I wrote it a while ago, but it’s still worth reading! Check out Unlucky 7 … my review of Buffy’s final season, and why I wasn’t sorry to see the Slayer go.

Friday November 14 2003

My Iraqi ass map

Okay. Let’s start here:

My blog seems to have some odd power indeed. No, some 40 hours or so after calling them out, Jillian and Alli still haven’t sent me any email. And yet, oddly, a friend of mine I mentioned obliquely, not by name, who I haven’t heard from since a year or so after Jeff killed himself, Pasquale (Patsy) Feola, was for some reason moved to do a web search on my name and send me an email, right after I spoke of him on this blog.

Patsy was probably Jeff’s best friend in Jersey before Jeff died, and he’s a great guy. He and I tried to stay in touch after Jeff died (Patsy is the guy who rescued and sent me Jeff’s Titan game, I mentioned him and that gesture on my last page) but, as people will, we just ceased staying in touch after a while as we didn’t have anything keeping us in contact and we lived quite a ways apart. It’s a joy to hear from Patsy again, and I’ve given him this blog URL, so hopefully he and I will be able to stay in touch from now on.

And, honestly, the ways of this blog simply baffle me. If it has this kind of power, then, my God, could I get some winning Lotto numbers, please? Or just, you know, meet a nice girl?

Also, the webmaster of the Site Which Must Not Be Named finally posted… something… about the upcoming quarterly payments. He still hasn’t gotten the pay out sheets done, so I still don’t know how much I’m supposed to have coming to me, but he’s promised that the checks will be out by NEXT Monday.

Yes, indeed. The checks for the work that his writers have posted over the months of August, September and October, the proceeds from which have been in his bank account for the past three months and three weeks now, he will condescend to mail to us (maybe) in another ten days or so, and we might get them by, you know, the end of the month following the quarter whose earnings he is already spending.

I seem pissy about this because I am. I am BROKE. I asked this guy for an emergency advance two months ago and he turned me down for no good reason at all. I am BROKE. Every day that goes by, I am BROKE and it is torture and I am not contributing and I can’t even do my goddam LAUNDRY or buy a fucking newspaper without scrounging a quarter out from under the couch cushions and no one will hire me and I’m living off my younger brother’s generosity and I am BROKE and now I’m told I’ll get this check for money my stories have been earning for the past 110 days at some point in the next, maybe, ten to fifteen days and this is fucking TORTURE.

So, yeah, I’m a little CRABBY about it.

Still, at least he’s told us SOMEthing.

Other than that, though, it’s all tedious self pity here, so let’s get to that:

The pieces in the mosaic are these:

Several years ago… I’m going to say it was in 1998… at one particular temp job, I met a truly lovely girl named Tabitha, I believe. (It was a while ago and Tabitha, if that was her name, wasn’t someone whose life intertwined with mine for long or in any extensive fashion beyond this anecdote, so I’m not sure I’m remembering her name right.) She was gorgeous and seemed reasonably intelligent, and I was going through one of my periodic fits of ‘what the hell, if you meet someone you like, just ask her out and hope for the best’, which, by the way, has NEVER worked for me, so I wish people would just shut the hell up about it. But, anyway. So I asked Tabitha out, and as it happened, I did it in front of about half a dozen of our fellow employees, and Tabitha was clearly appalled that I had done so, and she quickly responded “Um, I’m not really looking for a relationship right now”.

This was, of course, truthful, if truthful in a half-finished way. What Tabitha’s full sentence would have been, if entirely accurate, was, “Um, I’m not looking for a relationship right now with a nearly middle aged fat geek like YOU.”

Had I owned the business we were both working for, or even been ten years younger and fifty pounds slimmer, I have no doubt Tabitha would have at the very least given me one date to try and prove myself worthy of her exalted attentions and favors. But, as I was in my late 30s at the time, and not at all comely, and I was working for precisely the same amount of money Tabitha was working for, and Tabitha was herself in her early 20s and a complete babe, well, she was not looking for a relationship at that very set of space/time coordinates with the particularly trollish OLD guy who had just screwed his nerve to the sticking point and asked her out in front of all their fellow telemarketers.

Another woman I met on that job, whose name I absolutely cannot remember at this moment, so I’ll call her Rose, was an extraordinarily attractive woman, physically, anyway. She showed up as a temp secretary. She was very tall, but very sexy looking, and when she first met me and had no idea I was just a phone serf there like everyone else, she was extremely nice and very flirtatious with me, to the point of some pretty direct sexual innuendo. This despite the fact that one of the first things she told me about herself was that she was married.

