The Man of My Dreams

I just picked this off a network, hey, like fruit from a tree, and hustled back here to publish my treasure, thereby both giving it away and making it more deeply mine.

Someone had posted the question, Who can I reach at Amazon to fix a customer service situation gone wrong? (I don't think you're supposed to take items from a closed site like this and—whoa, there's a blog police in my head?)

Answer: I just got a similarly weird "error msg" from L----In! First they say, hey, here's a new member who used to work at MMmedia just like you (the poor bastard). Perhaps you know him. As it turns out, I do, So I invite him to like, you know, L--- In. But then I get this ERROR MSG in response to my invite: "Please note: You cannot send invitations from this page because several recipients of your invitations indicated that they don't know you."

Have we achieved Fascist Networking yet?

sheesh!

Clarification added 6 hours ago:
Gosh, I didn't realize that this would be visible to everyone. Just to be clear, when I said "poor bastard," what I should have said was "poor FUCKING bastard."

And when I said "Fascist Networking" what I meant was "National Socialist Networking."

I hope this serves to clarify my position.

His only faults are that I have never met him, and, well, do you see him posting about me? (Answer: hell, no.)

Besides, the older men get, the more they like—no, let me put this another way: he is my age, give or take, and the whole of my life, since I was eleven or twelve, the male of the species has treated me as if I were as interested in naked women as they.

But it's really more than that. These things are pointers, in the way links point to something else, something huge, bigger than Google ever dreamt: Women are actually other people!

Different! Separate! Similar, in that we are as full of ourselves as any guy, with the same self-interest ... but with the addition, okay, of an inborn capacity to deeply care for and about others.

But enough about that. For now.

Over It

I am sooo over yesterday. You ever had the experience where you wake up the next day, and it's not that you are somebody else ... it's, what makes you think a person is one single point of view. Hell, no. The art is to get bigger than all of it, you little hydra you, and like the membrane of a balloon, contain it. Affectionately. I am an asshole—now and then—and besides, I was dealing with a lawyer all day. A middle-aged white male lawyer.

Someone sent me a cartoon: a couple in a car, the wife is driving, and she says, “Oh, dear, I think I ran over a lawyer!” Husband says: “Well if you're not sure, dear, back up and do it again.”

Nothing personal, if you are a lawyer (and reading this blog? why?) but as far as I can see, these people are paid great sums of money to lie. And after a while, the lies kinda slip into the category of normal, and if that isn't morally compromising. How the hell do you keep track of right and wrong?

So about 3 a.m. I started at the beginning of Mystic Bourgeoisie, and right off, saw that the title means something! All these clever blog monikers. Honey, we are the mystic bourgeoisie and of course I am never going there again. Tomorrow morning, first thing: torch all those self-help books left over from Eighties. Marianne Williamson? Up in smoke. I bought that stuff whilst involved in a romance that should never have happened, which will make you grasp at any manner of crappy straws.

From October 2005:

“Forgive me if I've already told you this, but I have a plan to claim the local Target store for the Queen of Spain. I figure if I can get an outlaw biker gang to back me up with stolen heavy construction equipment, I might be able to hold onto it long enough to make CNN. I'll spend the rest of my life in the slammer, sure, but imagine the cred ... ‘What's he in for?’ ‘Who, that guy? Him and a bunch of berserker biker dudes claimed a Target store for the Queen of Spain.’ ‘Whoa! Far fuckin out.'“

What a pity. Finding the man you want to marry at my age, when I want to marry like I want to cut off my foot with the butter knife. It's a sentiment, but no less sincere. The way to a woman's heart is through her eyes and ears. What? No, never met him. That matters? Through their writing ye shall know them, and it was good.

No, it was Far Fuckin' Out.

You Want Rage, Boy

God damn it, Locke, no sooner do I like you again than you turn around and do something sooo stupid.

Have you not obtained a clue? By now? There are many of us—women—who don't find that sort of thing funny ... just fuckin' lame. It's entertainment for guys—old guys—and truly obnoxious to me.

Why? Because it is, and yes I get to say so! And I'll tell you another thing, any hip chickies who claim to like it or take part in it are co-opted waaay beyond what they can possibly know.

