I will be in minnesota until Saturday night, so no blogging until then.
There is this guy I met in college. I guess the word that describes him the best is 'intense.' everything about him was just BIG -- not only did he weight between 350 and 280 pounds when I knew him, but he was a loud, socially aggressive, emotionally intrusive, very open person. BIG. Spending time with him meant constant overstimulation. He decided, at UMBC, that he and I were going to be best friends. He's a smart guy, and I enjoyed my intellectual relationship with him, but the relationship slid into something not at all intellectual, but rather emotionally abusive. He was physically aggressive, and would fake punches at my head, complete with sound effects. It was all in fun, but he was extremely large and overbearing. Maybe that's the best word to describe him all-around: overbearing. He would call me, sometimes several times a day, and want to do something pretty much every evening. Also, he had a disturbing habit of saying 'i know you're a fag...i know you're a fag...you should just admit it.'
Now, this is not new. A lot of people, especially when I was thinner, presumed that I was gay. But I would think that 'matt, it's interesting -- you come across as being gay, and I'm not sure why' would be the preferred way to communicate this, rather than 'i know you're a fag!' at the top of his lungs, several times a week, accompanied by a punch to the shoulder.
There are three pieces of evidence I can remember that lead me to the conclusion that he harbors some pretty strong homosexual feelings:
I believe there were other incidents, but these are the ones that come to mind, three years later.
It wasn't the repressed homosexuality that bothered me so much as the intrusive behavior. If I had let him, he would have moved in with me and consumed every ounce of my emotional energy, time and space. It was just impossible to deal with his level of intensity -- it left me drained and incapacitated. It's tempting and usually pretty stupid to start applying pop-psychology to people in an attempt to explain their behavior in terms of idiot categories that tend to be quite arbitrarily laid down, but I'm forced to say that major components of his personality are clearly narcissistic. The root of this kind of behavior, of aggressively prostituting one's emotions to someone without any regard for their feelings, fits a definition of 'narcissism': a psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem. He was, all analyses aside, quite simply intolerable to be around. I feel like he would have eaten me alive if I would have let him, as if he were some kind of emotional predator -- a psychic vampire, using people like drugs to fill his own need for stimulation, until they are reduced to dessicated husks.
Back in college, he singled me out for parasitism after a male friend of his had 'dumped' him. I gathered that this had been a similar relationship with someone who, like me, just couldn't take it anymore. Things were also not going well with his girlfriend, and when he broke up with her the manic intensity of his relating to me increased markedly. Thankfully, he very quickly responded to my hints that I no longer wanted anything to do with him.
Recently, three years after this social debacle, he emailed me, this time shortly after his most recent girlfriend killed herself, demonstrating a pattern of seeking out new victims shortly after old ones disappear. He initiated this contact with a discussion of free will vs. Determinism (as it applies to pulling one's self out of depression), in which I was happy to engage. He told me he had made a myspace.com account, and I told him that I had one as well. He gave me his AIM screenname, and I sent him an instant message.
This is when things turned ugly, and I got a taste of the person I remembered, the one voracious to possess people in their entirety, to utterly control them and use them as overflow bins for his own flaming emotional jism. He told me he wanted to see me again, that a drive down from new york would be well worth it to 'interact with me again.' we'd re-visit our old haunts. He'd pay for it. This is when I freaked out, and blocked him on myspace.com, AIM and email. That's the nice thing about electronic communication: it's very easy to control access.
I hope he gives up and forgets about me soon -- he's a dangerous person.
I'm still very upset about my blog. I don't even feel like writing in it anymore, especially now that no one is going to read it because it's password-protected. I included a message in the authentication box to 'email me for access,' but I don't think that's going to generate much, if any, response. One of the most consistent and important motives on the internet is to remain anonymous, and an admission that they are reading a blog is too much to ask of any member of an internet audience. People are already using anonymous proxy services to read my blog; I would in fact be shocked if a single person emailed me for access, as I requested. I don't know what to do here. Either I open my blog up and risk offending people, I restrict access, drastically reduce readership, and pollute the good feeling of publicly accessible information, or I am more careful that my writing not offend, insult, or upset (which I feel is its major strength). I don't know what to do. I feel like the longer I wait, the more readers I will lose. However, if I open it up, then some readers with whom I want to maintain friendly relations might be offended.
