Mowing down psychological tall grass and tangled weeds; clearing the field and planting new seeds. Thoughts lifted from my angry days, when someone asks my opinion and then denies it. If I tell you my favorite color, who else would have the "right" answer? Challenge it, oppose if you must, but to correct it is to erase my existence. If we all had the same thoughts, there would be no need for democracy. Cogito Ergo Sum.

2011/07/14

Five years is a long time to be in the company of "friends" to find out...

that nobody really is.

It's deeper than that -

when someone says to me

"Well because you have these particular views (which they completely misunderstood) that's all I need to know about you"

Then the other chimes in

"Well now we know the real you"

Both of these people are far more destructive to a communal society than I could ever be - even if I were to go out of my way to live up to all this monstrosity that they are sure belongs to me.

I can't put this together; I get so caught up in the surreal conflict of being accused of something my accusers are far better examples of that I can't let go of the anger.

At the same time, a "friend" says this to me - a guy who I did think I had a unique relationship with -

"All you want to do is argue"

Um - can I get an objective voice in here? - It takes two to argue; any time someone wants to end the argument it's simple - concede and let the other guy win. Otherwise, whoever is still contesting an issue has just as much desire to 'argue' than the other person.

Someone pulled this on me a few years ago; a dentist who refused to give me copies of my dental records (who would only release them to a dentist). That's a violation of the law; I printed out the law and provided links to the state and federal government websites where the law is posted and still there had to be a big production. At the actual face-to-face meeting where the records were being surrendered, the representative from the dentist's office says to me

"Well, I'm not going to argue with you"

Hey, I don't want to call you stupid - but you're too late. You're already arguing with me, and you can end the argument simply by obeying the law and I'll be all smiles as I leave the office with what is my legal property and right.

But for the love of anything lovable,

not for Christ's sake but ours - as mortal beings who have to share a planet whether we can see Christ or not -

don't tell someone you "are not going to argue with them" while you're standing there arguing.

If what you actually mean is "I'm going to pull rank, use my authority, or just be a stalwart bump on a log and stand here and pout while you try to tell me that's not allowed" - go ahead and say that, but you might want to check the brutal clarity of a mirror before you tell anyone that you're

"not going to argue with them"

It's petulant, it's petty, and it makes you look silly (unless you really do have the authority and power to end the argument on your terms)

Either way,

perhaps all the parties who'm I've severed ties with, or who severed ties with me, can have the intellectual integrity to look at whatever they think is an objective adjudicator in the universe and tell all of us and answer for me:

If you are a student in school, does it get you a passing grade to tell your teacher "I understand plenty. The answer to the question is XXXXXX" - which is the wrong answer?

If you are being handed a traffic ticket by a law officer, can you get him to drop the charges by saying "I understand plenty"?

Can you go into any situation, given any number of people, given any amount of time you've known one or all of them and say, "Well, based on what you've said in the last five minutes, now we know the 'REAL' you" -

...and in either or all of these scenarios think that really does put a lid on the matter and settle the issue?

Let me know, because I'm confused.

If anyone knows me so well that I don't even need to be party to the conversation (or am excluded from it)

then what am I needed for at all?

And if that drives me to spend time in isolation pondering where in thsi world I fit in, so that the answer arrives in the form of "You don't; get over it" - every one of the people who went out of their way to make goddamn sure I did not fit in

can just shut the fuck up

if that puts the idea of suicide into my head

It's fascinating how people want to drive home the idea that they are right and I am wrong with a 16 pound sledgehammer to my face, but if I take it seriously and take it to heart and that somehow gives me the feeling that this planet doesn't want me

that doesn't get these people off the hook who spent so much energy and grabbed my ears so that they could be god damn sure I heard them when they told me what a piece of shit I am

It's fascinating

these people want to shout as loud as they like

in a canyon full of loose rocks

knowing the canyon is full of loose rocks that are unstable

(that's what they're ranting about)

and after they scream and shout and make goddamn sure the rocks heard them at all the volume they can manage

they blame the rocks for falling in the avalanche.

You have free speech to say whatever the fuck your little heart feels like saying

PROVIDED

that you have the courage, the integrity, and the honesty that when you ring the bell because you have the right to ring the bell

you can't un-ring the bell.

Have some courage, people. Your free speech is indeed not free; not because someone fought and died for you to have it, but because you now own all the echoes, feedback and consequences of whatever it is you want the world to know.