Within a day, Rose had discovered that I was, in fact, just a common dial up trench laborer like most everyone else at the place, and I was no longer in any way a target of her flirtatious, slyly dirty talking attentions. She had, in fact, taken to outright ignoring me unless she absolutely had to talk to me for some work related reason, and if I tried to banter with her in a friendly fashion during the odd free moment, she quickly became cuttingly brusque. I was younger and more naïve at the time, so this puzzled me, yes it did, but, well, it wasn’t until I walked in on Rose and our branch manager, a fellow named Jim, and she was actually sitting in his lap cooing like a long legged pigeon as he looked down the back of her shorts and she urged him to take a closer look at the tattoo he was inspecting, that I realized just how much money and authority and the ability to make a temp secretary into a permanent secretary act as attractants on certain sorts of women. (Jim, I’ll note in passing, was engaged to a fine, pleasant, not very physically attractive woman who was obviously not in that room at that time, but, hey, us guys are horn dogs, I make no bones about it.)

If I indulge my bleak and peculiarly pissy mood right this moment by typing the word ‘bitch’ here, I will hearten and gladden the hearts of any number of lurking folk from Aaron Hawkins’ blog, who will promptly take enormous satisfaction in denouncing me there and on their own blogs (but never here, that would be, you know, somewhat brave and honest and straightforward, words that are anathema to that particular crowd) as a complete misogynist and declare ringingly that someone should just shoot me or at the very least, whack my dinger off with a butter knife.

So, I won’t do that, but I will note that for some individuals, that word is a perfectly accurate one and its employment should be regarded as being more in the service of truth and justice than simply a gesture of disgruntled and gender based bias.

One of my favorite movies is an offbeat Hollywood celluloid opus on television journalism written and directed by James Bridges called Broadcast News. Virtually every single scene in this film says something reasonably meaningful and moving to me in some way, but the one I’m on about now is where Jane (Holly Hunter) meets Tom (William Hurt) at a broadcaster’s convention where she has just given an enormously unpopular and ill received keynote address. Tom, handsome fellow that he is, is the only person who indicates that he liked Jane’s speech, and Jane, being rather lonely and socially challenged (despite looking like, you know, Holly Hunter) immediately crushes on the alarmingly attractive Tom, and tries to pick him up.

Although she does succeed in getting him back to her bedroom, he apparently simply wants to whine about his self image problems and get her to tell him he’s cool and it’s the world that blows. Jane does her level best, but eventually she simply can’t swallow enough of her self esteem to continue bullshitting Tom, and she provides him with an actual honest evaluation of Tom’s skills and talents in this field, in response to the questions about his own inadequacy as a broadcaster that Tom has been pummeling her with all night.

Tom, miffed at Jane’s treachery in actually giving him an honestly unflattering opinion that might have been helpful to him if he weren’t such an ass, stalks out of her room in a snit. Jane then calls her friend Aaron (Albert Brooks) and tells him “There is something wrong with me. I am starting to repel people I am trying to attract.” Aaron, who is secretly in love with the amazingly smart, talented, funny, witty, articulate, gorgeous, and just overall pretty frickin hot in every conceivable way Jane (they’re doing the ‘bestest bestest friends in the whole wide world’ scam with each other), reassures her that the departed Tom is simply a great looking idiot, and then says something to her like (I can’t quote it exactly from memory at this point, but I can come close) “Wouldn’t this be a great world if loneliness made us more attractive? If needy were a turn on?”

Now, there’s this guy who has a blog. He’s rather younger than me, rather thinner and apparently better looking than I am, he’s somewhat intelligent and can be fairly funny, although his blog has some really earnest and solemn and enormously pompous name I can’t recollect. I find him irritating because without having any real kind of relationship established with me, he comes on my blog and advises me that my blog would be so much better if I just made it look more like his, which I find rude and arrogant, but apparently others think reflects well on him. I also find him kind of obnoxious because he goes on and on in great and tedious detail on his blog about his beautiful, smart, funny girlfriend, who gives him head and swallows his cum, and who is deeply deeply in love with him. Then he belittles her at length and whines about how her being in love with him annoys him because he doesn’t feel that way about her, he just likes shooting off in her, and gosh, isn’t his life hard.

Beyond that, he posts pics of himself on his blog with his fucking shirt off.

These aren’t the most annoying things about him, though. The most annoying thing about him is that women apparently adore this fool. Oh yes. He gets 40 comments per post, and all of them are from apparently attractive women, and they not only flirt outrageously with him, they out and out talk dirty to him in his public chat threads and offer him sex. They praise him and banter with him and act as if he’s some sort of Greek god incarnate whom they cannot wait to get their fingers, lips, and various other appendages and orifi attached to. Meanwhile, over here, I… well. I.

Look around. See for yourself, all the erotic and affectionate attention I get on this blog from attractive women.

