Things that Fall Apart and Shit that Sticks

Posted on December 15, 2002 in Anger Depression

Looking over my blogs of the night, I must conclude that I am following a very usual cycle that occurs when I get angry. Things fall apart, the center doesn’t hold.

To be truthful, I’ve enjoyed writing my rants about Job and about the Orange County Justice system. They’re things that I can write about safely. What I am having trouble writing about might be called mysteries: I have no idea of the full measure of what is happening and I dread cabals.

Not every paranoid hallucinates or fears for no good cause. I’ve worked hard over the years to curb my worst excesses. But, from time to time, I’ve discovered petty confederacies which have, I dare say, made it an issue to undercut me. My anger sometimes caused me to fall apart. Sometimes I preserved my integrity and cool. Here’s a few examples:

• I haven’t spoken about this in years, but I had an altercation with most of the people in alt.folklore.urban, very aptly abbreviated AFU. A young woman posted asking about a folklore assignment. They told her to go to the fucking library. I said it was bad advice that they were giving. In folklore assignments, you’re not supposed to gather your material from books but from living people. I was called a know-it-all and a homophobe by people whose main purpose in being in the group was belittling the intelligence of others and character assassination. Most of you readers know where I stand. Things degenerated. I lost it. To cut my losses, I left the group, even though a couple of people wanted me to stay and fight. No thanks, I said.
  
  Here’s where things got weird: First, I was harrassed for nearly a year on a completely separate folklore list. Though the moderator sympathized and wanted me there, participating, he would not take a stand against personal attacks on the list. Second, I ran into someone who ran an urban legends list that I thought sounded fair. His idea of fairness was that I join the list but not talk because it would upset the others. I refused. The list goes on without me. I have no pretense of things collapsing without me. Third and strangest of all, I received — quite by accident — a note from one of these clowns who had seen a posting of mine on another group. “It is back”, he informed his friends. I wrote back and informed him that I was not an It. He told me that we could settle it by not writing to one another any more. Fine with me, but ever after when I have posted anything to the abUSEnet, I have suspected — possibly with, possibly without reason — that the AFU secret police are watching what I say. I’m saying my say now mostly to clear this demon out of my mind. There’s been enough public silence on my part about it.
  
  
  
• Strange conspiracy number two. I was a god of a MUSH. I had to fire a staff member because he wasn’t doing his job. For one thing, he was holding back another player’s special roleplay application (VASpider would understand this) because he feared that the guy was after his girl. We had an argument. I laid out my problems with him. No matter what I said, he told me that I was being vague (another one my friends will know is laughable) and that he wanted “constructive criticism”. When his girlfriend paged me and launched into my being cruel to this fool, I fired him. I wasn’t going to put up with that. To abbreviate the story considerably, after the firing and several reforms that included that no one could be fired by me alone (instigated by me as a check against my temper), I discovered that a purported log of things that I had said about others was floating around. I never got to see the log, so I can’t tell you if I said the things. The circulator? The guy I fired. A regular Linda Tripp. He and his girlfriend (who was making him her fourth husband) said there was proof that I couldn’t get along with people. For some reason, they wanted to take over the Mush that I had literally written myself. They failed. We held an election for a player mediator. The first one was a total failure because he could not stand up against his friends against other players. So the fired fellow ran. Out of 80 votes cast (we took every precaution to avoid multiple votes by anyone and I resolved to learn to live with whoever they chose), my detractor got 6 votes. He claimed that I rigged the election against him. He couldn’t fathom that he’d made a complete and utter ass of himself. I took it as a referendum on my policies and continued them, much to his chagrin, until I closed the MUSH and took the database with me. The descriptions of the town were mine. No one was getting those for free.
  
  
  
• I once got kicked by a wizard at someone’s Palace community for telling someone who was attacking me for being a phony pacifist because I was not a vegetarian that she was going on /ignore. That’s it. I talked back to the “wizard” for picking on the wrong person and got banned. Permanently. Shortly after, another Palace wizard told me that he’d been approached by a committee to have me banned for good. He said he knew me better and that he told the people to fuck off. The Palace software people got involved and they told them to fuck off, too. I still wonder exactly who was in it and what was said in the backfield there.
  
