To this I immediately responded:

There are a few points of interest about this. One of them is that apparently, Dweebmonkey sent me a response five hours before I wrote my initial email to his pre-hensile tail adorned ass. This astonishes me. But actually, I imagine it has something to do with time zones and involves a great deal of math, so I’m content to ignore it.

More interesting, if not much so, is that I originally wrote a much more pungent response, referring to Spoogmickey as a dickweed and a lying sack of shit. But as I try to always do when I am reduced to merely vulgar insults, I then reflected that pretty much anyone can call someone a dickweed and/or a lying sack of shit, but few people have the self control to insult someone at length through gentle and derisive irony. So, I composed the response you see above and sent that instead.

The problem with gently derisive irony is that when you’re talking to very very stupid people, as I obviously am above, they may not get it. Spudmonicker may well now believe that I worship the very ground he brachiates above and across while hurling handsful of feces upon unsuspecting passers-below. And gently derisive irony, like a mind, is a terrible thing to waste.

But, what the hell. At least I had fun reaming the pud-walloper out, even if he doesn’t understand me.

Oh, yes, there was one more thing I found to be of mild interest about Spockmockery's kind and thoughtful retroactive rejection note: I did not submit 'stories' to him. I submitted 'articles' to him. There is, I grant you, very little difference, assuming one is a pig ignorant and inarticulate dimwit, which in fact does seem a safe assumption in the particular case of Speakmurkey.

But... wait! Here we are on Sunday, and there's more! Remember what I said about Schpielmaggot not being able to appreciate gently derisive irony? Check out the very first sentence of this, the lengthiest and most prompt response I've ever had from the wank:

It's no surprise that publishers do this, at least, not to me. Publishers will absolutely explode if a contributor asks them about money. I've seen it with Steve Jackson and I've seen it with Jonathan from TMIS and I've seen it over the years at a few other places that praised me and my work all over the place when they didn't have to pay me, but immediately went into full screeching reverse when I asked them about when I might see some money.

Now, here's the deal: if you're just publishing me, and you can't afford to pay me, and I'm doing it for the exposure, or because you're a buddy, or whatever, that's fine. But if you promise to pay me, then I will expect to be paid. I deserve to be paid, I am a very good writer, and I keep my promises when I make them. If I tell you that I will get you the work you've asked for by a certain time at a certain length and level of quality, you will get that work. I deliver.

So far, though, the only publishers or editors I've found that are honorable men are, perhaps ironically, those who buy porn from me. Sproingmalarkey is just the latest to prove that, if you want to get paid, you have to deal with a perv.

While that was a lovely close, I have to add that Spelunkmaguay seems to want the last word. Or so I gather from this:

I did send an email back telling him he was very welcome for the inspiration, and asking if he'd be willing to pay me for providing it, but, well, I'm not holding my breath.

I HATE TO THINK I BEEN BLINDED, BABY

Yesterday I grabbed a cab and headed back up to Postal Zone to pay the remaining amount left on last month’s power bill. Alas, hottie Jennifer who was there last Monday was nowhere in sight, although someone who sounded a lot like her was in the back room droning on in a very loud voice telling some extremely boring story about dropping her little girl off at school and how she just wouldn’t move her minivan out of the other parents’ way until she was certain she saw her little girl into the school safely and with things the way they are these days she just thought it was SO rude that people in the drop off queue behind her were honking their horns because it was the safety of her child in question and as parents you would think they would understand that the entire universe slows or even begins to turn backwards on its axis around Jennifer and her child because she and her precious urchin are just absolutely the most important things there ever could be.

Now, this woman was pleasant to me the last time I was in (in a sort of cordially distant, very professional way) and she’s very nice looking (little librarian glasses, very white and sparkly and even smile, short soccer mom shag hairstyle, very large hooters, lovely charcoal grey slacks with black pinstripes that were fetchingly tight on her) and seemed reasonably intelligent, so I’d been kind of hoping I might get a chance to chat her up again, so if you want to read into this account that I was annoyed she wasn’t out front to wait on me (especially since I had to wait while someone who was Obviously New And Did Not Speak English Well completely screwed up the bill paying process for me three times before she got it right), you may. But having given you that mandatory disclaimer, I will now go on to say that either Jennifer was putting on a piece of performance art in the back room or whoever she was speaking to simply never got the chance, in the ten minutes I was there, to get so much as a syllable, nay, not even the first part of a breathy consonant, in sideways. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, did Jennifer so much as take a wisp of breath while I was listening to her, which means, my God that woman must have impressive fellatio skills, except anyone who goes on and on and on about herself and her little girl for that long in that loud a voice while ostensibly engaged in a dialogue with someone is not anyone who has ever performed fellatio, because that would be an act that would give pleasure to someone else, and I don’t think Jennifer is about that.