And it’s not that he’s seeing someone and therefore isn’t needy. This guy is the neediest goddam thing I have ever perceived outside the parameters of pop culture fictional artifacts. He actually posts stuff about how, although he doesn’t much enjoy it, if any of his female commenters would like him to suck their toes, he’ll happily do it. Now, give that a second thought for just an instant, repellent though the whole notion may be to you. Neediness is a turn off, and certainly I myself come off as needy, but holy mother of Christ, I have never in my life posted a general ‘oh god please love me and give me positive attention’ statement anywhere that is this fricking sycophantic in my life. This guy has said that HE WILL SUCK THE TOES OF ANY GOOD LOOKING WOMAN WHO WANTS HIM TO. Right after talking at length about his beautiful girlfriend who adores him that he really doesn’t love very much, and how irritating he finds that state of affairs.

Now, here’s something I have recently articulated to myself: as long as I am single and entirely alone (i.e., without a chick in my life in any way at all), when I encounter an attractive woman, any attractive woman, in any mode or manner, I will want any or all of the following three things from her:

* I would like her to date me and share my life with me and let me make her happy and have her make me happy by doing so in a loving and intimate fashion
and/or
* I would like her to have sex with me
and/or
* I would like her to be my friend and think I’m swell and be nice to me and let me be nice to her

This is what I want, from every attractive woman I somehow come into contact with, and it is what I am going to continue to want from every attractive woman… one, some, or all of those three things… until some attractive woman actually provides me with one, some, or all of those attentions.

What’s truly, and I mean, deeply and poignantly, saddening and hurtful to me, is that if there are any attractive women reading this blog right now (not related to me, I mean; relatives obviously don’t count) they are appalled and annoyed and offended by the fact that I am so goddam needy and demanding and whiney, and that I have just ADMITTED that all I want from them is… um… love… or friendship… or just plain mutually pleasurable SEX… and who the hell do I think I am, jesus christ, they have better things to do with their lives and better men to do those things with?

It’s stunningly disheartening, to suddenly realize that to every woman in the world you might ever want to spend any time with at all, you are unattractive, undesirable, and dislikable. That no attractive woman anywhere in the world, apparently, wants to be your significant other, your lover, or simply your friend. To have to face up to the fact that any woman in the world who has an array of potential male suitors, lovers, or friends to choose from, will never choose you, and in fact, finds it absolutely insufferable that you would like them to.

And it’s worse, when I look around and see the kind of guy that women WILL throw themselves at.

Now, as sure as the sun comes up tomorrow, someone is going to post something in response to this berating me because I only have these feelings for ‘attractive women’. Why in the name of God I should want to spend time with anyone, male or female, that I am in no way attracted to, I do not know, but, nonetheless, somebody… perhaps an attractive woman in her own right… is going to bitch at me (wait and see) because I do not pine and letch and wistfully yearn for any of the women I meet every day that I am NOT in any way attracted to.

I’ve always thought it odd that every attractive person in the world basically wishes that all us ugly, poor, unpleasant, common folks would just hook up with each other and stop bothering our betters. Well, no, I don’t find THAT odd. What I find odd is that they regard this as an entitlement of some sort, and they will absolutely lecture me freely for being so shallow that I only want to be friends with, or have sex with, or enjoy an intimate and passionate romance with, women I find ATTRACTIVE, when they themselves are, of course, always dating someone who looks like they ordered them from a fucking catalogue.

No pun intended.

I had more to say here, it seems like to me, but, well, I think I’ve pretty much run this into the ground by now and I have no doubt there are at least a few folks out there champing at the bit to start listing every single thing that is wrong with me for posting all this, so I’ll just close here.

No, wait, let me say this:

If I want to be friends with you, and I try to befriend you, and you reject me, you are a fool and you are a very mean person. I’m a good friend to have, and you are missing out on a great thing when you spurn the offer of my friendship, and besides that, you’re a selfish miserable creep.

If I want to have sex with you, fine, be offended by that if you like, but understand that that’s on you. There is nothing offensive about me wanting to have sex with you, and besides that, I happen to be decent at it, and a very considerate lover, and you’d probably have a good time if you weren’t so mean and shallow and utterly self obsessed.

And if I think there’s a chance that you and I might be able to share our lives in an intimate and passionate and romantic way, and you feel there’s a possibility there, too, but you simply shut it down because for some reason you don’t find me suitable or you’re too busy or you can’t even be bothered to give it a chance, well, see above comments doubled and redoubled.

It’s a cliché, but cliches get that way by being true, and this IS true: if any of the above is true of you in regard to me, it’s YOUR loss.

And, if you’re rejecting my friendship, if you find the idea of having sex with me appalling, and you absolutely want to retch at the notion of being my soulmate, and you’re dating someone or attracted to someone or trying to sing unto me the praises and virtues of someone who belittles a woman who is in love with him on his blog while flirting outrageously and offering foot sex to every other woman who posts comments on his blog, or a man you know is simply manipulating you for sex and positive attention because that’s all he’s ever done… well… if that’s the kind of person whose company you prefer, then your life is just going to suck, and that’s on you.

All right. Now if that doesn’t get some people shrieking at me in the comments threads, then I just frickin’ GIVE UP.

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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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