I don’t care what you say any more, this is my life,
go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.

Wednesday November 5 2003

Taking a break today from the beautifully worded but oh so grim and depressing Orwell passages. Instead we’ll focus on one of my favorite, overly glib and completely shallow pop culture neo-Yoda figures.

The returns are in; when I do long rambling chaotic entries covering a whole lot of different subjects in one endless blathering column, I get 10 or 14 comments; when I break everything up in neat little specific subject-oriented paragraphs, each with its own comment thread, I get maybe two comments on one, nothing to the others, and everyone ignores the cartoon. You can guess which result I enjoy more, and for God’s sake, people, it’s EASIER for me to write the long rambling stream of semi-consciousness crap, so get used to that.

I’ve been meaning to mention, and I just keep forgetting, that after a brief respite of about a week maybe three weeks ago, all these emails promising me millions of dollars in misplaced African funds if I’ll just give my bank account numbers to some total stranger with a weird name somewhere have started rolling in again in avalanche proportions.

I have to assume, since people keep sending these out, that (a) our law enforcement organizations are doing nothing to try to track down whoever is behind these things and provide them with the lengthy period of penal internment they so richly deserve, and (b) these things must work on someone out there, which indicates to me that there are still people on the Internet that are just barely sentient enough to turn their computers on.

That last especially surprises me. I would think anyone with enough brainpower to be able to negotiate through AOL’s sign on procedures (admittedly, AOL does their best to make these things utterly foolproof, but still, you have to pay a LITTLE attention) would just delete these things in disgust.

I also think our laws should be modified to allow people to file suit against someone simply for continually TRYing to defraud us in a very annoying fashion, even if those people haven’t suffered any actual monetary damages. Of course, that brings up the whole ‘who is it’ question, but I guarantee you, if there was a billion dollar class action suit in the mix, there are lawyers out there who would make it their business to track these assholes down and slap a summons on them.

Well, we don’t live in that world, so let’s move on.

A friend of mine, who I’m not going to name because he IS a friend of mine, sent me a really interesting email the other day containing what was apparently meant to be a prologue to some fascinating science fiction/fantasy novel intended to be a sort of allegory on religion in general and Christian monotheism in specific.

In it, he’d set out a conflict between a couple of Earthbound deities who were at war with each other, both of whom were trying to avoid the notice of the major deity who rules Earth but dwells on a higher plane. This all seemed really promising and interesting to me, but I got the niggling feeling that he’d put all these specific references into it that I was supposed to ‘get’, and I just didn’t. They went right over my head.

So I wrote him back saying ‘nice ideas, but if you’re referring to something specific I don’t get it’. And he wrote back, and, well, this was his idea for a preface to the third, as yet unwritten, novel in one of my projected trilogies, and, well, that shit’s not funny.

Look, folks… I don’t share my toys well. If the Late Great Jeff Webb and I had one really serious fight ever, it was when I sent him a longish short story I was about halfway done with for his feedback, and he rewrote it completely from scratch and sent it back to me enormously changed without asking me if he could, because he thought it was really cool and wanted to collaborate with me on it.

I don’t LIKE it when people do this.

Beyond that, this made me realize why I had so much loathing for a certain person’s approach to the Silver Age Marvel Universe. See, leaving aside all the nonsense about me seeing that Universe as a real place populated with real people, what it essentially came down to for me as a reader was, the Marvel Universe is supposed to be FUN. It’s not supposed to be this really heavy place full of deep spiritual analogies and religious symbolism and shit like that. It’s just supposed to be FUN. Now, you can do some fairly serious abstract explorations in the Marvel Universe… my favorite writer, Steve Englehart, certainly did, especially in Dr. Strange and Captain America and The Avengers, and Steve Gerber was always into the heavy social satire and humanistic explorations over in Man-Thing and Defenders… but none of this stuff was religious, none of it was tedious or pedantic or pretentious or pompous (or at least, it wasn’t any of those things in the same way that stating that the Silver Age Marvel Universe is essentially an exploration of Calvinist liberalism, or talking about superheroes as invisible saints living in a state of unwitting grace, is) and, well, Englehart and Gerber are GREAT writers and they could get away with this stuff in a way that other, very solemn and overly pretentious writers like Roy Thomas and Don MacGregor simply couldn’t.

