5 a.m.) if I’m going to get up and watch the game.

I’m trying to think if there’s anything else worth talking about… oh, yeah. Paul’s landlady showed up yesterday… first of the month and all. Paul simply doesn’t make enough money for all his expenses, especially with me living here, and since his landlady lets him pay what he can when he can, well, she tends to get paid what he can spare, when he can spare it. (It’s the way of things: when you have bills to pay, the people who are complete dicks about it… the utility companies, basically… get paid first. If your landlord is willing to cut you slack, you take advantage of it. I wish that wasn’t true, but until someone starts paying me enough money to live on comfortably, that’s how it will remain.) Today she had her son with her, and she’s been saying for sometime that fairly soon he’ll be our new landlord, and hinting he’s much more of a hardass that she is.

So Paul’s fretting about that. I tried to reassure him… it’s rarely in any landlord’s best interests to evict a tenant they’re getting at least some money from, who isn’t trashing the place… but landlords, I know well, are ultimately unpredictable and a lot depends on their nature. If this son is a prick, well, he's perfectly capable of simply evicting us the first time we don’t have all the rent on the first of the month, and may not care (or believe) that he’s going to have a hard time filling the space with someone who will be a better tenant.

I’m hoping this guy will be reasonable, or, if he’s not, that Paul takes it as a wake up call to start seriously living on a budget. I’m also hoping I get some kind of job soon (I went back over to the restaurant I applied to a while back today, but the manager wasn’t there, so it was a wasted trip). Barring all that, I should get a check for at least $500 from the Website Which Must Not Be Named this month, and if we have to plug it all into the rent, well, fine, I’m prepared to do that… but that’s only a short term fix.

It’s nothing that will be helped by worrying, of course, and I’m trying not to let it bug me much, but… well… I really need to get a job, sell a novel, or win the Lotto.

But that’s always true, anyway.

Oh, genuinely good news… after a weekend of outpatient treatment, my mom’s platelets are, at least temporarily, back up into very healthy ranges. And, also, Scott Shepherd and his family are doing as well as could be expected, which is good to know.

Beyond that, I got nothin’ else. Scott is here and Paul just yelled through the wall asking if I want to roleplay, so I’ll post this and sign off. I realize it’s two hours before November 2 right now, but most of you won’t read this until tomorrow or afterward, so screw it.

All right. I’m off. But then, you knew that. ;)

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Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.

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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:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(c) be a better writer than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

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:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they’re not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that’s all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I’m in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people’s blogs, so this probably doesn’t matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don’t care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that’s just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say I don’t care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it’s just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what’s left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it’s a self correcting problem.

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.

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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.

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