Ok, here's what happened: I had a budding internet friendship with this girl named erin. We talked and talked. Then, one day, I made what I thought was an obviously silly, nonsensical joke about eating babies. I don't know about you, but I and 99% of the people I know would consider this to be so ludicrous as to override the taboos of infanticide and cannibalism. Or maybe 'there are some things you just don't make jokes about.' actually, I think this is nonsense -- you can make jokes about anything. Some people are just dense, uninteresting and simple-minded.
Erin is apparently one of these people; she got offended. Most would probably simply think her offense silly, and move on. The problem is, NOTHING is guaranteed to make me madder than when someone gets 'offended.' what we need to do is look at what's happening when someone gets 'offended.' I don't want to spend too much time on this tangent, but suffice to say that it's a form of moralizing and inflicting those morals on the rest of society.
Anyway, I got mad when she got offended, called her dull, and blocked her from contacting me via instant messenger. I wrote her an angry letter but did not send it, per 'dear abbey's' recommendation. However, I did send her a friendly letter apologizing for overreacting, which was rudely met with no response. When that didn't get a reply, I sent another saying 'i wish you well' or something along those lines. No reply, of course. At this point, I think the cloture of this relationship should be accomplished by publishing online the angry letter I wrote back on the 17th.
Here's some context, in the form of the IM transcript:
me (5:29:25 PM): ::eats babies:: me (5:29:34 PM): speaking of babies ebrownSPLN (5:29:37 PM): Not funny. Me (5:29:46 PM): :| me (5:29:50 PM): ;| me (5:30:42 PM): so did that seriously offend you or something? ebrownSPLN (5:32:30 PM): It just isn't funny. Me (5:32:34 PM): christ ebrownSPLN (5:32:47 PM): You didn't hear the story today, I guess. Me (5:32:51 PM): the story? me (5:33:21 PM): nm, I found it ebrownSPLN (5:33:29 PM): About the lady (8-months pregnant) who was killed and the baby ripped from her? me (5:34:12 PM): yeah, I read it just now me (5:34:51 PM): anyway me (5:35:01 PM): whatever me (5:35:32 PM): thousands of people die horribly every day ebrownSPLN (5:35:47 PM): Yeah, but you seem to have fun with the kill kill rants. Me (5:35:48 PM): we're supposed to pick this one to touch our hearts because the media says so? ebrownSPLN (5:35:57 PM): No. Me (5:35:58 PM): yes, I do me (5:36:15 PM): and you seem to take things a bit too seriously ebrownSPLN (5:36:45 PM): Maybe I just prefer not to hear kill kill kill as the solution to every problem. EbrownSPLN (5:37:08 PM): After the first few times... It just gets a little old... Me (5:37:15 PM): extremely literal, banal people sort of bore me ebrownSPLN (5:37:19 PM): and then you don't know what's serious and what's not.
What a ridiculous cunt. Without further ado, here's the angry letter.
