It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

Tuesday November 4 2003

Anything that suggested a taste for solitude

Bad day yesterday on the blog. I’d like to move right along from that, but, well, this stuff is important so I’m going to dwell a little bit in the section below. I regret boring any of my audience still bothering to read this nonsense with a further exploration of this crap, but, well, skip on down if you gotta.

Cyber Shenanigans

I’ve had a few brief but interesting email exchanges with Vanessa lately, which have been a much appreciated distraction amongst the nonsense otherwise swirling around my email box and this blog in the last day or so.

The sidebar on Vanessa’s Blog has also reappeared and she’s been kind enough to move me up to her ‘Weekly Goodies’ list, so I’ve restored her to my blogroll, as well. Aren’t I splendid? Shower me with praise for my magnanimity.

Now, as to that nonsense swirling around my email box and this blog over the last day I mentioned above: Banned Boy Dave Fiore sent me an email this morning that I deleted unread. Let me explain why:

I knew a guy in college, and for a long, long time (well, two years or so) I really, genuinely thought he was the closest friend I’d ever had. Yeah. I sincerely felt ‘hey, this is one of those storybook friendships, the ones that last the rest of your life, where we’ll be best man at each other’s weddings and some day when I open my P.I. business he’ll show up to ask for help, get shot at the end of the tease right before the opening credits, and I’ll spend the rest of the episode avenging him, finishing up with me laying the badge of the renegade cop that killed him on his grave in a tearful send off right before the closing credits roll’.

Honestly, I really do think things like that. I blame the media.

Anyway, I had this friend whom I’ll call K., and I really genuinely thought he was my friend and that we’d be friends for the rest of our lives, and now, just to jump ahead, K. seems to regard me with loathing and approbation to the point where he has spread vicious lies about me all over the Internet… but never mind. Suffice to say, K. is not my friend any more, and I imagine even at the time he was was not really my friend. I just didn’t know that then.

What K. got out of the relationship, back then when we seemed the closest, was that I had a lot of really stupid ideas back when I was 17, just turned 18. I really did not know how to think analytically. I wanted to be a professional writer and I had talent and good ideas but no clue how to structure these things, and, well, a lot of my opinions were worthless overly emotional twaddle.

K. took me in hand. He instructed me patiently in how to think analytically and critically (an invaluable tool for a wannabe writer, and I honestly think everyone could stand a dose of it), and he just as patiently waded into the morass of idiotic adolescent bias that comprised my mind at that point and methodically set about replacing all of my truly idiotic opinions with his rather more lucid, reasoned, and logical views.

Thus it was that I came to learn that, no, Wolverine killing people he didn’t HAVE to kill for any reason was BAD because Wolverine was being presented as a HERO, and when a writer presents a hero to an audience he knows is comprised of adolescents, he has an obligation not to model egregiously bad behavior (like, you know, cold blooded murder) with that ‘hero’. (I think he also shouldn’t have had Wolverine smoking, but that’s just a thing of my own. Certainly he shouldn’t have had Wolverine sneaking up behind guards in the Savage Land, that he could easily have rendered unconscious, and disemboweling them, just because Wolverine is, you know, like that.)

All of this is fine, but it isn’t friendship. I just didn’t know that.

Flash forward a couple of years. I’m living in my first off campus house over on Strong Avenue, with my three closest buddies from the campus clique… Rob, a really good guy, great company and excellent friend I still miss occasionally, Andy, who was always really really popular with chicks and that I’d had a really good time with the previous summer crashing on his back porch; and the Late Great Jeff Webb, whom I still miss pretty much every day of my life. And we were all kind of excited, because K., who had been over in England for a semester, was finally showing up to move into the room we’d reserved for him in this five bedroom house.

So K. shows up and everyone does a lot of hopping around and there’s excitement and festivity and eventually, though, much later that night, we end with just me and Rob and K., or maybe me and Jeff and K., sprawled around in K.’s bedroom (K. could not believe that we’d saved the largest, most desirable front bedroom for him, but, well, we were actually just nice guys and we didn’t want to stick him with the hole at the back of the house where, in fact, I ended up). K. is playing various interesting .45 singles he found over in England for us (one I remember had a chorus that was something about Sgt. Rock helping someone to do something, although I can’t recall anything else about it except that other than those words it didn’t strike me as very much fun).