My blog just 'feels different' now that it's behind a password. I strongly believe that any and all types of information should be unrestricted. Maybe I'll put up a warning page, similar to those found on porn sites, explaining to readers that the best way to protect themselves from objectionable content is not to access that content. There is no middle ground, no compromise; if someone freely chooses to read my blog, then s/he must be willing to accept responsibility for his or her feelings on the writing (and images) therein.
I'd always assumed that if someone read something they didn't like, they'd either 1) realize that it was indicative of my changing day-to-day feelings and not an etched-in-stone declaration of world-view, or 2) simply stop reading my blog. Receiving an email yesterday about my blog being 'offensive' was too much to bear. The funny thing was that this person mentioned that they had found my blog to be offensive before. Yet, this person continued to read it, and then yesterday expected me to accept some kind of responsibility for his or her reaction to the content. If anything, an incident like yesterday's makes me less willing to censor my content than I already was.
Maybe it's not that important to have readers, or at least a lot of readers. But I was getting quite a lot of hits per day, and I regret that these are going to go down the toilet because I was forced into the position of making a choice between a censored, freely-accessible or an uncensored, restricted blog, and opted for the latter.
I realize I'm moving in circles here, but I have to remind myself that my blog was censored before this incident. In a way, any publicly-accessible content is by definition 'censored,' in that the content reflects its consumers. It's impossible, when publishing for the public, not to have a work be affected in some way by that public. Long before this incident there have been things that I have wanted to write, but haven't, in the interests of social politics.
A blog is a different thing than a diary, and I have to decide which one I want to keep.
Ok, screw this -- I'm going to make my blog freely accessible. I don't like the feeling of being behind a password. I'll make a new index page, complete with warning, but that's all I'm going to have in terms of a reader filter.
[29/Feb/2004:09:12:24 +0000]|my domain|/0019.html|216.40.225.75|22667|0|200
A WHOIS query run on 216.40.225.75 reveals the records of a well-known web-proxy service. This person used that service to download every page of my blog yesterday at about 4am EST, wishing to remain anonymous.
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND I'm COMING FOR YOU TONIGHT.
Certain IP blocks (including the one the proxy was found in) will now be silently re-directed to a decoy blog on my main site that is identical except for the fact that it is not updated. I'm drunk with .htaccess power. Just for fun, I blocked the CIA and NSA as a political statement. I will accumulate more IP addresses to block tonight at 7, when the next batch of access logs come out. It could be you!
I applied for jobs at seneca park, two veterinary offices and the grocery store. Coincidentally, I got an email back from someone telling me that my bid for employment at some place in DC had been rejected. I had completely forgotten about it.
I may completely discontinue this blog, and start up only after I've moved far away.
I wish people wouldn't email me to say that they didn't like what I wrote, or that it was offensive. If a person doesn't like my blog, then they are under no obligations to read it. It's a very similar situation, I feel, to one encountered by opponents of gay marriage. If gay marriage bothers you, then by all means don't marry a homosexual. This blog is, and will continue to be, a place of personal expression that happens to be publicly accessible. However, getting here requires a conscious effort and premeditation. My blog doesn't enter your home while you're sleeping. The fact that a potential reader needs to type the URL into their browser absolves me of any public responsibility for content. This blog belongs to me, and is not written for my readers' benefit.
Maybe password-protection would be a good idea.
I find it extremely offensive when other people take offense; it's almost the only thing guaranteed to make me angry. That, and being told what to do. So, when these two are combined, I become enraged beyond any hope of reprise.
If you're going to criticize what I've written, then you're not welcome here. There's a reason I don't have a commentable blog enabled: IT'S MY BLOG. Read at your own risk, and I will quickly and eagerly sever relations with anyone who presumes to tell me how I can and cannot express myself.
I password protected my blog, and feel infinitely better. Along with the password-request box comes a message asking the user to email me for a username and password. It's quite possible that no-one will email me asking for it, which is perfectly fine; I'm happy maintaining this blog as something closer to a personal journal than a public record that is, apparently, subject to some kind of fascist democracy.