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 18:24:55 -0500 From: barnacle To: Erin Marie Brown Subject: wow 'not funny.' I'm forced to the conclusion that you're not only uninteresting (as I had unfortunately come to realize a little while ago), but not very bright, either. I was avoiding this conclusion, and yes, it's easy in a chat environment to project feelings onto someone who is completely inappropriate for any sort of relationship; I guess I can blame that phenomenon. you must know somewhere, in your tiny, tiny, black-or-white, oversimplified world-view that I didn't actually plan to 'eat babies.' so it was an inappropriate joke? In general, or especially because of the newspaper article, which you happened to read today, about some specific tragedy out of the millions of others that you ignore because they aren't fed to you on a media spoon? Are you a vegetarian? Do you help build homes in bangladesh? people like you really confuse me -- people who choose to get offended at things people say. And don't give me that shit about 'it just wasn't funny' -- you were offended and upset, and I'm trying to understand the square-block-into-round-hole world that people like you inhabit. It's perplexing. Are you affecting a conscience because you actually lack one? are you presenting your own moral superiority? maybe it's just a pathological oversensitivity -- I should have been given a 'heads up' when you were emoting over that 'henrick the frog' thing, or whatever it was. This degree of empathy is NOT an evolutionary advantage. It's clearly debilitating, and you should consider some treatment. unfortunately, I think it's more than that -- I can't just write you off as 'oversensitive.' what you do can only be described as moralistic masturbation. I'm sorry if you have some form of autism and are unable to recognize sarcasm, humor, hyperbole, etc. I continue to be simply flabbergasted at your offense. Come to think of it, that's the only thing GUARANTEED to offend me: when small-minded stooges get offended. 'that offends me!' 'this offends me!' this is the cry of the fundamentally conservative. Not necessarily politically conservative, but intellectually: a world-view is etched out in granite, and anything that challenges it is shouted down or sulked at. You're welcome to subscribe to some morality that forbids certain words, but please -- help me in my quest to avoid such people. i didn't think it was possible that a person could be COMPLETELY uninteresting. But you've managed, through some magical endeavor, perhaps, to be the dullest girl I've met in my entire life. A case for 'more fingerpainting in kindergarten' if I've ever seen one. stay away from me. You're a simpleton, and the kind of person marketing executives hope exist in vast, vast numbers, because they take EVERYTHING at face value. Unfortunately, I'm afraid they do exist in vast, vast numbers. at first, I found your complete lack of cynicism, skepticism or wit charming and sort of fascinating. But I'm afraid it just doesn't work for me in the long haul. -- http://www.me.net "But it's the truth even if it didn't happen." -- Ken Kesey, _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_
Anyway, I feel better now. Merry christmas eve!
I'm getting a little tired of seeing people who are better off than I am. I saw them today when I was delivering packages in faux-potomac, and I saw them later when I visited james and shoko. I wish I had a pretty girlfriend/wife too.
But then I wank and it's all better for a while. It's sort of humbling just how much our behaviors that we thought were a result of deep emotional and spiritual longings are just a result of needing to get laid, at at the very least ejaculate. I need to remember that whenever I start to get sad about not having a pretty wife, or not having a wonderful girlfriend -- I just need to beat off, and the pain will go away. It makes things so much easier. Really, it's like night and day: beforehand, I'm pining, weeping, moping and feel this craving, angry-sad, frustrated need for something, I dont know quite what, but something involving some girl's pretty face and smile and love. Then, I find some porn, jerk off, and it's all over -- I'm totally content, and the thought of having a girlfriend makes me think of her pleading me to get an eyebrow ring or to go to some fucking shopping mall.
There's nothing better for ongoing mental health than regular masturbation.
By the way, I need to address something. A few people have talked with me about my blog, often REPEATEDLY, even though they KNOW I don't like it, and it is explicitly forbidden in the warning. Stop it. I might not be as polite next time. Actually, I need to come up with a plan. I think I'll just refuse to answer any questions, meeting them with silence, as if the offending person had never spoken.
I have fifteen minutes to blog before I have to leave for work.
I was sad last night because I was hanging out with my friends, and their loveliness and success made me think of my own obese hideousness and utter failure. It's interesting the sense of revulsion that most women get around me, around a fat, disheveled man. They don't want to be touched, don't want to be hugged, even in a friendly way. Those games of friendly touching between the sexes are reserved for those who are at least marginally attractive.
I am one ugly piece of shit. It's time I faced this fact. Gorby (one of the friends) took a short movie of me with his digital camera. I don't get to see profiles of myself too often, and I was pretty shocked. I have an enormous roll of neck fat that bulges out from beneath not only my chin, but my jaw all the way around. I look a great deal like the late chris farley.
I'm very, very unhappy with my appearance. It makes me want to kill myself, especially when coupled with the fact that I'm 30, living in my mother's house and earning $10/h as a seasonal employee at UPS while my friends enjoy the fruits of successful adulthood.