So then I got up and went out and came back in with some new City Boy records I’d gotten while K. was gone. Now, first, K. had turned me on to City Boy (you don’t know who they are, and never mind) shortly after we’d first met, so I thought he’d be interested in their latest album, and second, we’d just spent an hour and a half listening while K. played all this stuff he wanted us to hear, so, naturally, I assumed, social contract, and, you know, among friends… whatever.

So I played one track off the new album (“Life On The Balcony”, a spooky song about ghosts of old lovers), which K. didn’t seem to really like as much as I did, and then I went to lift the needle to play another one (“Mr. Shoes”, which I really REALLY liked and thought K. would too) and K. said “Okay, look, you know, I let you play the one, but it’s late and I really didn’t even enjoy the first one, so, you know, let’s… just talk, or something.”

I look back on that now and I think that’s just amazingly, I mean, stunningly, rude.

At the time, though, I was so pleased to have K. back, and so generally charmed by him (K. is a very charismatic person; he presently has tens if not hundreds of thousands of fans, many of whom are passionately devoted to him to an extent that defies all logic and reason) that, well… I thought it was amazingly, I mean, stunningly, rude, and my mouth fell open in utter disbelief and I believe Rob, or maybe Jeff, looked equally stunned… but no one said anything. And we just started talking.

And then we come to the other part of the evening that is burned on my memory, where I first realized that, whatever it was K. and I were, it wasn’t friends.

We were having this long drawn out debate, as we often did, on… something, I don’t know what… something geeky, I’m sure, like whether or not the Invisible Girl really ought to be called the Invisible Woman, and whether her typically ‘50s personality of ‘supportive wife, mother, and big sister’ needed to be changed to make her more ‘appropriate’ to a more modern, feminist age… I don’t know if that’s what we were talking about at that time, but it could have been, and honestly, if it was, I could not tell you now which side I was arguing, because both sides have their merits (there’s nothing wrong with portraying an individual character the way Sue Storm Richards was always portrayed during the 1960s and early 1970s, however offensive many feminists came to find it; on the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with Sue changing and growing over the years, especially given that she’d had a career in which she’d met kings and presidents and aliens and saved the world many times). What I do remember is that, after we’d discussed whatever it was we were discussing for an hour or so, I finally concluded that we just weren’t going to reach an accord, and, in what I thought was a very grown up manner (I remember being very proud of how much I’d matured while K. was gone) saying “Well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that, then.”

Now, while K. was gone, I had come under the influence of, well, I’ll call him S. (I’m using initials, although anyone who has read any amount of my work knows who I’m talking about, but both these guys are big names in comics right now, and I’ve decided it’s poor form to seem to be name dropping, so, hence, initials for the famous successful people I used to hang around with.) S. is actually one of the better human beings you’ll ever want to meet, and where K. had taught me to think analytically, S., along with the Late Great Jeff Webb (a very wise man about everything except his own individual social interactions) gave me a crash course in learning to be more tolerant and generally behaving in a more mature and adult fashion, while K. was over in England.

So, where in the past I would fight to the absolute death about every single subject of disagreement no matter how trivial, now, I was perfectly capable of seeing that debates on the characterization of an imaginary character named Sue Storm (or whatever geeky subject it was we were talking about) weren’t important enough to warrant all out warfare.

I’d also gained enough self confidence in my own viewpoints by then (based largely on K.’s teaching me to think analytically) that I was no longer willing to simply capitulate a point in order to win approval.

So, you know, I said, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree” and I thought K., as my friend, would be impressed and pleased with my new maturity and personal evolution.

K. looked as if I’d kicked him in the nuts… for about two seconds. Then his face changed, and for another two seconds, he looked as absolutely furious as I have ever seen him look.

Then he smoothed his face out and said “It’s really late, I want to crash”, and, well, looking back on it, that was really the actual end of my ‘friendship’ with K.

