Nobody cares.
Nobody cares what you think.
Nobody cares how you’re doing.
Then you die.
Category: Philosophicaliness
Aaaaand I’m back!
Hey kiddies. Long time no post. Seems I’ve sort of neglected this. I think at one point I had an audience of as many as 20 people. I’m pretty sure we’re back to zero now. A lot has happened. To all of us. When I started this blog it was many many years ago. I was married, I had two kids, and my wife was going slowly insane. We still don’t know exactly what is wrong with her, but I have a few amateur armchair suspicions. What’s important is after a long drawn out legal battle in a justice system that is skewed against dads and, in particular, atheists, I divorced my wife and eventually got residential custody of my kids. My kids went through hell and there was nothing I could do to stop it. They’re both grown adults now, and I think they turned out pretty well despite everything. And by everything I don’t just mean their mom. I made plenty of mistakes myself. The difference is that I own my mistakes. Anyway… rambling again.
Another impetus for this blog was the trauma of leaving a religious cult. Those folks fuck with your mind, and I spent a lot of years sorting through who I was and what I believed. As part of my recovery I took a class in Logic and Critical Thinking and it was the single best thing I ever did for myself, although it changed my life irreversibly. I’m now an atheist, a science enthusiast, and (by American standards) a crazy ass whacked out deranged libtard. That’s American for “I care about people I don’t know.”
I sorted through a lot of things on this platform. Actually, it was another platform and it’s been so long now I don’t even remember what it was. But it had an orange logo. I imported everything here. That’s probably about the time I lost the handful of followers my blog had at the time. Sometime around then Facebook and Twitter became the bright shiny new thing. I started tweeting. A lot. Don’t go looking for it, that account is gone. When Elon Musk went full on far right psycho I deleted the account. I don’t really have a social media presence left. Not as Dr. Cowboy anyway. But while I was doing the incessant tweeting thing, broadcasting every stupid thought that popped into my head out into the interwebs, I stopped blogging. I got married again. This time to someone with mental conditions that range in the two digit range (e.g. she was diagnosed with more than 10), none of which I knew about when I took those vows. So that was fun. I learned all about narcissistic personality disorder. And antisocial personality disorder. And a few others. I popped back in for one more blog post in 2019 in the middle of that shitstorm. I don’t think anybody read it. I doubt anybody will read this either. The blog has always been for me, with the rest of you invited along for the journey. I’ll probably keep exploring all of those topics, because the trauma from all of them still lives in my head. I’m still working through all of it. And now, we have orange Jesus in the white house. And every trigger I’ve accumulated over the last 2 1/2 decades is being triggered again. We’re gonna explore that too. I’m gonna have a hard time getting through the insanity that’s coming our way. Hopefully we can get through this together.
We’ve had quite the journey, y’all. Where do we go from here? Well, the country decided to elect an over the top narcissist with apparent dementia and a felony fraud conviction and a history of insurrection and stealing classified documents. Because why the fuck not? What’s the worst that can happen? Well we’re finding out day by day. We’re only a couple of weeks into the second term and the shit is flying fast and furious. I’m not going to be able to keep up with that, so don’t look to me as a news source. Plenty of others are doing that already. I’m here for us regular types who didn’t drink the orange koolaid, and are trying to keep our sanity intact while deciding what to do. When we studied Nazi Germany in school some of us wondered, or perhaps even asked by the teacher, “what would you do if you lived through that?” I think we can say for certain now that most of us gave a bullshit answer. Most of us should have said “not a goddamned fucking thing.” I don’t want to be that one. I intend to resist. I intend to keep people safe. I intend to be the person who hid Anne Frank, not the one who turned her in. Although sometimes I wonder if I’m not in danger of being Anne Frank. Let’s hope it doesn’t get there, but folks, we can’t assume anything yet. We’ve got at least four years of this shit to get through. One hopes our form of government holds long enough to retain elections for that long. That’s not what happened in Germany. Or Russia. I mean, technically Russia still has elections, but… c’mon. We all know, Vladimir.
So once again I need this outlet. I have no idea where we’re going. Let’s start finding out.
Healing From Narcissistic Emotional Abuse For Men Part 1
Dearly beloved are you listening?
It’s 5 in the morning. I’m not up early, I’m up late. Once again, I can’t sleep. Some nights I sleep like a rock. Some nights I wake up every hour or two. Some nights I don’t sleep at all. This is one of the latter kind. My mind just won’t shut the fuck up. It just won’t.