You can tell us how you feel

you cannot tell us how

or have much control over

how we react to it

if this be the case

where's the freedom for anybody else?

2011/07/13

It's your world, Boss

That line is from The Shawshank Redemption; a movie about prison.

Today I got an email from my bank, a bank that has an account with no money in it, because they paid a check on my behalf; then charging me $35 for the overdraft and presumably adding that to my credit report.

How?

Why?

Because my ATT wireless bill is paid online. They of course want to have a "method of payment" recorded in their system that they can draw their funds on. I had originally used the account that is now empty, although not closed. I had added a different method of payment.

In my haste to may my bills, I did not realize that although I have used payment method #2 for the last three bills, the old account still shows up first on the list and is the default for online bill pay.

My fault.

Nobody's fault but mine.

So, mad as hell at myself today, I go to ATT.com to delete that method of payment so I don't make this mistake again.

Guess what?

After spending 20 minutes scratching my head at the 300 buttons, pull downs and re-directs on their page, I could not find one way to delete an existing method of payment.

So I call their customer support.

Ten minutes on hold.

Customer support guy tells me that the only way to delete a method of payment is for customer service, (this guy) to delete ALL the methods of payment and to re-enter any one that I want to use in the future.

Have you noticed that the burden is always on us to do what they want
they set the rules for how it will be done

and despite all the comments they gleefully speak into your ear about how much you can do at ATT.com, despite all the "is there anything else I can do for you today, Sir?" obsequeous and false joy and protocol they speak, in the end, it's NOT all for the customers after all.

I can add a method of payment online without help from customer service over the phone

...but I cannot delete that same method of payment unless I get on the phone, wait for a customer service representative, and have him delete

ALL

the methods of payment, having then to start over and add the one I want to use even if it was just there only a few moments earlier.

"It's your world, Boss"

2011/07/12

"big" government vs. "dumb" government

So one of the things that really lit the fuse which blew up this friendship is when I asked the "friend" to read my postings on a large political blog; arguably one dedicated to and run by people from the left. My postings are mostly all about "meta" - the existential and sociological and psychological conflicts that make human communication oft times less productive than amongst all those "lesser" animals who we think we're so much better than.

Right now my 94 year old aunt next door is having a new bathroom installed in her house. WHy? Well, because she fell down a few times in recent years and the government, which gets involved because whenever she gooes to the hospital, is paying the bills. A truck just pulled up and dropped off a portable toilet - a chemical porta-jon.

We are now in the midst of a heatwave like none other in this area. It will get into the high 90's - very unusual.

Now aside from the construction workers themselves who are doing this work

(I'm a plumber, electrician, and handyman who got his start doing projects just like this in 1987, I'm not allowed to do this work even for free, because I'm not licensed, insured, or registered to perform "professionally": It doesn't mean I can't do the work, but I can't do it within the laws put in place to control disreputable contractors.)

So the idea is that when these contractors are installing this new bathroom, if they need to use - or if the 94 year old woman they're doing the work for - needs to use the bathroom, they're going to use the chemical toilet.

Think about that. A 94 year old woman using a chemical toilet in her own yard (which right now is leaning about 10 degrees to a seated occupant's right) - instead of walking the 70 feet over to her neighbor's house.

A neighbor, whom I might add, when he had no facitlities on his lot because of construction, used her bathroom with her gracious invitaiton and her insistence.

So could we all have been neighborly and said that my bathroom was open for anyone's use during any length of time that my 94 year old aunt's bathroom is unusable? We surely could have.

Was such an option even considered?

The law does not even allow it.

So when my former friend accuses me as a liberal of being in support (or even agreement with) "Big" government, I surely do not believe that government has all solutions for all problems - and why I refuse to vote for a Republican in 2011 (since 1999 actually) has nothing to do with my love of big government than my hatred of rank hypocrisy and unforgivable duplicity.

This is an example of DUMB government. We could have done this whole project for 1/5 of what's being spent - after all, this former plumber and electrian and amateur carpenter is unemployed - nevermind that the porta-jon is kind of a "we know better than your generosity"

What are the odds that a 94 year old woman is going to use a chemical toilet in the 94 degree heat of a sunny July day? I"m not sure I want anyone to answer a question that hopefully all would agree is a little silly to have asked in the first place.

She can use mine.

And so can the guys (or girls - woe to me that I might be presumptuously sexist) on the construction crew.

But we still have to have the porta jon, sitting on the edge of the driveway at some weird ten-degree list to starboard just to be safe.

