Nothing

Apparently I can't make this an invitation blog since it isn't housed on Blogger. It's on my ISP server. So it just hangs out here.

I'm not really worried. Goatman is so self absorbed I don't think he bothers searching for anything but his name.

He wrote an apology blog the other day in which he denies that what he wrote about a fellow blogger was really about her. It was all a great big misunderstanding. And the Buffalo Turd chimes in that it is terrible to be misunderstood. And some other twit says he is a big man for admiting his mistake.

Give me a fucking break. He is so full of shit that if you squeezed his head you'd have brown stains all over the ceiling.

Oh well. He has to live with himself.

Group think

One of the things I find disturbing about blog comments at times is the pig pile aspect of them. People pile on with "me too" sentiments and become outraged at dissenting viewpoints. Then they become piranha attacks and each one takes a bite out of the person who dared stand up and say something different.

Or if you try to do something different it sets off ripples in the blog pond. Take for instance becoming an "invitation only" blog. I've already seen comments popping up on the blogosphere about a certain "favorite blog" that has dared to limit access. There are hurt feelings. I wonder how long it will take before those hurt feelings are replaced with anger.

All of this because we try to express ourselves and protect ourselves. We are either too exclusive or too inclusive. We are too liberal or too conservative. We are too opinionated or too wishy washy.

Yesterday I wrote a post about whacked out crack heads. I half expected someone to tell me it wasn't very sensitive to call someone with a substance abuse problem a whacked out crackhead. That would have happened if I had dared write that in my work world. And I would have had to respond with an apology and say I did not intend it as a negative term, but a descriptive term. I am becoming more draconian in my blog world. If someone had said the term was offensive I would have thanked them for their comment and then suggest they go fuck themselves.

I'm tired of offending people unintentionally. I'd rather just be honest and offend them intentionally.

I'm beginning to view this blog as my pressure valve place. I can come here and scream. I can spout like a tourette's victim on speed. And it doesn't matter. There is something very comforting about that.

Uplifting

One of the difficult things about writing a "public" blog that has a modest number of people who read it and comment on it is this feeling like you have to write crap that is optimistic and uplifting. I suppose it is a self-imposed cross to bear.

I really do believe that you need to write for yourself and not care what anyone else thinks. This is not about pleasing people. It is not about accumulating readers or being discovered or popular. I do think blogging is about self-discovery.

But the funny thing about self-discovery is that you don't always discover good things. My whole experience being part of that terrible group blog experience triggered something in me I didn't expect. Although in real life I shrink from the limelight, in the blog world I discovered I don't like sharing it. I don't like playing by other people's rules and conforming to community standards. Hell, I have to do that in the real world. Why the hell would I want to start playing that game in the virtual one.

I don't deal with criticism well. I internalize it. But first I strike out and try to turn the tables on the ones criticizing me. That's what happened on that stupid blog.

I suppose the virtual world is a better place for this to happen than in the real, civilized one. Though in my work world, I have the reputation of someone who speaks his mind and can be blunt, I still know limits. You have to when you livelyhood depends upon it. The blog world really doesn't have those limits. But people always try to impose them.

I think of this world as an amazing experiment. It is not for everyone. That, I think is why there is a high incidence of blogger breakdowns. And though I have toyed with quitting at times, I keep going.

Sometimes I just think I can't stop.

Purpose

Sometimes I wonder if the reason people turn to religion is to be able find a surrogate purpose in their lives. If you believe in a god you can say things happen because "it is god's will." It's a great crutch if you are a loss for finding purpose on your own.

I don't want to write about how I feel in my other blog. I don't want to write about despair or depression or lack of meaning. I can read about that in enough other blogs. And I don't want advice from well meaning strangers.

One of the things that used to piss me off when the warlock BDSM goat herder would leave comments on my blog was that it was always something about him. I wanted to respond, "Fuck you. This is my blog. Go whine about your unhappy childhood in your own pitiful blog. I can't help it you suffer from short man syndrome." But no, I'd always be polite. I was always raised to be polite, even to assholes.

Oddly enough, I am not looking for anyone to comfort me. I gave up believing anyone could comfort me after hundreds of dollars of therapy bills and anti-depressants. And to think that one time in my life I thought I wanted to be a psychologist. How depressing would that have been. Sitting around nodding and looking sympathetic when all you want to do is slap the person and say, "you are pitiful."