See, some people really aren’t interested in being your friend. Some people simply want to change you. They enjoy doing that. It makes them feel big. If they can take someone who completely disagrees with them on a subject… any subject, they don’t care what… and they can painstakingly remold that person into a cheerful little parrot carefully reiterating whatever ideas and viewpoints that they, themselves, have planted and nurtured in said parrot’s idiotic little head… well, they’ll hang around with that person and pretend to be their buddy forever, because that’s what they get their kicks from… Changing Other People Into Second Rate Versions of Themselves.

I think it’s a fairly loathsome way to treat other human beings, but, well, there are a lot of people out there who do it. And I suspect that one of the many reasons I myself do not make friends easily is that I am, at this point in my life, utterly resistant to this kind of manipulation.

And, see, that brings us back to this thing with me and David Fiore, and why I deleted whatever email he sent me today unread.

What I remember of the comment of Dave’s that I deleted yesterday (which I did not read in full, only about the first two paragraphs) stated pretty explicitly that, apparently, Dave never really liked my work all that much, so when he wrote me to tell me he’d enjoyed it, and in general acted as a really friendly and supportive guy for all those weeks on my blog and his, he was, as folks like him tend to say, ‘handling’ me. (Aaron Hawkins might note he was using his social skills, of which I have very few, compared to guys like Dave and Aaron.) Dave’s motivation all along, according to that comment I deleted because it struck me as a real waste of time and sentience, was to ‘educate’ me. He’d read my Englehart article and found my ideas regarding continuity and characterization (said ideas which, remember, he snottily invited me to expand on in yesterday’s comment threads, although he obviously already had a pretty good grasp on what they were) annoying and offensive, so he sought me out to ‘engage’ me in what he called an ‘intelligent discussion’, with the sole purpose of ‘enlightening me’ as to the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth… as Dave Fiore sees it.

I cannot tell you how obnoxious and annoying I find this to be. That someone would come up to me pretending to like my work and to want to be my friend, when all along they have some hidden agenda to completely reshape my perceptions and viewpoints on something that, frankly, isn’t any of their goddam business… this is as aggravating as the very attractive young woman I once knew who spent three days acting as if she were really interested in me, so she could invite me to a Bible Study meeting.

For the record: if you want to be my friend (and it’s okay if you don’t) You Don’t Get To Try To Change Me. (Note the capitals. This is important.) You can take me as I am, or you can brush your palms together in disgust and walk away, but if you suck up to me in the hopes of using your ‘social skills’ to manipulate me into becoming more acceptable by whatever particularly odious subjective standards you have decided I need to measure up to, you are going to be disappointed. I don’t care if you sniffily declare that you were trying to ‘engage me in intelligent debate’ or if you just stalk away fuming about how some people are just too goddam stubborn for their own good or what.

I don’t change to please other people. I change, when and if I change, because I detect there is something fundamentally wrong with my behavior or my world view and I decide it needs to be changed for me to continue to be someone I like and admire.

Now, other people often help me to see these things, but there’s a fine line there, and I do not like to be handled. You think I’m a misogynist, you think I’m a racist, you think my sexual fantasies are too horribly anti-social, tell you what… front load with that and maybe we’ll talk about it and maybe I’ll learn from you.

If, on the other hand, you are mortally offended by my general attitudes towards the fiction I enjoy, or my specific attitudes as a reader towards the Marvel Silver Age superhero metareality, tough. That doesn’t impact you or the rest of the world and it’s none of your fucking business.

I used the ‘f’ word for deliberate emphasis up there.

Now, I’m not in any way saying you can’t use these chat threads to discuss anything I post on this blog, or, for that matter, anything I post elsewhere on the Web. Even if my attitudes are actually none of your business, I’m perfectly happy to talk about them with you as long as you remain civil, and if at some point I tell you ‘you know what, we’re never going to agree on this, let’s drop it’, you, you know, DROP IT.