Chances are you found your way to the post because drumroll you’ve recently been in an emotionally abusive relationship with a narcissist (why is that word so fucking hard to spell?). I’m so smart, see how I guessed that? Surprise, I have too. That’s why (surprise!) I’m writing this post.
You may have noticed something oddly different about this post than other posts, links, books, YouTube videos, etc. etc. that you may have run across in your search for emotional validation: the words FOR MEN. Odds are, you’re not. In my journey that’s the first thing I discovered, almost all victims of emotional abuse by narcissists are women. This can be a little problematic if, say, you’re not a woman. I’ve already become fairly frustrated with my search for self-actualization. The first audiobook I purchased on the subject was late last night. I downloaded it and set it to play on my tablet. Being aware of the skewed gender distribution of narcissists and their victims, I tried to find one that was at least somewhat gender neutral. That’s not all that easy. So many have taglines along the lines of “is he a narcissist?” “thousands of women have found hope in this book” etc. etc. I thought I found one so I dropped some much needed cash on my recovery and started listening with the intention of drifting off to sleep after finding some comfort. I quickly became frustrated as the book talked about narcissists and their victims in VERY gender specific terms. Rather than finding healing I’m finding my self-doubt growing. I’m a man. Am I really the narcissist? Was she right all along? I’m I really to blame for everything?
So finding my anxiety heightened rather than assuaged I went back to searching for books that were, perhaps, gender specific but in the other direction: Empathetic men victimized by narcissistic women.
Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Bupkis.
Apparently society is simply under the impression that all men are the same and none of us have any kind of emotional vulnerability. I’m here to tell you that’s bullshit. Highly sensitive men might be a minority but we definitely exist. I know a few who just happen to not be me. So here I am, sleep deprived, anxiety plagued, depressed, and in desperate need of attention to hygiene to say “This shit happened to me too.” That is not to say that if you’re a woman you might not find some value in my writing, but I’m writing this for me. This blog has always been by me for me. I’ve never had a large following at any point. I think at one point I might have had twenty or so regular readers, but in checking my blog stats this morning on my blog that hasn’t seen a post since 2016, my blog had a grand total of two hits for 2019. I’m pretty sure they were both me. That said, if this helps you nobody will be more excited than me. Follow along. Maybe we’ll find some peace together. First, a little background on me, just in case anybody who isn’t me reads it.
The space that’s in between insane and insecure
First of all, I use profanity. A lot. If that makes you uncomfortable, you’re on the wrong blog.
My name is Dr. David Grey. No it isn’t, but that’s not important. It is to you. What am I a doctor of? I’m not. It’s a fake degree. I printed it off from an unaccredited diploma mill years ago to make a point about how worthless degrees from unaccredited institutions are. I know a few “experts” spreading around woo (a term that means bullshit) with “Dr.” prefixed on their name. A little digging shows that their degrees are worth about as much as mine. Hence, I’m a doctor. Strictly speaking my doctorate is intelligent design or some bullshit like that. If I find the PDF with my degree I’ll be happy to post it.
I’m a musician. That’s the label that describes me the most completely. Music is my love, my sanctuary, my therapy, and my life’s blood. I started playing the violin at age four. I was concertmaster for all of junior high and always in some kind of titled seat through high school. I won the solo competition with my high school orchestra, played in the the local youth symphony, and went to music camp every summer. I went to college on a double scholarship for violin and French horn (picked that one up in 6th grade or so). My college professor destroyed my wrists and ended what was once a promising career. I washed out of college shortly after.
I got married in my early 20s. I fucked around and did a lot of nothing. I went to community college half assed and worked crap jobs. This went until around age 29 or so when my wife got involved in a religious cult. I was indoctrinated shortly after. After a bit more than a year of psychological abuse I left the cult. I went through that clusterfuck by myself. Nobody knew what I was going through, and my wife was still in the cult. I pulled myself through that crap alone, and I’m proud of that. It was fucking hell.
About a year later, as I was getting ready to divorce my wife because I had no intention of having children with her and having them be raised in a religious cult, my wife surprisingly left. Excited at what looked like the restoration of my marriage, we had our first child some nine months later. i cleaned my act up and got a computer science degree and began working as a software developer. Far from being the restoration of my marriage, it proved to be it’s undoing.
