Satyr’s Day, August 30 2003

I doubt this will be much of an entry, since there isn’t much happening here, but hey, you never know.

In real world news, Paul seems to be edging in a half assed manner towards some kind of half assed relationship with a chick he’s known for a long time. He’s mentioned her to me before and he’s always been up front about the fact that he doesn’t find her particularly physically attractive, so I’m thinking this is just a lonely-desperation thing for him. However, she came over today to drive him to work and dropped by tonight (waking me up from a sound sleep with her admittedly sexy contralto, the higher registers of which cut right through my earplugs as if they weren’t there) so I’m thinking stuff is happening between them, whether either of them want to admit it or not. They’re going to the Counting Crows concert a week from today together.

Now, I’m thinking Paul getting involved with this chick is a bad idea, because while they do seem to have a lot in common, Paul has made it plain he isn’t really attracted to her, and I’m sure she must be attracted to him, because she’s initiated contact a few times now and anyway, that’s the vibe she gives off when she’s over here. So if he does get involved with her out of loneliness, that can’t go anywhere good. Plus, she let drop into the conversation tonight that she’s Jesusy, and, as Kris Kristofferson notes in Millennium, Rule Number One is, you never go to bed with anyone crazier than you are, and by my definition, Jesusy people are always crazier than non-Jesusy people.

Hopefully, if things progress, she has her own place and they can hang out over there a lot. Having to avoid the living room while Paul gets it on isn’t something I’m looking forward to.

Aaaaaand after I’d typed this, I went out and the first thing Paul asked me was what I thought of the whole thing with this chick, whom I have now met twice for about twenty minutes total. And, well, I do not volunteer my opinion, but if you ask for it I will give it to you, and Paul asked, so I told him, and he was not happy with me and shouted at me for quite a few moments that I had a bad opinion of everyone and thought that anyone who had a different opinion from me about anything was crazy and stupid and, you know, the usual stuff.

Paul was especially wroth with my negative judgement of his lady fair on her religion. Paul feels that just because someone believes they have Jesus Christ living within their heart, and they are carrying on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ Their Lord and Savior, well, that’s just fine. Paul, I believe, is a victim of his cultural programming. I’m fairly sure that if this chick were, for example, Islamic, Paul would be rather more wary (yet, if she were Wiccan, he’d find that acceptable).

Me, I look at it like this: I’m a comics geek, and certain imaginary characters are very important to me, and I do not hesitate to call them my childhood imaginary friends. But if I told someone that I felt the spirit of Captain America or Superman lived in my heart, they would roll their eyes and think I was not socially functional to say such a thing out loud with a straight face, and if I were to opine that I felt Wolverine or Frodo the Fucking Hobbit were real people who really existed, and that I had a one on one, intimate, ongoing spiritual relationship with either of these folks, that they spoke to me in my heart and we communed together on a daily basis, well, as Michael Palin once put it, “they’d put me away”.

I got all the Christian programming you could want when I was a kid, and far more than anyone would want when I was a teenager, but I have managed to get over it to enough of an extent now that I do not regard Jesus Christ as being any different from any other beloved cultural myth figure. If people want to say that they think the teachings of Jesus as printed in red ink in all the cheap Bibles that the various Sunday Schools give out are beautiful and a wonderful set of precepts to live by, well, that’s very nice and I hope they remember me when they give away all their worldly wealth to the poor.

But when someone has accepted the Lord Jesus as their personal Savior and feels that the Son of God dwells within them and lights up their psyche with His Radiant Goodness, I’m sorry, but they’re nuts and I don’t want to date them.

Paul, and perhaps many of you, seems to regard that as being really narrow minded and judgemental, and, well, perhaps it is. But I would not have told him what I felt unless he asked.

Passing on from that…

Also in real life, Scott Shepherd says his family got about the best really bad news they could, in that his daughter has been diagnosed with something horrible, but there’s a 98% recovery chance after she goes through some admittedly hellish therapy for about six months. So I’m continuing to keep a good thought for Scott and his clan (filthy judgemental Christ-loathing agnostic that I am) and y’all are invited to, as well.

I haven’t heard from Alli since her note on Wednesday advising that she wasn’t feeling well.

Nor have I heard from my putative editor/publisher at Speedmonkey.com, or from Jonathan in Australia. If any of these people, or anyone else, ever sends me any actual money for my writing, you’ll read it here first.

