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.

something… Monday or Tuesday, Nov 17 or 18 2003 (actually, this is being posted very early on Thursday morning of November 19, 2003)

The prisoner would like to say… a word

I am so tired. For some reason, this job seems to keep me from sleeping. I didn’t sleep Saturday night, much… probably got an hour that night, and maybe another hour Sunday afternoon before going back to work. I may have had an hour of sleep last night. I’m hoping to crash and sleep solidly tonight… I need it, my whole existence is one sullen, subdermal ache of fatigue toxins right now… but I’m not sure I’ll be able to.

Okay, let’s throw stuff out there.

Someone named Karen… something… sent me a very nice unsolicited email indicating she’d actually enjoyed my rant about what women say they want as opposed to who they actually hit on and/or ignore. We’ve exchanged a few emails since then, and she’s a very pleasant woman. Sometimes I’m happy I have a blog.

Sunday was very slow at work, at first because of the late Bucs game, and later, I suspect, because the Bucs lost. Had they won, I imagine we’d have gotten a rush of post game celebrators, but with them losing (and pretty much seeing their chances of making it to the playoffs slip away for good), apparently nobody wanted to eat out. I say, yay. Stay home and weep. That way I don’t have to wash your damn dishes.

I can’t even remotely say I’m getting a handle on the job yet, but I do think that barring me saying or doing something egregiously offensive, or just not showing up for work, it’s the kind of job they’ll never fire me from.

Okay, I wrote all that… yesterday… well, very early yesterday, so, a while ago. It’s now Wednesday, about 13 minutes from being Thursday morning, and let’s just get a whole barrage of shit typed out here:

Today I put a whole lot of music on Paul’s X-Box. Paul bought a cheap stereo at Wal-mart a while back and was frustrated to discover it was marked down because it had no ‘random’ feature. But he figured out how to rig the X-Box up to the stereo, so it had good sound, and you can put music on the X-Box, and it has a random feature. So we have random soundtrack now, and after Paul left for work today, I put a bunch of stuff on it. Right now it’s playing some Three Dog Night; prior to that it was Elvis Costello… okay, I’m lying, NOW it’s playing Dave Matthews (Paul likes Dave Matthews far far too much) and I’m not going to just keep typing what it’s playing, but between Paul’s CDs and mine, it’s a pretty eclectic mix.

I just got back from my third shift as a dishwasher. It was slow tonight, too, so that’s good. I met the other supervisor, Julie, who seems okay. I like Dianne better because Dianne feeds me for free, but, on the other hand, since Julie didn’t offer to feed me I didn’t take a break, which meant I wound up with six hours and fifteen minutes tonight instead of five hours and 45 minutes, and given that I’m never going to get 40 hours a week on this job, I need to pick up all the odd little extra minutes here and there that I can.

I felt more comfortable with the job tonight… it WAS very slow, so I had time to do all the little stuff I was supposed to. I asked one of the cooks for some help at one point and she just kind of sneered at me, which I found annoying, but, well, what goes around comes around. I’ve never worked in a place yet where people didn’t need each other for favors occasionally, and she is now on the No Can Do List.

There honest to God isn’t much for me to post here. I wouldn’t bother with a new, essentially meaningless blog entry at all, but I’m tired of an empty email box. I got a couple of nice birthday cards from my mom and her husband Carl today, with a Wal Mart gift card for $25 that I’ll probably use to cover Paul and my Thanksgiving groceries next time we go shopping. My ex-gf Kristy is mailing me a box of cookies for my birthday, and Scott Shepherd is sending me a CD, which will make this a better birthday than usual.

What else, what else… Paul is working 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving (I’ll most likely be off; the restaurant is closing at 2 and I wouldn’t normally go in until 5), so I’ll probably end up spending most of the evening throwing some kind of Thanksgiving dinner together and we’ll eat when he gets home. That’s fine; he tends to stay up all night, and I generally stay up until 4 a.m. or so.

There’s some odd stuff going on behind the scenes at the blog, but none of it is very interesting. The webmaster I write porn for posted an announcement that he’s mailed all the checks out, but he still hasn’t posted the spread sheets, so I have no idea how much I’m getting. It’s rather annoying, but I guess I’ll just hope to be pleasantly surprised.

I’m current rereading Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice for about the eighth time. It’s one of Heinlein’s dreaded Final Five books, which Heinlein fans have no moderate opinions about… you either absolutely love or absolutely hate every single one of Heinlein’s last five books. I love Job and Friday and violently abhor the other three, and I’d go into detail about it but I’m just too tired, and Paul and I have to watch Smallville and Angel tonight (assuming his VCR recorded them properly; I haven’t checked yet) so I’m just going to finish this and post it.

Sorry it’s so boring. That’s pretty much my life, these days.

It’s been pleasantly cool here in Florida, almost chilly, the last couple of days. Any time you get to comfortably wear a sweater outside in Florida is a moment to be treasured, and I’ve been trying to.

Oh, I watched Braveheart again over the last few days… borrowed the DVD from Chad and Mel quite a while ago; finally threw it in the player to watch it. I like the movie a lot; now I’m watching Glory, because the score to the films is so similar (and, well, they have generally similar themes to them… a normal man becoming a leader and ultimately sacrificing himself for an ideal, that sort of thing). Paul won’t watch Braveheart again because the ending is such a downer, and I’m sure he’d hate Glory, but I happen to think our space/time continuum would have been spared a lot of really bad filmmaking if a lot of big name movies had ended similarly. If only Luke Skywalker had been tortured to death and then had his body cut up and buried all over the galaxy at the end of Empire Strikes Back, just imagine how much better a world we’d live in today…

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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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