You like women-as-objects? You approve? Believe me, we're still working very hard to just be other people.

So someone I thought of as friend posts a piece of sexist crap (and thinks he's just the cleverest thing, I know you do) but for me, coming across the page, it's shoving a setback right in my face.

Oh and thank you for contributing to the general cheapening of the web. If my daughter were young, I'd love her to come across your site. Not.

Dude, we are not all dudes. 

And even dudes, the younger ones, care.

I think i'll blog this email, as is.

Zo
     _ _ _ _ _ _

Just a spit in the wind against the massive business of internet pornography. But I don't care. I don't care how fuckin' big, how fuckn' hopeless. Who are you, if you do not say what is wrong?

“Entertainment” for men—human rights violation for women.

Only one point of view can possibly prevail.

Oh, here's the fuckin' link, you so dying to see. 

Big Stink In Little China

Yesterday (Tuesday, now that I post this) was kind of a gaggy day, in this little corner of the web. And it is little. I'm not sure some of the well-known bloggers involved really comprehend that. Least of all, the perps of Tuesday's big stink.

I'm not even going to bother to preface this with all the "I identify with you as a woman" crap, because that should be a given. Not that there were many givens—which are, after all, the product of trust—around yesterday.

What showed up instead, en masse, was a lot of ego-underbelly. The dark side of narcissism. Disowned, projected content, with that fabulous mob-mentality willingness to point the finger.

Finger, what am I saying. They named names, numbers, URLs. People, read my lips: this is something healthy adults do not do.

And you could count them on one hand, the adults.

As to the many "friends" who rushed to defend Kathy ... WTF were you thinking? Are people so bloody eager to belong, so profoundly immature ... it disheartens me. That's not support, it's not friendship, and certainly not what a person in trauma needs. Idjits! Get a clue, read a book, something!

Apparently, we must also review basic civil rights: No one is free to accuse a suspected other in public this way, name names, organize vendettas or any other similar damn thing ... unless, of course, you believe in vigilante justice. So crude, so not nice.

No matter how very special you are. No matter, even, if disgusting things have been posted about your wife—outrage, yes. Posses, no. Let me see, also bandied about by some leading lights were: vilification,isolation, shunning ... prison, FCS. Them's some mighty big underbellies. Some mighty brave pajama people.

Now we come to the nub of things. Miss Tara Rogue Hunt's blog, where I had wandered onto the comment thread that fateful afternoon.

"If you are part of the swarm of mean kids that come around to just be disruptive without making a point, you will be deleted. Say what you came to say … you aren’t clever. You are mean."

Talk about riveting. Instantly, the discussion became like one of those accident scenes where everything unfolds in slow-motion, with sirens and flashing lights just around the corner.

And Miss Tara Rogue soon got down to her nub.

"I don't want to sound like Oprah or any of these really slimy things the "guffaw brigade" is indicating below (they remind me of the mean kids in high school who used to draw pictures of me with zits all over and laugh at my expense) ... I guess I want us to get real and human."

A many-headed nub, as nubs so often are, and we ought not to be surprised. That is compassion, not the rush to fawn, but letting people speak for themselves—and listening. Carefully.

Tuesday night's Dan Fost Tech Chronicles column: (revised, small mercies, for Wednesday's paper)

"Tara Hunt, of San Francisco, who had been the original target of Locke's 'Mean Kids' site (she had coined the term after getting flamed for suggesting that companies need to find a 'higher purpose') ..."

Which isn't quite true. Is it. Clearly that's how you felt; the astonishing thing (do I need to say this?) is the latitude you cut for yourself as a result.

"'Chris Locke is a sad soul who blames the world for his lack of success,' Hunt said when I reached her on the phone today. 'He's constantly broke and angry. He calls himself rageboy. All that anger makes him very hard to work with.'"

Without condescension, Tara Rogue, but because this is somewhat within my purview, I offer you one thought: Stop all that fucking Twittering and get your ass into therapy.

No one acts out that dramatically and harmfully to another who has integrated their dark side ... and the dark side is what this is really all about.

N.B. This post actually follows upon this one, unbeknownst at the time.