WHERE MONSTERS DWELL

Speaking of people who have, apparently, actually been paid for their writing, thus proving just what a wretchedly unfair universe I’m forced to live in, some astonishingly enlightened fellow named Matthew Rossi apparently decided to troll this weblog a few hours ago. I would guess he came here from Tuxedo Slack’s site, as his comment turned up on my very first entry regarding the… feud, or whatever you want to call it… between me and the Slackmeister.

Apparently Matthew was feeling surly with the world over something… maybe his mom put his favorite blankie in the wash, I don’t know… and he just wanted to lash out at a stranger. His comment was remarkably concise, he noted merely that “[I] couldn’t be more like [Tuxedo] if [I] tried.”

Now, this is just silly. I could certainly be more like Tuxedo if I tried; I could, just for one example, hit myself in the head with a hammer many many times, until most of my writing talent trickled out my ears and I wrote very nearly as badly as Tuxedo Slack does now. I suspect I could get much the same effect simply by drinking way too much cough syrup, and who knows, whichever method I chose, I might very well find myself capable of appreciating the prose stylings of J.K. Rowling a great deal more after a couple of sound self inflicted cranial thumpings with a heavy bashing implement, or a severe overdose of Robitussin DM. And if I beat myself severely about the head and shoulders with a studded horseman’s mace several more times, or simply inject several hundred CCs of cattle tranquilizers directly into my cerebellum, I might even get to be so much like Tuxedo Slack that I’d be willing to sit down and write Harry Potter fan fic, or at least, plan to write it to the point where I called a friend of mine up on the phone and got into a hysterical screaming fit with her over whether or not I could use her made up fictional characters in my particular piece of Harry Potter fan fic.

Having said all that, though, I don’t know. I’m not sure I could survive a beating severe enough to make me that much like Tuxedo Slack, and I’m fairly sure there isn’t enough psychoses-inducing medication in the world to get me down to that level of sheer insipid self orbital nuttiness, either.

So, as Matthew’s statement certainly lacks actual accuracy, and we assume Matthew was probably aware of that when he posted it, we must then presume that Matthew’s primary motivation was not to share his opinion or offer any new insight that might contain valuable and previously unconsidered substance, but, rather, simply to be really fucking annoying to some guy he doesn’t even know.

Now, I understand the motivation of those who go to a stranger’s web page for no reason other than to be deliberately boorish, offensive, and insulting… like everyone else, Matthew is simply seeking attention, and, well, he’s getting some, and I hope he’s happy. Nonetheless, I have to say I’ve long since outgrown the need to exercise any impulse I might have to be similarly ugly and shrewish in public. So, being curious to see exactly what great contributions to literature, the Internet, or blogging this master of analysis might have made, I did a Google search on him, and came up with some archives from his own, apparently discontinued, blog. (Matthew didn’t supply a URL to any of his own work, so I assume he doesn’t particularly care to be subjected to my own analysis of it, and, well, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, buddy.)

Scanning a page or two of Matthew’s textual product, I learned a few things about him. First, apparently he’s a published author, which is why I noted what I did above about this being a horribly unfair universe. Second, he can’t fucking write a lick, and, again, see Unfair Universe, above. Third, he’s one of these people who is either really really boring or really really irritating, depending on my mood, in that apparently, Matthew Prides Himself On Being A Non-Conformist… Just Like Everyone Else.

Or so I more or less intuited, after wading through the following utterly humorless, tediously pedantic and morbidly self conscious passage from Matthew’s former weblog, which was rather wittily entitled Once I noticed I was on fire, I decided to relax and enjoy the fall:

”Of the monsters of my youth...the ones that were confined to safe depths of nonexistence, anyway...I believe my favorites may be the werewolves. I was never a tremendous fan of the vampire: at eight, I was a bit too innocent of sexuality to get the hidden kink our pallid guests bring to the table, although I did understand that they were much like plague, in that they spread and slowly drained the life, and Frankenstein's monster was just the golem in new flesh, so to speak. But the beast that lives inside all men, that I understood. Even as a child, the idea of my flesh shifting form, growing powerful enough to take revenge for any imagined slight while being safe from reprisal...that was powerful stuff, much more appealing than the idea of tattered ghosts or aquatic fish men. (What The Creature from the Black Lagoon utterly failed to create in me, The Shadow Over Innsmouth would succeed...but that wouldn't come until later.) Obviously in this as in many other things, I am not exactly one with my finger on the pulse of the popular culture: I remember recently, even, opining with someone that to be a werewolf was hardly to be feared. He told me he thought the real heart of the werewolf, the reason it was to be feared was the idea that you'd lose control and harm someone you cared about, which was not an angle that in any way has ever bothered me. I've always felt (and the mythology tends to back me up on this) that werewolves can change whenever they like and do whatever they like while changed. But the point he made was apt, and the idea powerful enough to inspire...the man who loses the man, who hides from the pain of it by taking Doctor Johnson's advice and becoming a beast, is also the fury of the heart without reason to control it.”