  
  
• Now, a current suspicious affair is this meetup thing. The two people who showed were nice enough. When one met me, she apologized for not returning my email. I promised to put the picture right up and came home to the Great Glowhost Crash of November 2002 when I was out of touch for several days. Our chat had been amicable enough. I had a cold and repeated myself a bit incessantly. I didn’t insult anyone and I don’t recall any insults from their end. The other two who showed are self described blog pundits. One has a graduate degree in journalism and the other is a lawyer. When I came back from e-exile, I noticed that these people were ignoring me, not reciprocating my links to them, answering comments or email, etc. I finally wrote and asked what have I done? No answer. With my past history of nasty secrets about me, I’m suspicious. I’m thinking “Now what the fuck is being said about me?”

You know what crap like this does to a person? Well, one effect is disorientation. Shit comes out of your mouth that is moved almost entirely by emotion. If it gets very bad, you can’t formulate what you want to say and what comes out is profane blah blah blah.

Another thing that happens is that you ask “What did I do?” When you’re like me, you get obsessed and roll such questions around in your head for hours and hours, days and days. I’m a sick man, I admit it. I’ve got this disease called depression and I can get thrown off my equillibrium by a concerted attack. Having been raised Catholic and having actually taken what the nuns said to heart, I do a lot of interior self examination. I’m not perfect. If there is a God, I am probably in for a stint in Purgatory. If He exists and He sends me to Hell, well, it only goes to prove that he’s a real jerk as I’ve been saying these last few days. But do they do this self examination? I’ve sometimes seen that the answer is “no”. They enjoy the fact that I worry about myself and, like a small furry animal in the hands of a teenaged George W. Bush, they flay me alive and toast me over the fire they’ve made. Or, should I say? — the fire that I have made.

Third, it has made me very cynical about groups on the Net, whether they’re populated by academics, young adults, or teenagers. Groups never take the criticism of an “outsider” seriously. They kill messengers as a routine.

I’ve tried to console myself, reciting Jonathan Swift’s line about the “Confederacy of Dunces” to myself. Except I don’t believe that I’m a man of genius. I’m a domestic parasite who has a lot of time to think and to write. I need Effexor and xanax to get through periods of crisis. And now that I have reviewed all these miseries of mine, I don’t feel a clearing of the air. I’m watching, waiting for the next wacko to misinterpret me, to charge me falsely, or pick up a vendetta against me. Or for a person, who is mostly reasonable, to take a disliking to me and never explain why. I hate information voids.

Since the earlier of these events, a few have experienced a side of me that few see: a wrathful side which, when it detects the slightest hint of someone who will be just like these others, slices, dices, and packages them in a box marked “BioHazard” so that they are clear, damned clear, that I never ever want to deal with them again.

You’re supposed to forget bad things that happened to you, to not hold grudges. I’ve tried with varying success. The only clear victory that I have had over all these and others like them is that they haven’t driven me to suicide. I’ve survived them to be here today, to tell you my story.

I wonder: is telling it a symptom of clinging to or releasing a grudge?

It hurts to tell it. And it hurts to keep it in. And in my telling here, there’s so much I have left out. And I have to concede the power of the argument that states “Well, Joel, this is your version of events, the story you wrote to explain these things so you can keep going. You’re being your own propagandist.” With that, they dismiss me. But why can’t I dismiss them? Why do I take these things so much to heart and ponder apologies. Disappearing is one way I have of granting them their hidden argument that I am no damned good and shouldn’t associate with people. Me, who has stayed married and faithful to the same woman since 1988.

Frankly, I don’t hallucinate. And the fact that I ache over what happens suggests to me that I am willing to introduce facts into my account that paint me in a not so very good light. Crazy though I may be, I don’t make things up except as works of fiction and I work very hard not to lie to myself. Mostly I keep my silence. I won’t even warn a friend if they are associating with one of my ardent detractors. I learned a long time ago that it is possible for someone to get on with two people who hate each other. I’ve done it. Why don’t they try applying it to themselves?

Most of the people who claim to be neutral aren’t, me included. I won’t lie to you and call myself above petty feuds, etc. like some bloggers do. I won’t say that I’ve been an angel. I treat people well who treat me well and, as my good friends know, I won’t hold back a criticism. The best of you love me anyways. Thank you.

Now: I must get some sleep and let these demons fly at the light. I’m certain this post is full of signs of mental illness. But I think, if others were as honest as I have been, they’d show plenty of signs themselves. The sickest out there are those who think they are not sick. I’d end this with “You know who you are,” but frankly, I don’t think you realize.

I’m sorry. This is too much like me. Disjointed, disorganized, and making sense without coming to a cohesive whole. It’s me and it’s not me. I wish — hell, I don’t know what to wish for except to survive and accomplish things that are good even if the whole world hates me.

Wasn’t Nixon like that, though?

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I’ll write more about some of these things over the next few days. It will clear my polluted conscience if nothing else.