To my mind, when you take the Marvel Universe and use it as fuel for some really heavy, grown up, utterly boring doctoral dissertation, even if all you’re doing is trying to prove that comics books have validity as historical documents (like Bradford Wright did in Comic Book Nation), you’re missing the point, which is that superhero comics are supposed to be FUN. Stop trying to get grown ups to take them seriously, that’s a bad idea. If grown ups want to enjoy superhero comics, they need to cultivate their inner child a little; trying to make superhero comics fit into some grown up context is just stupid.

And, given that I loathe religion, if you’re going to insist on re-interpreting everything in the Silver Age Marvel Universe in Christian monotheistic terms, well, I am absolutely going to recoil in appalled disgust and horror from you and tell you at every opportunity to STOP IT. Because, quite simply, YOU ARE TAKING THE FUN OUT OF IT.

Sometimes I think people taking the fun out of stuff is absolutely the primary evil in this universe. Or at least, one of the major ones. It’s like there are people out there who simply can’t let something just be, you know, enjoyable for its own sake. They have to find some deeper meaning to everything, some hidden symbolism, some portentious underlying moral to every story ever told. It’s like they simply can’t accept that fiction (or, perhaps, anything else created by man) doesn’t need any reason to exist except to entertain. That making people feel good for a while isn’t enough; no. All human endeavor, all expended creative energy, must have some overwhelming social value in order to justify its existence.

I know these people exist. Tobias Wolfe refused to let me into one of his graduate level creative writing workshops when I was going to S.U. because he found my submissions to be ‘too commercial’. He told me quite frankly that this wasn’t what writing was about. Writing was about exploring the human psyche and providing a viewing post into the soul, or some such horseshit. Simply writing to entertain other people, to give them a pleasant escape from their humdrum lives, to tell an interesting and exciting story, was futile, and, to Tobias Wolfe, offensive. It was trash writing, and given that that was obviously what I wanted to do with my talent (and Wolfe admitted frankly that I had a lot of talent) he did not want to teach me.

And, of course, we have the guy who recently got tossed off my blog, who insists on regarding one of the most successfully enjoyable and entertaining fictional continuums ever created as being little more than a field full of interesting religious metaphors and themes. Which is just revolting to me, again, because primarily, it takes something I love, something that exists for no purpose other than to be FUN, and, well, makes it NO FUN AT ALL.

It, to quote some Stephen King character or another, “ru’nes it”. And now my friend, out of very flattering motivations (he loves my two books Endgame and Earthquest and has been hounding me for over a year now to write the concluding book in the trilogy, but I don’t wanna right this second), writes this thing in which he takes the continuity I’ve established in those two books and runs it through the Christian cosmology wringer and tries to make those books about figuring out exactly what ‘gods’ are and who or what ‘Jehovah’ is, and… no. No. No no no no NOOOO.

All my books are just supposed to be FUN. That’s it. They are supposed to be fun, entertaining stories that take you outside your mundane life for a little while, into an imaginary world that’s more adventurous than ours, where geeks like me (or you) can get superhuman powers and wind up stranded across the universe and have to steal a starship and win the loyalty of a crew of scurvy space pirates in order to fight your way back across a hostile galaxy to the planet you call home before your one time closest friend uses HIS new super powers to completely conquer it.

They are not, and I cannot stress this enough, religious goddam allegories. Or deeply insightful social commentaries. Or anything else that would provide them with validity and a justification for continued existence in the library of Tobias Wolfe.

Now, if my books ever got published and were at all popular, it’s certainly possible that fifty or sixty years in the future, some gaping sphincter of an academic might come along and publish some horribly tedious paper showing how everything I wrote was actually an exact thematic model of neo-Puritanical conservatism, and how all my characters, when broken down into their essential dramatic components, were clearly personifications of the ascending and descending levels of the Jewish Tetragrammaton. Or some such crap.