Matthew obviously wrote this passage in a fine frenzy of self admiration; he’s very nearly visibly preening as he sits at the keyboard hammering this baby out, and when he’s finished with this sucker, you can tell (or I can, anyway) that he’s holding it up to the window and turning it this way and that, like some precious textual jewel, watching as the light refracts through it in shiny rainbows all around his bedroom, while he complacently sits back and waits for the slack jawed admiration he knows is his just due, since he’s clearly not only Such A Brilliant Fucking Writer, but also, Such A Lonely, Insightful Maverick Dwelling Outside The Herd. Yes. For he never liked vampires, you see. He never really thrilled to the ‘hidden kink our pallid guests bring to the table’, whatever the fuck THAT means. No, no, Matthew is a rebel, an iconoclast, a brilliant soloist whose singular plaintive voice rises like the trumpet of an angel above the discordant shrieks and bellows of the lowing plains dwellers. You understand, of course, that Matthew reads both H.P. Lovecraft AND Samuel Johnson. He Is A Gift Of The Magii and Just Plain Spiffy. Worship Him Now.

::sigh:: I don’t know. I’m probably being too hard on poor Matthew. After all, he didn’t really do anything bad; just drove by a stranger’s blog and decided, ‘say, I’m bored, let’s just say something this silly bastard will probably find really offensive without in any way offering anything of substance, and then speed away!’ It’s not like he’s the first drive by troll on the Internet (he’s not even my first here) and I doubt he’ll be the last. So I shouldn’t be so rough on him, I guess…

Except that, honest to god, if you’re going to go on and on and on about interesting stuff like comparative monster mythology and H.P. Lovecraft and for God’s sake Samuel Johnson, the least you could do is not sound like a completely pedantic twit while you do it. I mean, this is great material, here. It takes remarkably well developed skills at writing badly to so completely press the life out of this shit the way Matthew does.

Who knows, perhaps Matthew will read this (I’m sure he does relentless ego searching on Google just like I do) and be moved to respond with more than nine calculatedly obnoxious words.

Since I’m not sure I can take more of his leaden prose style or torturous syntax, though, I’ll be just as happy if he doesn’t.

BUT WAIT… THERE’S MORE

Matthew Rossi sends me email!

Well, to be fair, I sent him email first, as follows:

-----Original Message-----
From: docnebula01@juno.com
Sent: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 01:35:38 –0400
To: ezrael@onebox.com
Subject: Thanks for your comment.
Matthew,
I always appreciate people taking the time to check out my blog. I checked out a few of your archives. I don't think you and I are going to be particularly sympatico... your rather leaden, humorless, remarkably self absorbed and utterly pompous writing style simply doesn't even remotely entertain or even vaguely interest me... but still, I'm glad you found the blog somehow and were moved enough by my writing to post a comment.
I agree that Tuxedo/Austin and I have a few similarities. However, if you honestly feel that I 'couldn't be more like him if I tried', you may want to move more slowly and stick to the shallow end of the blogosphere for a while. Anyone who honestly regards Tuxedo and I as being all THAT similar, beyond both of us being admitted geeks, has some SEVERE perceptual problems.
However, I'm sure you don't actually think Tuxedo and I are all that similar. You're a yammerhead and a windbag and really unbelievably boring regarding material that would be interesting in anyone's hands but yours, but despite all that, there's obviously an intellect working in that surly ursine form of yours somewhere, so you have to be aware that Tuxedo and I are far more dichotomous than we are a unity.
Nonetheless, for whatever reason, you just decided to show up on a stranger's blog and post a comment you thought would be offensive and insulting. I've never particularly understood that impulse, but at base, like the rest of us, I guess you want attention. So... here's some.
Thanks again, and have a good night.
D.