But if you keep scolding me about it like a sixth grade teacher, after I’ve decided I’m not enjoying the conversations any more, you will annoy me. If, when I finally tell you you BETTER cut the shit or I will throw you the hell out, you then starting shrieking shrilly about how my attitudes towards this stuff (that is and are none of your goddam business) are ‘extremely dangerous’, you can look forward to a long and prosperous career teaching typewriter maintenance at the Rocco Columbo School for Women, or, really, doing anything else in the world besides than taking up time and space in my email box or on my blog’s chat threads.

And if, finally (to bring it back around to where I started) in your very last communication to me that I will ever read, you angrily confess that you never really liked me or my writing very much, you always thought my attitudes towards various things that aren’t your concern were offensive and annoying, and the only reason you’ve been being nice to me to date was that you had the obviously mistaken impression that I was an intelligent person who might possibly be open to a reasonable debate… ‘reasonable debate’ being a term that you apparently define as a period of intelligent disagreement followed by my absolute capitulation on all terms and immediate enthusiastic embrace of your own deranged and stupid POV on whatever subject we are debating about… well. Upon my realization that you have been playing me like a cheap banjo for the past two weeks when I foolishly thought we were becoming buddies, I will boot you the hell entirely out of my life and never talk to you again.

See, I’ve been here before. It was a long time ago. But I try to learn from my mistakes.

And now I’m tired of this shit, so let’s move on.

”When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.”

Rest of the world blues

I walked up to a local restaurant… ABC Pizza, about six blocks away… and put in an application for a dishwasher position today. For one dizzying, heady moment, I thought I might get an interview (and who knows, maybe a shift offered to me) right there on the spot… when I handed in my completed application, the woman behind the counter said “the manager’s here today, want me to ask if he wants to talk to you?” Naturally, I agreed enthusiastically. Apparently, the manager wasn’t anything like that enthusiastic; she came back a bit later and said ‘well, he’s busy right now but he’ll be in touch’. Yay.

It’s always good to be singled out for a little special positive attention, that’s what I say. To be treated as if the fact that you exist, and you’ve chosen to try to contribute something to this one particular little locus in space/time, really makes a difference to someone.

Anyway.

She was very young… she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

TV FUNNIES

Let’s see. Both papers yesterday had glowing write ups of this new reality show my sister in law mentioned a week or so back, Average Joe, where a total hottie gets fixed up with, well, average looking guys. I had trepidations about the show from the start, and they only got worse when I read that Kathy Griffin was acting as host… I mean, you want to get someone with a truly annoying voice, why not just go straight to Fran Drescher? I’m sure she could use the work. But regardless of that, I figured I’d check the show out anyway… the papers had mentioned that after a bit of a rocky start, the ex-cheerleader really got into several of the guys, and I thought, well, that might be nice to watch… a total hottie put into a situation where she has to look past the surface and actually take note of all the stuff every woman in the world SAYS she wants in a guy, instead of just the sixpack and the jawline and the Roman nose.

Well, I watched half an hour of it.

First, I didn’t like the chick. She’s gorgeous, seems to have the personality of a pomegranate, and the apparent intellect of a great big box of styrofoam packing peanuts. If I ever, through some bizarrely unlikely twist of fate, wound up on a date with this woman, I suspect the first words out of my mouth would be ‘do you have a favorite author’, and if she said anything besides ‘oh, I really don’t read very much’ I’d be absolutely flabbergasted.

Having said that, I also didn’t like any of the ‘Average Joes’. I mean, some of them I absolutely loathed, and some I was merely apathetic about, but there was nobody there remotely like me in any way, or that I could more than distantly sympathize with.

And, gotta tell you… the idea of spending any time at all in a common bunkroom with those guys was and is simply a nightmare of incalculable proportions to me.

Beyond that, I very quickly got tired of the insulting manner in which the show continually smirked about just how upset this amazingly hot chick was going to be when she discovered she had signed up to be on a dating show with a bunch of guys who were definitely NOT hotties.

Oh, I’m aware this is a miniseries and it’s supposed to go through a specific arc. The chick starts out going ‘oh my GOD these guys are all homely’ and ends up realizing that at least some of them are genuinely good catches despite the exterior package. I get all that… but I still don’t like the smarmy, sneering manner in which at least the first half hour that I watched constantly emphasized all these guys’ physical defects.