Dumb government.

Do you tell someone you understand, or do they tell you?

Two blowups happened in my life in the last week, and they both had something in common.

Well, me, of course. But since people who think they're being objective will stop analyzing at that point and think they've figured everything out.

This post, this blog, is just that last gasp to suggest maybe they don't know as much as they are sure they do

and that may have some bearing on our situation.

"That you would uprate such a piece of shit diary tells me all I need to know about you"

"All you can do is argue and say I don't understand, and that I never will. I understand plenty. You pretty much hate me because I am content, you are not, and it's all about you. But I don't look down on you - that has to be you measuring yourself against others. You are the one that thinks you are a failure. Not me."


The first one is pretty simple: that a person can say they know "all that I need to know" about a person based on one comment/lack of condemnation of what they felt deserved to be condemned - that's the depth of their investment in knowing a person before judging them.

The second post was from a friend of 25 years ago. A relationship that was apparently so shallow that despite it's original importance had sheltered both of us to things that would not have allowed a friendship had either one of us known. The other guy, it seems, wants me to know that he has nothing to prove, he does not judge me (but I judge him) and to prove it, he has to tell me that our parting is all my doing because he did not judge anyone.

Focus please on just this one sentence:

All you can do is argue and say I don't understand, and that I never will. I understand plenty."

Can you name for me one situation in life where it's good enough to tell someone that you understand the subject at hand, and they take your claim at face value, that's good enough?

Do you tell your teachers/professors that you understand, or do you have to take a test to prove it to their satisfaction?

How about the Bureau of Motor Vehicles? Many people will tell you that they are great drivers and they KNOW all the rules, yet the BMV still makes you take the exam. They will deny you a license if you don't answer enough questions correctly, and the police reserve the right to pull you over and issue a fine or arrest you if you demonstrate your actual failure to understand.

But to my "friend", I tell him he doesn't understand what I'm telling him, and his answer is "I understand plenty".

Wow. My grades in college would have been so much better had I been able to get a deal like that.

But this person takes it one level further - his whole point is to tell me that he is my friend no matter what and that he has nothing to prove.

Am I the only one who thinks it's odd that a guy who has nothing to prove went a long way to prove he wasn't wrong; and that if what he was trying to prove was that he is my friend and he doesn't have a problem with my faults...

...did he not just take the time to point another one of them out to me?

2011/07/11

back to my cave. Don't open this door, I'll let you know if I'm coming out

http://www.dailykos.com/user/snafubar

Diaries published: 178
Comments posted: 12177 (6 days since last comment on Tue Jul 05, 2011 at 10:24 PM EDT)

Diary frequency: often
Comment frequency: frequent
Total Recommends: 3160
Total Comment Ratings: 29547

Most Recommended Diary: They're gone. I was close. I'm still curled up in a ball. (UPDATE), 492 comments, 436 recommends

People Following snafubar: 60

There's a little skull and crossbones where there used to be five bars out of five that measured "mojo"

Here's the comment I'd like to ask the blog moderators (or the one who created the algorithm that triggers the autoban)

When someone says

"That you would uprate a piece of shit diary like this tells me all I need to know about you"

That means someone else wrote a diary, it pissed a lot of people off, but I thought it made a valid point. Five others did; about 190 voted against it.

Now - regardless of what the subject of the diary was (it was about the use of the word "pussy" by men in locker rooms and whether or not it makes sense for women to go on crusades about sexism when that happens)

what is a more significant measure of why/how our society is coming apart

Men using "pussy" in the locker room to insult other men (by *gasp* comparing them to women) and ignoring that women take offense to it

or

A community so shallow that after five years, 12,000 comments, 192 essays/diaries, and 60 people "following" me

that a person's entire worth, character, contribution, or value to anyone can be determined by one or just a few comments on a blog.

If our society is that shallow

if all it takes to learn "all one needs to know" about another person

can be learned by having actually experienced so little of what constitutes them as an individual

perhaps I will be so bold to suggest that the shallowness is our bigger problem.

Simon and Garfunkel wrote a song in 1970 called "The Boxer"

I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/s/simon+and+garfunkel/#share

People go where they know they will like things. They avoid things they don't like. Surprisingly, they get the impression that things work pretty well and everybody gets along....until that moment when something rubs them the wrong way and they say

"HEY! That upsets me, we don't want that here"

Well, the other guy obviously did, so now it's a competition over who belongs and who doesn't.