And Matthew Rossi… the LORD Rossi, the AyaTOLLah of Rock and ROLLah… took the time out of his no doubt busy schedule playing with his toesies to immediately shoot back:

”Yes, and I'm also a published author with my first book out. You forgot that part. Good luck with the Wal-Mart job.

Matt "Leaden and Humorous, self absorbed and pompous, and a professional writer' Rossi”

Yeah, Matt. I got your ‘published author/professional writer’ shit right down here. I got it hangin’, buddy.

As to my OFFICIAL emailed response, here it is:

>>Yes, and I'm also a published author with my first book out.

Dean R. Koontz is a published author with about forty books out.

You must be so proud to be part of that literary tradition.

>>You forgot that part.

I didn't forget it. The universe is a grotesquely unfair place that rewards mediocrity and and ignores merit. And how much did you pay that vanity press to put your shit between covers for you, anyway? Or are they paying you? On commission?

>>Good luck with the Wal-Mart job.

Oh, what a give away.

By the way, O Wise One, I'm a professional author, too. I've been paid for many many porn stories and a couple of articles in various geek magazines like LOC and ROLEPLAYER. I don't give myself airs over it for obvious reasons, but having read your astonishingly cogent and stylish prose, I will puff myself up with the knowledge I'm a FAR better writer than you are.

Not that it takes a whole LOTTA puffing.

But you realize I'm a better writer than you are, right? Or you wouldn't be pissing and moaning in my comment threads, would you?

Maybe he’ll write back! This is the most fun I’ve had since Buffy’s fifth season.

And he did, he did, he DID taw a putty tat! Or at least, he wrote me yet again, being one of these people who is, apparently, simply incapable of letting anyone else have the last word.

Here’s dear Matthew’s latest:

Considering you've now written me twice (once to brag about working in porn), I'll take your commentary with all due merit. Good luck shelving the magazine racks with all the markets you've sold work in. It must take away some of the sting of not knowing the touch of a woman.
Matt Rossi
Couple of things here. I did not write Matthew to brag about writing porn. For that matter, I did not, as Matthew implies but does not directly state, initiate contact with him at all. He drove by the blog to insult someone he didn’t know and had had no previous contact with. I read his comment, looked up his work, and gave him a detailed and honest response regarding it. Then he wrote back to me to not so much brag, but, apparently, club me over the head with the fact that he’s a published, professional author, to which I responded, essentially, “yeah, big eff, hairball; so is Dean R. Koontz and, for that matter, so am I, and I’m STILL a better writer than you”.

Unable to respond to this, Matthew has moved on to the next level of the gentle, open minded, enlightened troll: having failed to make me sufficiently miserable by crowing about his professional ‘success’ (i.e., I’m Better Than You Are Because I Make More Money Than You), he’s now reaching for the I’m Better Than You Are Because You Don’t Get Laid club.

The fact that I don’t get laid is personally annoying, but if it were something I felt reflected poorly on me as a human being, I probably wouldn’t have been as forthright discussing it here. (As a general rule: I know a great many assholes who get laid all the time. Matthew may be one of them, but in any case, I’m sure everyone reading this also knows a great many assholes who get laid all the time. I do not consider the fact that they are sexually successful to be something that makes them quality human beings, nor do I consider the fact that I’m not to be something that reflects poorly on me. I think a lot of women reward the worst kind of behavior with sex, and that’s just how the world works… and apparently, some publishers at least will reward the worst kind of writing with publication.)

I don’t judge others based on either how much money they make or how often they manage to achieve a social orgasm, and I certainly don’t judge others on the basis of their putative lovers’ gender, as apparently is very important to Matthew, given his ‘touch of a woman’ remarks.

Having said all that, I’ll also say this: Matthew in no way disputes the simple fact that I’m obviously a better writer than he is, so, again, I continue to assume he’s aware of it and it pisses him off. He has now resorted to (a) bitter recriminations based on the fact that something called Monkeybrain Books has decided to publish one of his tracts, and they haven’t decided to publish anything of mine, and (b) even more bitter recriminations based on the fact that, as I admit, I haven’t been laid in a while.

Mind you, Matthew doesn’t mention just how often he gets his wick dipped, not that it really matters. He seems like exactly the kind of arrogant idiot many women flock to.

What a guy, huh? Gee, the level of mature and enlightened discourse I’m attracting to the blog these days is just stunning…

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