What mostly turned me off, though, was when one of the better looking alpha males in the group, for absolutely no reason, humiliated one of the geekier guys by smashing an egg on his head. I’ve noticed when watching Survivor that apparently one player putting hands on another player is absolutely verboten, and I think that’s a good rule. I do not understand why this bullying behavior was tolerated by this particular show’s producers, or why the prick who committed the act of violence and humiliation against the other guy wasn’t shown the door immediately… but this is worse behavior than I’ve seen even on FOX reality shows. (This shouldn’t surprise me, I guess… NBC is the network that came up with For Love or Money, the dating show in which a guy thinks a bunch of hot women are trying to win his heart, when in fact, they know that whichever one of them is his final choice will actually get a hefty paycheck. I personally think that concept is horrifyingly cruel, far worse than any other reality show I’ve ever heard of… so NBC not only tolerating a little humiliation, but broadcasting it on national TV, really shouldn’t surprise me. It certainly made me lose interest in this program, though.)

Anyway. I’m over Average Joe. And I’m not sure the question should be ‘can a total hottie find true love with a guy who isn’t very good looking’, but rather, ‘can a guy with any depth of character at all fall in love with a really good looking woman who is as shallow as a raindrop on your windshield and as dumb as a grocery sack full of iceberg lettuce?’

Actually, okay, that’s something else that really bugged me about the show… it strongly buys into the whole ‘all any man wants is a good looking chassis’ myth. That annoys me. Judging from what I saw, if I ever ended up on a date with the woman on this show, I’d be bored to tears in ten minutes. (Of course, I doubt she’d be real thrilled to find herself having dinner with me, so that makes us even.)

I wrote all the TV stuff last night, and looking back through it, well, I guess I was in a bad mood. Oh, Average Joe really doesn’t interest me at all, but I had no real right to be as mean as I was to the woman (Melana Scantlin) on the show. I don’t know her. She may be smart as hell and very witty, and even if she’s not, that’s just my particular bias… I like smart women, and so what? There are smart men and women in the world who are despicable people, and Ms. Scantlin did demonstrate one particular trait that is enormously to her credit… she was very kind and gracious to all the guys when they got off the bus, in what had to be an excruciatingly stressful and even humiliating situation for her (basically, she was held up as a piece of meat for 16 strangers, and every single one of them pretty much emphasized that by stressing to her how gorgeous she was as they greeted her). For her to maintain her composure and remain gracious to all those guys in that particular context certainly shows more character than I was giving her credit for.

I’m going to leave the stuff I wrote above because, well, I wrote it, and that’s just how I am sometimes. Best people have no illusions. But, honestly, I have no idea what Ms. Scantlin is actually like, and for all that the producers of the show are trying hard to make us think she’s a two faced hyprocrite (showing her being nice to guys, then making faces behind their backs) I need to remember that this is almost certainly a product of careful (and unfair) editing. What probably happened was that after everybody went inside, they kept Melana outside in that location and engaged her in a conversation designed to elicit certain facial expressions and body language, and then cut those expressions and postures in to make it look as if she were being a brat. But there’s nothing in any of what Ms. Scantlin actually says or does on the show to indicate that she’s anything but pleasant and sweet, and if indeed she doesn’t read for pleasure, well, so what? She’s not my dream date, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a good person.

Mind you, I have no idea what she’s like, and that’s what I’m saying. Reality shows, especially very mean spirited ones, go out of their way to present their ‘characters’ in certain lights, and the dangerous thing about that is, these ‘characters’ are real people with real families and real friends and real jobs and real bosses… but, anyway.

To summarize, I don’t like Average Joe that much, mostly because I don’t like how manipulative it obviously is… but I shouldn’t have been so mean to Melana Scantlin.

On the other hand, the asshole who broke an egg on the other guy’s head should be tied behind someone’s car by the scrotum and dragged down two or three miles of dirt road on his face, and if they’d like to do that on national TV, well, I’ll buy that for a dollar.

Realistically, though, that jerk will probably end up with his own show next season…

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

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

(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.

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.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man