Anyway, it's very humid and rainy today, which is actually kind of nice after so many days of a relentless dryness that was chapping my lips and exacerbating post-illness phlegm production. The cool, wet mass of air actually felt good on my skin this morning. I usually don't like the Maryland humidity.
Just to keep the public informed, I wrote that in 6 minutes. I'll probably go back and edit it for stupid-sounding grammar, though. And then there's the spell-checker. So really, more like the alloted 15. I'm on the phone now, on hold, with my supervisor.
Oops, I have to leave.
It's hard to blog and work a job. Writing takes a certain amount of 'energy', which tends to be eaten by regular work.
Well, I'm working, albeit temporarily. I'm a driver's helper for UPS, which means that I ride along in the big, brown, square trucks and carry packages to houses while the driver organizes his other packages. I've only worked for four days, and I've worked with three different drivers.
The first, rodney, drove his route in poolesville and north potomac. It was a very slow route, with a lot of long driveways and call-boxes. Rodney was very quiet, almost sullen, and looked very much like an older malcolm mcdowell ('a clockwork orange'). I told him this, and he managed a little chuckle and an 'oh yeah?' rodney delivered packages on seneca and falls roads, and would tell me to get out and carry a few packages to houses in sequence along the road while he delivered others nearby. I guess this is legitimate, except that the evening was pitch-dark, my uniform is almost black, those two roads have no shoulder and only one lane, and SUVs and BMWs come whizzing down them at about 60mph. So, that was exciting.
One man was really freaked out when I delivered a package to his house, sans truck (rodney was elsewhere). He followed me out of his driveway (i thought he was just being nice, and lighting my way), and down seneca road a few feet before rolling down the window of his SUV and barking 'can I help you?' 'yeah, I'm a UPS man.' 'where's your truck?' 'my driver dropped me off so he could deliver packages elsewhere.' 'since when have you guys been doing that?' 'we hire extra help during the holiday season. Did you think I was a prowler?' 'I've never seen anyone walk down that driveway in 20 years.' 'have a good night.' then, the man drove down seneca road a ways, made a u-turn, and went back up the driveway to his enormous house.
The next day I was paired with a driver named lisa, whom I was 99% sure was a lesbian. Lisa yelled at me basically the entire day. She would give me some vague directions, change her methods, and then yell at me for not being able to read her mind. For example: packages need to be scanned by an electronic gadget called a 'DIAD' before they are delivered. Lisa would sometimes do this herself, and sometimes she would expect me to do it. However, she sometimes neglected to tell me when I was to do it myself, and would then get explosively angry when I fiailed to precognate. I don't know -- maybe there was some complex algorithm that a smarter person would have grasped (lisa scans packages being delivered to green houses, but I scan packages being delivered to red houses), but I'm inclinded to believe that lisa was simply a bad manager.
If I failed to scan a package when it needed to be scanned, she would get this look on her face, her brow almost unfurrowed, but her lips pursed together so tightly that her whole face indented at the mouth, clearly furious at my inefficency. Sometimes, she would just close her eyes, smile, snicker, and shake her head, as if to say 'my god...how does he feed himself?'
At one point, she stopped the truck and accused me of 'doing it on purpose' (where 'it' is equal to walking slowly and failing to understand her cryptic nonsense and inconsistent rules). She asked me to explain myself. I got mad, and told her that she could drop me back at my car if she wanted. She didn't want to accept this, and sat waiting for another explanation.
At that point, I decided to play the head injury card, which worked quite well. She even told me that one of her degrees was in something related, she had cared for brain-damaged patients, and had even dated a brain-damaged man. From then on, she was perfectly friendly. During her lunch break, she went shopping at some outdoor store. She told me that she enjoys kayaking, hiking, rock-climbing, cycling, etc. I described her to another driver as a psychopathic nazi. He suggested 'control freak.'