But I do feel some sense of loss at the fact that I no longer will have as many readers as I used to. I guess having a blog amounts to a trade-off, a choice, just like anything else: readers or freedom of expression. Maybe, as in most things, a compromise is best, and giving out the password to a few friends will make me feel like I'm not so alone, but at the same time will keep out people like parents whom I don't want poking around in my private affairs.
Suddenly, it seems as though I have a lot to do. I have to find a job, following up with all of the interesting or promising prospective employers I noted on Friday and Saturday, reschedule a Thursday meeting with the head injury rehabilitation and referral service and pray that I am accommodated, and on that day fly out to minnesota for a funeral.
It's going to be a quick affair: fly in Thursday, services on Friday, and fly back out on Saturday, returning to DC after midnight. I'm worried about inadequate suit-transportation facilities, and I wonder if I should maybe skip the suit. I think I'll just wear it on the plane.
I only know of one of my cousins who will be at this funeral; I think the others are probably too busy. I'm not sure to what extent people tend to drop everything and attend funerals. I guess it varies. I've been reading my uncle's blog during these past few days when it became clear that my grandmother was dying. He's been updating frequently, and it's probably one of the most practically useful blogs I've seen, at least temporarily. Reading the entries about singing this hymn or reading that catechism, it dawns on me the degree to which some people are christians, and little more. Their faith solely defines their identities as human beings.
The primaries are on march second, and I think I'm going to vote for kucinich in the interests of idealism and to show him my support, and then of course vote for kerry over bush in November, when he will have inevitably won the democratic nomination. It's funny how that works.
This morning, I made a fried onion omelette. It was pretty good. Also, I'm sick, having picked up a cold from either nick or pesh.
As far as the job-hunt and job-prospects go, right now I'm leaning towards pursuing seasonal employment in seneca park, being a waiter at the outback steakhouse, hopefully working at a veterinary office (even though this sounds unlikely), or just resting my neck on the nearby B&O railway line and waiting.
The world is always different than I picture it. I'll get excited or interested in working in some place when I think about it, but then once I step inside everything changes: it's poorly lit, there are unfriendly people wandering around, it's noisy, chaotic, ugly, has a 'bad vibe,' etc. I don't like people, and I especially don't like them when they band together in civilization-sponsored groups, such as those that exist to filter money from the pockets of others. The service industry is grotesque, but that's the only place I feel that I'm able to find a job. 'going out and getting a job,' means walking around on the streets of commerce and approaching the vendors, normally approached as a consumer, as a prospective slave. When you 'go out looking for a job,' you're looking in the service industry -- restaurant and retail.
To 'go out looking for a job' is a shameful thing. When I was in the GNC store and a customer overheard me say the words 'I'm looking for a job,' his head snapped reflexively around to gawk at the freak-show of a person begging for his own survival, going from store to store, pan-handling like a starving beggar. There's something obscene, something inappropriate, something that needs to be swept under the rug about a person openly asking for a job. It's debasing, primitive and ugly, and doesn't fit into the way the service industry likes to present itself to consumers: all clean-pressed, plastic and grinning. The selling of goods and services is something that needs to be smooth and slick, its glistening marketing prints untainted with the image of someone who needs a job because he is poor. A job is something you have, not something you look for. Why are you out looking for a job? Why don't you have one now? The catch-22 is that if you're out looking for a job, you couldn't possibly be hirable. Anyone who is fit to work at an organization won't be found crawling along in the gutter, 'looking for a job.'
Seneca park sounds like an ok place to work. The outback steakhouse really doesn't. I think the main thing is that I don't like crowds, noise, or hustle and bustle. I get over-stimulated very easily, and when I'm in this mode I perceive a threat in every human that I see. When I look back on the two jobs that I most enjoyed, they were those in which I worked alone: sitting in a filling station on Sunday morning, waiting in the early morning sunshine for people to come and buy cigarettes, and delivering pizzas, listening to 98-rock in my car, looking at laminated map pages of catonsville, and smoking marlboro reds.
I hope I can get a job at seneca park. I need some money so my mom won't hate me so much.