It always bugged me to pay someone to listen to me. It seemed too much like paying a prostitute. At least a prostitute would be honest about screwing you. It also bugged me how they'd stop you mid crisis when your time was up and usher you out the door like a one-night stand they'd woken up next to.

Obviously I have issues about therapists. Perhaps I need to see a therapist about it. Ha, ha.

What am I looking for? Purpose. I want a reason to be. I want to matter. I used to think being a published writer would mean I mattered. I wanted my words to change people's lives. Maybe it is an ego thing. Or maybe it is just human nature.

We are raised to think we are special and then we go out into the world and discover everyone thinks they are special and other people are ordinary. And when you stand in line at Starbucks and the 20-something cashier chats up the Amazon.com goth geek for 15 minutes while you wait patiently to order your grande Americano with room, you realize that you really aren't special. You are invisible, especially to the 20-somethings.

But suppose it is god's will.

A bit lost

My 49th birthday is creeping up on me. I have never really liked my birthay. This is a common thread for me. It never lives up to expectations. Part of it is that it reminds me that I have very few friends. But I have very few friends by choice. I find it much easier to interact internally than expend the energy to interact externally.

I despise small talk. I hate chatter. People who cannot sit without going on mindlessly annoy me. Sometimes I feel bad for having these feelings. Sometimes people blather on because they are lonely. My mother for instance. I'm sure her obsession with narratives on grocery shopping and lunch menus stems from spending so much time alone with her dog.

I am terrified at times of becoming like the people who annoy me. Is it karma though? Will all of those times I've been impatient with some old person plodding along in front of me at the grocery store come back to haunt me as I get older? Will I be that boring old man annoying people with repetitious stories?

I catch myself repeating myself in my blog and I cringe. It is one thing to be repetitous on purpose for comic effect. It is another to repeat yourself because you forgot saying it before.

I still lose sight at times of the point of blogging. It has become habitual for me, part of my obsessive behaviour. It's like a twitch anymore. I suppose it comes across as that at times. My mental farts.

I find it difficult to blog when I'm on vacation or at a conference. Maybe it proves that the blog is my stress relief during my normal day. We had so much going on in Guatemala that I didn't feel the same compulsion to write. Plus I've always hesitated to write too much about my personal life in my blog. At least overtly about my personal life.

It startles me at times to witness blog breakdowns. Most of them are cryptic crys in the virtual ether. Funny how some commentors flock to these crys like predators swarming a wounded animal. I still find it awkward to comment when some one has a meltdown. My urge is to be a smart ass. And the last thing someone in crisis needs is a smart ass. So most of the time I just don't comment.

Maybe it embarrasses me. I want my meltdowns to be in private. I still believe in muffling the screams.

Rub some dirt in it. Shake it off.

The blog zone is for loading and unloading only.

Men and women

I watched a segment on a news magazine the other night about a woman who posed as a man for 18 months and wrote a book about her experience in the man's world. She was a lesbian who looked a lot like KD Lang to begin with so the transition wasn't as big as a stretch as one would think.

One of the first things she did was join a men's bowling team. Like this is the last bastion of masculinity that would unlock the door to the men's club.

There is something seriously fucked up about this approach to trying to understand the difference between what it is like to be a man and a woman. First dressing like the other gender and pretending to me them will not give you insight in what is like to be the other gender. You may find out how the other gender is treated but that will not let you into that "secret" world of men and women.

I don't think it exists.

What separates each of us is the life and experience we have compiled. Sure, gender is part of it, but just being a man doesn't make me understand all men. And I'm willing to bet that just being a woman doesn't make a woman privy to what makes women tick.

I don't claim to understand anyone. I'm just barely figuring out myself. I live with my wife. I talk to her and I listen to her. But I don't claim to really have any insights into that separate world we both live in. I think we are closer than most and can intuit certain things, but I believe fundamentally all people are mysteries to each other.

And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

I would never want anyone to read my mind. Could you imagine how we would recoil at the the secret thoughts people think? None of us could ever look each other in the eye if we really knew what we thought down in the recesses of our minds.

I don't believe, however, that men and women have to be in separate camps trying to figure out what each other are all about. That seems to polarize our differences rather than bridges them. Maybe I believe this because I am older and no longer driven by hormones that emphasized the difference between men and women. Or maybe it is because I've always had as many or more women friends than I had guy friends.

I do know that I have no desire to embrace my masculinity by beating a freakin drum while dancing around a fire. And I don't want to wear my testicles around my neck in a leather pouch as attonement for my gender's sins against humanity.