A compromise in terminology might be 'type 'a' personality' -- one of those people for whom the world doesn't ever move fast enough, who can never get excited and nervous enough about the flow of reality, and who needs to 'achieve at 110%' at all times. I hope I never meet another person like her. Furthermore, I'm convinced that anyone, brain-damaged or not, wouldn't have been able to follow her scattershot directions and absorb by psychic osmosis what she needed done. I thought about punching her in the face while she sat there in her truck making faces, or kicking her against the elevator wall as we both stood in it, but didn't.
Lisa was actually pretty nice otherwise: she bought me dinner and was a good conversationalist. It's just that she's a control-freak psychopathic nazi war-criminal bitch. She needs to stay the hell away from management positions. Apparently, she has a regular helper who does his job really well. I suspect she's castrated him and uses a shock-collar.
My third driver was an easy-going sex-maniac ex-cop named jim. His favorite phrase was 'but it's their right to do whatever they want' or some permutation thereof, and I correctly guessed him to be a libertarian, registered and everything. He was actually pretty sharp and fun to talk to, except that he's one of those people who is ALWAYS making a joke, so I sort of felt obligated to crack my own weak ones as well, made weaker still by my social anxiety. Another thing he kept saying was 'don't worry! Why worry about it? People waste too much time worrying.' jim had it all figured out. He also told me that he had a 'dynamite IQ'. I have no reason to disbelieve it -- as I said, he seemed pretty sharp. I got along best with him, my third driver, and asked that I be paired with him again today. It looks like I will tomorrow and the day after as well.
Anyway, I just got off from work, after nine fucking hours of being a slave for UPS and jogging packages from the truck to the front door of some cretinous rich person's obscenely ostentatious house. The thing that struck me as profound today was that all the boxes were so light -- nothing substantial is actually being shipped to these whores. Some rich person sees something like a little 2 inch crystal cat that they must have, and then it gets packed in some comparatively large box and stuffed in a big UPS truck, burning gallons of fossil fuels, along with other feather-light boxes of crystal cats. So then I take the crystal cat to the front door of these palatial homes on about as much property, square-foot wise, as is taken up by the house itself, surrounded by other enormous houses on a plot of land that looks like a mine field or something because the grass is all torn up and there are no trees since it's so new...i take this crystal cat to the door, ring the doorbell, and set the fucking thing down. Then I jog back to the truck, so the driver will know that I'm 'there to work.' I haven't yet gotten a straight answer on whether or not I'm actually helping things along. There are hundreds of housing developments like this in north potomac.
'North potomac' is pretty much a nonsense word anyway. No one is quite sure where the boundaries of this mysterious area called 'north potomac' are. It was conceptually created because potomac, the real potomac, which is (shock!) off of the potomac river, is full of flabbergastingly rich people. There was a lot of open space -- pastures and just undeveloped land -- between gaithersburg-proper and potomac. So, every cretin with a cookie-cutter mansion on a ludicrously tiny lot of untreed, muddy land eagerly scribbles his or her return address as 'north potomac.' and really, since there's no other name for the suburban wasteland which is unincorporated montgomery country, I suppose they might as well call themselves 'north potomac.'
Montgomery county is funny that way. All of these fucking losers, the upper-middle class -- the rich-but-not-that-rich -- these lawyers and construction executives, doctors and god-knows what else, the mediocre-rich, all want their piece of the pie. They want their little chunk of land, and their ugly palace on top of this land. It's a massive flood of suburban tapeworms and human fecal matter all eager to live out some manufactured dream of living on a quiet lot of beautiful property in potomac. But the problem is that there are thousands of them, they're all alike, their houses and property are hideous and probably poorly constructed, and they're the worst kind of human refuse -- shallow, money-grubbing, status-seeking, and deluded into believing that they're living the good life in 'north' potomac, getting away from it all.
The reason I'm upset is that I've been slaving at work all day, and the only thing I was looking forward to, after I got off, was visiting with james and shoko for a few meager hours before I need to force myself to sleep so I can get up early enough to meet my driver tomorrow. But, they were expecting me later, and are off to james's father's house. I feel really awful, being a lowly peon, the fucking scum of the earth, seasonal help during christmas season to accommodate all the fucking hausfraus and their addiction to harry and david, qvc and amazon.com as this addiction comes to a frothing head in this ugliest of all holidays. Everyone else is a normal human, and has christmas holidays.