All of which reminds me of something I wanted to say to dear dear David Fiore, with his ‘everyone and everything is more important than you are’ crap. Which is to say, David, that’s a wonderful philosophy, and when the Jennifers (and Jessicas) of this world start treating me that way, I will happily start treating them that way back. Until then, I will settle for not being sociopathic, by which I mean, believing that nearly everyone else is JUST as important as I am, or, to put it in a way I find more comfortable, that I am just as important as everyone else. (This is, in fact, a direct contradiction of what SESAME STREET used to tell me via song every day – I’m too old for SESAME STREET, but Paul watched it a lot when he was a baby and I was babysitting him – namely, the most important person in the whole wide world is me and nobody else but me… but then, I think the life lessons taught by SESAME STREET are often flawed anyway. Encouraging toddlers to believe that anyone as moronic as Big Bird could ever survive so much as crossing a busy street, especially while nattering on and on at great and voluble and delusional length to a giant hairy imaginary friend, is just plain damn irresponsible in my book.)

Anyway, back to our completely out of control narrative stream… After paying the bill, I repaired once more to the curb from whence my Friendly Taxi hied me off home again, where my driver, someone I hadn’t had drive for me before, looked through his rate sheet and then presented me, quite firmly, with the rather astonishing intelligence that this very same ride which I had paid $5.50 for about ten days prior to this was going to cost me $8.50 today.

Now, I’m not the kind of guy who argues with taxi drivers, although this fellow seemed pretty harmless and I most likely could have. I need to psyche myself up for confrontations and, well, I just wasn’t ready for that one, and for all I know, if you add in the stops (at the bank to cash the check from U Stor, and at Postal Zone to pay the bill) and the waits (at the bank and at U Stor there were customers ahead of me) perhaps, by their billing structure, the ride did cost $8.50. However, the last guy who had driven me on that same route a week and a half before had been a taxi driver Paul and I frequently get when we go grocery shopping, and he’s an affable fellow who is always quite friendly to me, and he apparently hadn’t charged me waiting time.

So I gave the driver a ten and waited patiently for change, and he did that thing that taxi drivers and pizza delivery guys do where they count the change out verrrrrrrry slowwwwwwwwwwly to give their cheap prick of a customer a chance to say ‘keep it’ or ‘just give me a buck’ or whatever. And I always tip taxi drivers, and I would have tipped this cretin, too, had he only charged me $5.50, but if he’s going to be a dick and charge me $8.50 for a $5.50 cab ride, then he can just have no tip and like it.

He didn’t like it. His ‘thank you sir’ was so dry as to be nearly machinelike. It was positively alkaloid in its dryness. But fuck him. $8.50 to go up to the bank and then over to Postal Zone so I can pay a goddam bill, when I did the exact same thing for $5.50 ten days before with another driver, is just too much.

And other than discover that Speedmonkey, unlike all my OTHER publishers, is actually not going to pay me a damn thing, ever, I have done nothing today. Well, okay, I finished rereading ISSOLA by Steven Brust, which is about his weirdest Vlad Taltos book to date, and I started to watch Vanilla Sky on DVD, and it’s not as good as I remembered it in the theater (I still just don’t get the Penelope Cruz thing; neither she nor her character Sofia really do a damn thing for me in this movie, but I guess I’m just freakish) but all that’s pretty boring.

Well, I made this rice thing tonight with Spam and crushed chips… Fritos corn chips and some French Onion Sun Chips… we had lying around the house. It’s… interesting. If not exactly good.

Scott suggested keeping a pitcher of cold water in the fridge a few nights back to cut down on our soda consumption, which is pretty much out of line (the soda consumption, not the suggestion) and for the past few days we’ve been drinking water, but today when I made my newspaper run to Jay’s I broke down and bought a 2 liter of Pepsi. I mean, for God’s sake, there’s only so much ‘no sugar no caffeine no taste’ healthy crap a man can take.

And the St. Pete Times didn’t even have an article about the Bucs in their sports page. And it’s football season! And the Bucs are on Monday Night Football this week! I swear to God if I won the Lotto I would start a little paper that would publish nothing but Bux news every goddam day no matter what time of year it was, because, let’s face it, who the hell wants to read about golf or NASCAR or the fucking Lightning or the GODDAM piss in a batter’s helmet Devil Rays? I mean, PLEASE.

Okay, I wouldn’t do that because I’d move back to Syracuse and buy the building I used to live in and then reside in a hotel for a year while ingenious interior decorators (Top. Men.) turned it into an exact replica of Doc Savage’s skyscraper headquarters but, you know, smaller, and without the science labs or the armories full of Thompson guns that fire anaesthetic bullets or the operating theaters where I would perform lobotomies on captured criminals to make them productive members of society.

Wait. Maybe I should have the operating theaters. After I win the Lotto some of the many women who have rejected me may want to visit my new luxurious love nest and sample its sybaritic decadence, and a prefrontal attitude adjustment could be just the thing to maximize their comfort and prolong the pleasure of their visit.

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:

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:

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.