Can't we all just get along?

Confessionals

One of the relatively new bloggers I read wrote a post yesterday about starting out to write a journal of sorts and then being intimidated when people started commenting. She complained of no longer feeling free to write honestly for fear of how her readers might take things. She was at a fork in the road and didn't know whether to delete the blog or try and just write honestly.

This person had been sharing pretty intimate information about her struggle to get pregnant for quite some time. Last week she wrote of another ultrasound where they could see the 6 1/2 week old fetus but couldn't hear a heartbeat. She wrote of her doctor's warning that they needed test again in a week and if the pregnancy was healthy, they'd hear a heartbeat. If not it ment there was no longer a pregnancy.

Then today she posted that she'd had an ultrasound and discovered that she was no longer pregnant.

And the commentors...including Buffalo dung...one after one wrote platitudes about being sorry.

I couldn't comment. What could I say? I barely know this person yet I had just read something brutely personal about her. I am hurt for her and know she must be devastated yet I feel it would almost cheapen the confession for me to say something meaningless.

When she wrote that she was no longer pregnant, I wanted to scream that no...no, that wasn't the way to write this script. We all wanted hear that her months of trying to get pregnant had been worth it and that she was carrying a healthy baby. That wasn't the way things were supposed to work out.

This is the downside of writing about your personal life in a blog. It's like letting strangers rummage through your underwear drawer or medicine cabinet. How do I process this information? Do I treat it like those people I see on the news? Strangers suffering misfortunes. I can tsk, tsk and move on because I really don't know them.

But blogging forces you to be more involved. You are strangers, but not strangers. You care, but you aren't really part of each other's lives.

Are you?

Being petty

Sometimes I just want to give in to my petty side. I still haven't quite gotten over the whole Freedom's Place incident. It just struck my sense of injustice and raised ghosts of the past.

For some reason growing up, I always felt guilty regardless of whether I'd done something or not. We used to go to this Five and Dime store when I was a kid. There was this old fart who worked there that would follow us around whispering to the other clerks to watch these kids to make sure they don't steal anything. I was mortified. I had been raised never to even think about taking something that wasn't mine. But still I felt guilty.

When I was in first grade, I remember going to another classroom to sing or something. The kid next to me was talking and the teacher in that room asked where the noise was coming from. My teacher pointed to the kid next to me but the homeroom teacher thought she was pointing at me. I got hit in the head.

One time in junior high I sat down in the lunchroom next to a wall. I looked up and noticed someone had stuck a catsup cup on the wall. I pulled it off, turned around and was handed a rag by the janitor who was glaring at me and lecturing me for trashing the place.

Each time I was mortified at being accused of something I didn't do and no matter what I said it didn't matter.

Thus Freedom's Place burns me. I despise the goat man. You can't have the last word with the goat man. Even deleting my link to his page can't be done with out a cheap shot from him protesting his innocence and my childishness. I never really liked being linked to his site. I have always felt obligated to provide a link to people who link to me. More often than not I was embarrassed to be associated with him. I cringed at the thought of people finding him through me and thinking I liked his rambling babble and amateurish prattle about politics and his BDS&M fantasies.

And I despise that fact that the little prick hides behind Buffalo turd and his odd bevy of bobbleheads. And my vindictive self wanted Freedom's Place to crumble and take with it the bad poetry, stupid cartoons and sad political rhetroic.

Being sick feeds my pettiness.

Leper

I have mixed feelings about being sick. I suppose I would prefer being well, but I have to admit there is a part of me who revels in the attention. Nothing like coughing up a body part to elicit an, "You sound terrible, poor thing."

I am pitiful.

It's not that being sick got me much attention as a child. Being a Christian Scientist ment we weren't supposed to get sick. So being sick was an emotionally bad thing as well as a physical one.

But my latest bout of sinus infection and fever was almost a vacation. I got to sit in my easy chair, drink Theraflu, suck on cough drops and watch whatever television I wanted. Oh, the fever, congestion and coughing weren't (aren't) fun, but at least I wasn't puking. I hate puking with a passion. I will endure almost anything to avoid puking, even though you know that you always feel better after you puke. It's just the approach and mid-wretching that gets to me.

Being sick at work has avantages and disadvantages. People aren't so anxious to meet with you when you are overflowing with mucous. You can see them visibly recoil as though you had a sign reading, "UNCLEAN" around your neck (hear the one about the leper hockey game...there's a face off in the corner). The disadvantae is that no one wants to go to lunch or coffee with you (though you can't taste anything anyway).