But not the scum of the earth -- if you're the scum of the earth, then your only hope for employment is to cash in on the service industry boom during the christmas holiday. You have to work while everyone else is on vacation, right up to and including christmas eve. The service industry is there to serve all of the bourgeois when they're done working their cushy 9-5, Monday-Friday desk jobs. We're here serving you when you get off, and you don't even think about it. You don't consider that the reason you're out gobbling up products and services like a fat repulsive hog is that you're off from work, and that there needs to be an army of proletariats to heed your beck and call at this time. I think the service industry needs some maoist leadership, and should form an international union similar to the 'industrial workers of the world.'
Wow, I have almost no energy. I've been eating too much today, and lately in general. I see that 'hard to kill' is on. I'm going to watch it.
For fun, I requested a 'vegetarian starter kit' from PETA some time ago, and it finally arrived last night. It was basically a propaganda blitz, and I threw it away. Not because I strongly disagree with vegetarianism -- on the contrary: I think it's probably a good idea. But I didn't like PETA's presentation. They listed something like 15 reasons to be a vegetarian, all of which sounded preachy, elitist, smug, superior and offensive. Some of it was simply disinformation.
Some of the 'reasons to go vege' cited were under the umbrella of 'vegetarianism is healthier,' which is just nonsense. One can eat healthily on an omnivorous diet just as easily as one can on a vegetarian diet. Vegetarians can also eat just as unhealthily as meat eaters, or more unhealthily -- I've heard of vegetarians who consume little but candy bars and doritos.
Being a vegetarian in the usa is difficult, because the national cuisine wasn't designed for it. Most vegetarian dishes in this country are made to imitate the flavor of meat dishes and satiate the american palette, which is accustomed to animal protein. So, we get things like mock chicken, tofu hot dogs, soy beef patties, etc. It's a pretty glaring example of 'fighting the medium' -- this array of imitation meat products is telling me that vegetarians would really prefer to be eating meat. Contrast with indian, middle eastern and east asian cuisine, which are extremely happy without meat, since so many of their recipes were designed without it. Not so with american fare, which relies, with a few exceptions, on flesh to make it palletable. We, in this country, don't have the pallets or the culinary skills to produce a viable vegetarianism.
That said, I think vegetarianism is a good idea, and I suppose if I cared about things, I would care about that. PETA's propagandistic whining can be condensed into two very compelling reasons not to eat meat: 1) doing so is a gross waste of environmental resources, and 2) concentrated animal feeding operations are almost unimaginably cruel. These two can be broken down, of course, citing facts and figures and examples and blah blah, but as I implied, I don't really give a shit.
However, even with these two pillars erected, we're still operating on a few presuppositions. The erection of the pillars presumes that 1) one cares about the environment, and that 2) one cares about cruelty. Most people claim to, but in fact they really don't, so meat-eating is not a problem for them.
People like to see themselves as fundamentally different, somehow, than any other animal, but chordates are all pretty much the same: bilaterally symmetrical, a central nervous system, two eyes, four limbs, skin, etc, and, most strikingly, a genome that is freakishly similar across the board. No one argues that, say, cows don't think. No one argues that they don't feel pain. Or don't communicate. Don't nurture, care for, comfort, and love their young. Etc. Humans are no more fundamentally different from cows than dogs are from cows.
PETA thinks killing and eating animals is wrong, per se. I disagree. I dont't feel that there's anything inherently wrong with hunting some creature down and then killing it for food -- that's just the way things are done in the biosphere: beasts feed on other beasts. There might not even be anything wrong with confining some creatures on a green-pastured farm for slaughter. Unfortunately, the fact that these things might not be 'wrong' is a bit of a moot point, because the number of humans on the planet eliminates game hunting or pasteur farming as a viable source of meat for any significant number of people. Of course, at any given moment there are about 6 billion utterly defensless instances of prey wandering around, ripe for the hunt; low-hanging fruit. long-pig, c'est magnifique, non?