But he would be wasting his time and if I were still alive and I became aware someone was doing that to my work, I would either throttle him my damn self or hire someone younger to do it for me, because, as Stephen King has noted on many occasions, sometimes a story is just a story, and pleasing the paying customers is enough validation for anything.

On the subject of email, Scott Shepherd sent me a lovely long chatty one the other day in which we got to discuss Lois McMaster Bujold’s fiction and America’s utterly insane and outright evil health care system and like that, and I never get to talk about stuff like this in real life because I don’t know anyone who is a serious SF fan like me any more, so that was nice. But I’ve answered it, so that’s over for now.

Now let’s talk about something else I find annoying: approval whores.

Now, mind you, I’m not talking about attention whores. We are all of us who live our lives on a less than saintly level attention whores. I’ve already gone over this many times, how everything we do, in a social environment, basically boils down to either attention getting or attention deflecting behavior. I used to feel really bad when I caught myself engaging in attention getting behavior, or worse, resenting someone else’s competing attention getting behavior, but then I realized we all do this, so I cut myself a break.

But an approval whore is rather different. The approval whore isn’t simply trying, pretty much all the time they take a social action, to either get or deflect attention. No, what they are trying to do, with every action they take, is manipulate other people’s perceptions of and reactions to them in such a way as to maximize their chances of getting that person’s approval and/or positive attention.

We all know these people. We call them asskissers and/or sycophants, depending on how crude and/or pretentious we’re feeling at that particular moment, and I should state right here that I, myself, am occasionally an approval whore, with certain very specific people, and I suspect nearly all of us are, as well, but I’m not sure. In that regard, I won’t speak for other people. But I know that I myself am an occasional approval whore; there are certain people whose approval I want and strive to obtain, yes, indeed.

But being an occasional approval whore with specific people (I sucked up to Steve Englehart outrageously in my article about him, but I don’t feel bad about it because I genuinely admire his writing in a very nearly idolatrous manner) isn’t what I’m talking about, either. No, I’m talking about the full time approval whore, the guy or girl who simply cannot get dressed in the morning, walk out their door, pick up the phone, send an email, post a message to a chat thread or an entry on their blog, engage anyone in any sort of conversation, or pick where they’re going to sit in the cafeteria at school or work, without working through some complex social equation in their heads regarding exactly how this will impact everyone else’s perceptions of them and what exactly is the optimal choice to gain the maximum amount of approval, or, at the very least, the minimal amount of social disapproval, from whoever happens to be around them at the time.

Approval whores are nearly always really hard core attention whores, of course. They live for attention and a lot of times their AGB’s (attention getting behaviors) are so obvious as to be really, egregiously obnoxious even to those who try to be tolerant of such things. But their AGB’s are also carefully molded to win them sympathy and admiration. Approval whores like to be the smartest person in the room, or, if they can’t have that, then they like to be the most pitiful person in the room, the one that everyone feels sorry for. And, of course, you can’t get approval/admiration/sympathy/pity if you don’t first get people’s attention, so yeah, you can generally pick out the approval whore by the way they are frantically waving their semaphore flags at any and every social gathering.

In case you haven’t gotten this yet, I loathe approval whores.

An approval whore cannot dress to please themselves, they have to dress to make themselves look as likable as possible. Approval whores have no opinions other than those of the person they are talking to at the moment; if they’re lucky enough to be the center of several people’s attention, they generally start speaking in platitudes, because platitudes usually don’t offend anyone except surly fuckers like me, who prefer truculently opinionated people who demonstrate some capacity for having at least one or two original thoughts to approval whores who try hard never to utter a single word that anyone, anywhere, might find offensive or annoying.

Approval whores do things like send emails over and over again to large groups of people, and when nobody in the group responds, or when only a few people respond, they send the same email out AGAIN with a whiny little note on the top saying ‘is my email working? Are you guys getting this? If so, why hasn’t anyone responded yet?’