I should feel grateful that my illnesses have all been relatively minor ones. It is easy to bask in minor self-pity, choking back snot and blowing your nose constantly when you know it will go away and you'll be back to normal. I doubt I'd be so cavelier if it was something serious and my odds of ever getting out of the easy chair again were minimal.

I did think about my father during my bouts of self-pity over the weekend. I remember when he was diagnosed with stomach cancer and was confined to his bed, unable to eat and in constant pain. And I cringe as I recall him clutching me as I helped him to the bathroom, crying, "Take the pain away, please take the pain away...." And I couldn't.

So I feel petty with my sinus infection and cough. I feel weak for complaining and not shrugging it off. My father never left his bed after that. At least I'll rise and walk.

And rise and walk.

Beat

I've been on seven airplanes in less than two weeks. I've had a bad cold that turned into a sinus infection that has lasted three weeks. I have lived out of a suitcases for two weeks and eaten more room service and restaurant food than any person should ever have to.

So I don't feel up to being too funny, so I'll avoid Dizgraceland for now.

Las Vegas isn't quite as entertaining when it is cold and you are hacking your lung up while sitting next to a chain smoking old lady at an Elvis slot machine. Of course nothing is as glamourous as they make it on television and the movies. I have always found casinos somewhat depressing anyway. Even when you win, you lose.

Against my better judgement I went to the Sunday brunch buffet at the Hilton. Now granted, the quality of the Hilton is far above the standards of a Circus, Circus buffet, but there was still this air of decadent waste and excess that puts me off from enjoying the food at a buffet anyway. I watched this old fat lady from somewhere on the East Coast (judging from her nails on chalkboard accent) sit across from her pudgy son cracking crab legs and shoving the glistening meat into her fat gob as fast as she could until she started choking. Security quickly swarmed around her as she made pitiful mewling sounds and hacked up stuff into the napkins they kept shoving in front of her. Apparently whatever she was choking on was dislodged and she waved off the security guys and continued shoving crab meat into her mouth.

The train wreck that is humanity fascinates me.

One night I stopped for a drink at a bar in the "Star Trek Experience" portion of the Hilton. All of the drinks were themed after Star Trek shows. While I was sitting there drinking my Dilithium Brandy or whatever it was, a couple and their two children sat down in the restaurant. They were all dressed like Klingons. I asked the bartender if they worked there. He said no, there were a few paid Klingons, but these were just people who liked to dress up like Klingons. I said something about that "just being wrong" and he got a little surly. It was the "Star Trek Experience" after all.

I think they were all majorly fucked up. I wouldn't waltz in there wearing an Elvis jumpsuit just because Elvis used to play there. No one would notice if I did. It was, after all, Vegas. But it would still be fucked up.

I ate lunch one day at the Cheesecake Factory in Ceasar's Palace. Mindy, or someone with a similar name, was my server. She started off her server spiel by asking me if this was my first time at the Cheesecake Factory. I'm not sure why that was relevant information, but the server at the Rainforest Cafe asked me the same question at the MGM Grand a couple of days later so I'm guessing it is important. I wanted to say, "Why no Mindy, I've actually dined at this very Cheescake Factory three years ago and had the lettuce wraps followed by the Thai pizza. It was all very overpriced and still gave me the runs. " Instead I simply nodded and listened to her babble about the specials and the portion sizes. I ordered an ice tea and she asked if I'd ever had their ice tea before. Again I wanted to say, "Yes, and it tastes like yak urine, but I realize that this is an acquired taste so I'll have it anyway." But again I just shook my head and let her explain that it was enfused with Rasberry nectar or some other BS and wanted to make sure I still wanted an ice tea. We went through a similar painful process with the appetizer (avocado egg rolls), the entree (a crispy chicken sandwich with fries) and dessert (peanut butter cup cheese cake). Mindy then had to go on about my Alaska Airlines credit card and wondered if I was from Alaska since she was from Juneau. I had visions of shoving my fork into my forehead as Mindy quizzed me about whether or not I'd ever shoved one of their forks into my head before because they only had three tines instead of four and I might not find it pleasurable.

All of those things are Las Vegas. It is a city without a soul or a brain. They actually brag that their architects design buildings to be torn down within a decade to make room for new buildings with a more trendy design.

I am feeling pissy. It is the Theraflu speaking.