What might be 'wrong', in my opinion, is the way animals are kept in modern large-scale farming facilities: confined to the point of immobility, mutilated, unable to socialize, separated from their young, and given hormones and antibiotics. Proponents of concentrated animal feeding operations bring up the valid point that doing things this way is necessary to keep up with the demand for meat. Counterpoint: there doesn't have to be any such demand; there's nothing inherently unhealthy (except perhaps psychologically, because it might taste bad) about a vegetarian diet.
Feeding and watering animals who are to be eaten themselves is less efficient, resource-wise and energy-wise (basic thermodynamics), than simply eating and drinking what is given those animals to begin with. However, I have to admit that I'm really not all that worried about the environmental issues. Either we'll fix things at the very last minute, as we tend to do, or we'll fuck the planet up so badly that it no longer supports life, and eventually the biosphere will recover without primates driving SUVs all over its surface. It's all eventually going to get swallowed by the sun anyway.
I think I'll start on a new page when I hit 4,000 words. My last page (0058.html) was about 4,200. That seems reasonable -- very many more words, and the scroll-handle starts to get uncomfortably tiny.
I have achieved very little. The only reason I went to college, and finally finished after 9 years, is that I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I hadn't gone. This attitude, of college being something that one HAS to do, came from my parents, who were raised in a culture of college-going. Not attending would have been an unthinkable breech of social status, not to mention all of the statistics that cite salaries with and without an undergrad degree. But really, salaries are irrelevant, and especially irrelevant if one is an art major. A college degree has become more like a high school degree used to be, in that it's pretty much ubiquitous within certain sectors of society.
College attendance (especially on the 10-year program) was also a way to postpone having to do anything else -- my path of achievement was predefined, and rather easy to follow. I suppose I could continue to follow a predefined path of achievement at this point, but it seems silly now, mot to mention somewhat impossible. I have an art degree, took 9 years to finish school, and haven't held a job, let alone a 'real job', for longer than a year or so. At this point, mainstream 'success' is more or less beyond my reach.
My problem, if you want to call it a problem, is that I have never really endeavored to achieve anything. That's what sets me apart from my friends, who tend to move along goal-oriented paths. I've never been able to do this, or never wanted to do it -- it's a fine line. At any rate, I've never done it; I have never achieved anything. And this is not just be society's standards, either. I've never picked a difficult goal for myself and accomplished it, save getting a BA degree in over twice the usual time. There are things that I would like to have, too. I would like to have a house, and a car, maybe even a wife and children. Well, I don't know about the children part, or even the wife part. Maybe a live-in, sterilized girlfriend. Most importantly, I would like some social status. It sounds funny from someone who hates, really fucking hates, in a deep-down way, in a real, schizoid, axe-murderer way, human beings, but I would like these bipedal, round-headed creatures I so deplore to show me some deference. And money, too. I want money.
I've never really consider the word 'achieve' before, and how it relates to me. I've accomplished small goals, like learning this song or that song on the guitar, but I'm really not motivated to do anything. Almost all the art that I've produced, save for a few www pieces I did right after college, were either school projects or commissioned. I used to joke about 'motivation deficit disorder,' but I think I might really have it. Let's take away the 'disorder,' just to make it seem less like a disease, or even a personality disorder -- just a frank description of who I am. I have very little motivation to do anything -- a deficit of motivation; I simply don't see much as being worth doing. A lot of people are quick to associate this condition with depression, and this might very well be true in my case. However, I don't think it's necessarily associated. I can imagine a person who is lazy, but isn't sad; who is unmotivated, but not depressed. I can't think of any examples, but I can imagine it, and think of literary examples ('the dude' in 'the big lebowski'). Come to think of it, I believe depression is sometimes defined this way: as a lack of motivation. Someone can be depressed without necessarily feeling sad.