Approval whores are often brilliant at how they go about getting their approval. They will find ways to inveigle their way into a particular group, ways that cannot be refuted, like moving into a neighborhood and attending every neighborhood watch meeting, or showing up for every City Council meeting and claiming to represent some constituency that doesn’t know they exist. They will then attempt to ingratiate themselves with everyone by always bringing cupcakes, or by offering to do little odd jobs for folks, or run errands, or doing whatever else it is they detect that this group will, however grudgingly, approve of. They never offer an opinion they know may offend someone. And if the social group they’ve infiltrated isn’t paying enough attention to them, or providing them with enough approval, they’ll start attaching their AGB’s to something else, or someone else, that they know the group is very interested in. If the neighborhood is comprised of rabid soccer fans, for example, this person, who may or may not be a soccer fan, will start organizing soccer parties at their house, doing soccer themed barbecues, and they’ll go out and get a satellite dish and a big screen TV so they can have everyone over to watch soccer matches. If the most popular person in the neighborhood gets sick, this person will fight tooth and nail to become that person’s primary caregiver, because not only does this make them look good to the rest of the group, it also gives them endless grist for more AGB’s… they can put little bulletins in the neighborhood newsletter about how well Beloved Person is doing, they can put up signs asking for old hot water bottles or electric blankets or Scooby Doobie Doo videos that Beloved Person would enjoy while recuperating (these signs always have the approval whore’s phone number on them, never the Beloved Person’s), hell, they can create websites and email addresses just to allow people to ‘easily monitor Beloved Person’s recovery and send messages of support’, and of course, they’re the one who handles the email account, so they get their hits of approval that way.

Approval whores never, ever do anything anonymously. Their name, and generally, about fifteen different ways you can get in touch with them, are on every single thing they do.

Every email address, every phone number, every person sitting at a bus stop, every web log, every bulletin board, every concert, every party, every social gathering that they have a legitimate and irrefutable ‘right’ to attend, is simply a potential approval source to the approval whore.

I’ve just realized that Garrity essentially accused me of being an approval whore over on Aaron’s blog. That’s pretty much what she was saying… that I only write one sort of entry on my blog, and it is designed to only get one sort of response, and that those responses are the only thing that I live for, because I have no inner strength of my own.

I don’t know. Maybe she’s correct. On the other hand, I think anyone who looks at my work and sees someone who is writing to get the approval of others needs to get their medication adjusted, but maybe I’m kidding myself.

And yet, even the always gracious Elayne Riggs has described me as being ‘very much an acquired taste’, and I think Elayne was really struggling to find something nice to say about me, because she’s just like that, and I appreciate it and her. And if there’s one complaint I’ve heard over and over again about me, when I’ve finally exasperated someone close to me enough that they’ll be honest with me, it’s that I do not care enough about what other people think of me, and I do not work hard enough to make other people like me, and I have no excuse, because I know that, and I know how to change my behavior to make myself more likable, and I willfully refuse to do it.

So, ultimately, based on my own perceptions and the perceptions of others I trust, I have to say, I don’t think I’m an approval whore. Attention whore, sure. Approval whore, no. I’d like you all to love me and adore me, certainly. I much prefer positive attention to negative, absolutely. But I could, if I wanted to, do Darren’s Happy Blog, and write about nothing except puppy dogs and kitty cats and rainbows and cinnamon donuts and Hershey’s kisses and how adorable little kids look in their cute little Hallowe’en costumes and how much I enjoy the holiday season and I don’t know WHAT the fuck all else, and I’d have a lot of shallow pinheads posting shit in my comment threads like ‘you go Darren!’ and ‘we wuv oo!’ and ‘hang in there dude!’ and utter CRAP like that. It’s not hard to get approval on the ‘net from total strangers; it doesn’t cost them anything, and I know exactly what buttons to press to make dolts give it up for me, if the affection of dolts is something I at some point come to find desirable.

However, at this point in my life, I’d just find myself loathsome if I did that, and the approval I got would be worth exactly what you’d think it was, given where it was coming from, so I don’t do that.

So I guess I’m not an approval whore.

Yay me.

But, God, I hope you all approve of that. Otherwise, I can change. Really. Just let me know. ::grin::

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And if you can’t drive with a broken back, at least you can polish the fenders.

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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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