This is not new, this is not unique

but if the answer is always to scatter off where we all see things the same way and build a fence to keep out anyone who doesn't

or make it easier to pick off anyone coming over the top

"community" is starting to lose it's meaning.

That I can be summarily judged a sexist - a person who denigrates, opposes, hinders, ridicules, belittles, or otherwise obstructs to a person just because of their gender - all because I say that the use of the word "pussy" does in itself NOT make me a sexist -

That some people do

may I suggest this may have some bearing on our problem.

I think we've lost the plot

I also told a story how the political left takes a lot of shit for their hysterial overreach on matters that DO have legitimacy; when the minutae is carried so far that somehow the legitimacy of the more important hunt is lost because too may people have been lost in the weeds on a red herring.

Someone who turns down a job candidate because he's a male and she's a female - that's a sexist

The kind of guy who says a woman is nothing more than a life support system for a cunt - that's sexist

the guy who says to become apoplectic because two guys in a locker room where no women were even close called each other "pussy" because - well, that seems to be what guys in locker rooms do -

both those guys may go home and treat their wives and daughters and mothers and bosses and employees with all due respect

And yet still people insist that from the conversation in the locker room, they know all they need to know

Someone who says that it's a fools errand to try to control people's language because it saps energy from other more legitimate sources of the problem

that's not a sexist.

So to dismiss the entire value of one person's contribution to the effort,

to say that such a simple and brief encounter tells one "all (they) need to know about you"

may I suggest that could be a bigger part of the larger problem.

People congregate because we have greater strength together than we have individually.

That the minute we gather we start sequestering ourselves again into smaller groups within the whole

and talking about people as "them" who only moments earlier were part of the "us" that was in league against the other "them"

well, when you meet a guy like me who has few friends and now spends most of his time alone no longer daring to make others

perhaps this example will

nah, who am I kidding. it won't mean a thing

That I do not hate women
that I have stood with them in their defense
that I have given to help them
worked to help them
on an individual basis as people who had as much need as I did and I recognized it

...and never have tried to exclude them merely because they were women

somehow I'm still a sexist because I think it's a fool's errand to go apeshit because some guy used the word "pussy" to describe -

who cares

it wasn't to a woman, it wasn't about a woman

but some woman who had no dog in the fight

was sure that there was a larger fight that needed fighting that day

and knew - without knowing anything else about me -

"all she needed to know about me"

from a dozen comments on one day about one diary

that made sense to enough people to send me on my way.

It's amazing I was able to keep all that a secret for five years, 192 diaries, 12,000 comments, with 60 followers in tow.

For those of you who know me, I have a story that I tell, and I made some overtures in this spirit during the pissing contest that ended in this banning,

you can find examples of this not only in psycology, sociology, history - or your local new outlet -

if a person who is NOT ostensibly a real example of some label he keeps getting slapped with
enough people slap that label on him over and over
enough people ignore him when he says that label is not enough to describe all that he is and what he's about

some day

some moment

some trigger is pulled inside that man (person)

and the words

"well, if I'm going to be taking all the shit for this thing that I don't believe I am,

regardless of how hard I'm trying to show that I am not this thing I am being labelled

I might as well start going out of my way and deliberately engaging in all those things that will surely get me labelled as this thing people are sure I am

and get some fucking mileage for all this grief I'm taking now."

...cross his mind.

My only real strength in this life, being the spiteful bastard I am, is to not become that which people assail me for being, just to prove they didn't get me.

That some people still bang their drum to gather a crowd and scream to them "THERE'S THE WITCH!"...

...to our sober and astute readers, is how people get pushed into places they had no intention of ever going

and why I have little sympathy and less forgiveness for those rubberneckers who slow down at a car crash and say

"Holy shit, look at that! Wow! I wonder how that happened?"

Don't bullshit yourself -

they don't care how it happened.

Because you know

that two miles earlier on that very same highway

only a short distance in time and space from that wicked and horrible wreck that "shocks" them

they were likely engaged in about five of the seven bad driving habits that led to the wreck that now has them stuck in traffic and going so slowly that they can see the mangled bodies bleeding in the mangled cars.

When a guy snaps

either homocide

suicide

or just plain "you're fired, we don't tolerate that"

all the people who think whatever it led to was just unacceptable and unforgivable

...five minutes earlier would have been the very same people who were arguing with that same person for 59 rounds...

...who drew a line somehow at round 60 and said that the OTHER guy had gone TOO far.

and so it goes.