My first wife apparently succumbed to some form of mental illness. It was difficult to spot at first, but ten years later it was undeniable. I’m not a psychiatrist so I can’t say what it is with any certainty, but from what I’ve learned it bears a lot of resemblance to schizophrenia. Who knows. The short version is ugly divorce, custody battle, lots of mental trauma for all involved, financial ruin, foreclosure, therapy, and eventually me and my boys were more or less ok. She ran off to Texas or something. Nobody knows where she is now.
Somewhere along the line, circa 2008 or so, I realized I was an atheist. Religion had done so much damage to me that not only that but I had a really long angry period where I was a full on anti-theist. A lot of that is chronicled on this blog. Then, blogwise, I disappeared around 2016 or so. The parts you missed were, after a few more bad relationships, I thought I found the one™. There’s no explaining this. For some reason I became enamored of a highly religious Republican voting abortion protesting blonde bombshell. We married last June, she left me about a week ago. And now we’re all caught up.
Nobody’s perfect and I stand accused
I’m not going to tell my story in chronological order. I don’t need to, I lived it. I’m going to go over the parts that matter in the order my stream of consciousness puts them on this page. Like most people I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to put the pieces together to figure out what happened. So little of it made sense. No conflict is entirely one sided. I know I fucked a lot of things up. The narcissist always tries to put the blame on you, and that’s what she’s been doing. It’s a form of gaslighting, and it’s painfully effective if you’re highly sensitive. This is where a lot of the pain and confusion for me comes from: the inclination I already had to blame myself for everything. When the other side is also blaming you for everything, it spirals out of control.
Since things really went to shit about a month ago, a lot of people who have known her a lot longer than I have have reached out to me and given me a lot of info I didn’t have before; things that really would have been helpful to know before saying “I do”. But last night a good friend said a word to me that really kind of hit everything home for me: Narcissist.
It hadn’t really occurred to me that she was a narcissist, but with that word locked in place so much of it begins to make sense now. The thought had crossed my mind, and I even looked up the symptoms of narcissism previously, but she didn’t seem to match enough of the signs to convince me. A total lack of empathy sure, but not all the signs matched in my mind. So I kept that to myself and filed away. I never said the N-word to anybody, but unsolicited they said it to me last night. Once I knew that other people saw her a narcissistic, I knew I wasn’t crazy for thinking that. The unbearable pain, the out of control crying, the binge drinking, the chain smoking, all signs of the emotional abuse I’ve gone through. I hesitate at that word, abuse. It makes it sound so intentional. I don’t think it was. I don’t think she knows why she behaves the way she does. Certainly if you approach her with concerns about her behavior it immediately sets her into a rage. It’s like there’s some kind of demon deep inside her head that hits the panic button as soon as anybody tries to help her.
I think I’m going to wrap this post up at this point. It’s obviously going to be a multi-parter. I have no idea how many parts there will be. This is a journey. This is about me trying to find my way back to normalcy, to learn to love myself again, to recover and function from the complete and total devastation I feel. Only in the last few days have I even been able to function at all. Every day I’m a little more productive. I’m getting there.
This? Again?
So this happened:
(I’m having a little trouble with the link in my blogging software, so I’ll post it here just in case it goes horribly wrong).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNl_1gQqrWI
First of all, I like Russell Brand. I do. I don’t exactly think he’s any kind of bastion of intellectual thought, but his heart is in the right place. But here, like with Ben Affleck, he’s adopted this mainline liberal idea that Muslims are this big giant group of peace loving hippies and there’s just a couple of bad apples who run around blowing up buildings trying to make Islam look bad.
So I find my self in the uncomfortable position of actually agreeing with Fox News. Yes, they got something right. There are scores of human rights abuses in Islamic countries ruled by Sharia Law. However, Fox is right but for the wrong reasons, and they get the point wrong as usual.
You see, Fox has an agenda. They target a Christian conservative audience and play on their fears to increase viewership. To a conservative Christians, Muslims are fuckin’ scary. We sort of ran out of bad guys with the fall of the (godless communist) Soviet Union in the early 90s, and 9/11 gave us a new one: Muslims!
In this case, the facts fit Fox’s narrative beautifully, as long as you don’t back up and look at the bigger picture. The Quran does endorse subjugation of women. It does call for killing infidels and apostates. Fox says that you can be killed for “sins” but it’s actually a bit more specific than that. Only certain sins will merit the death penalty, and leaving Islam is right up there. I can only assume they dodge that one because *gasp!* it makes atheists look persecuted. Fox hates atheists too, so they can’t go there. But back up a little, take the 40,000 foot view, and you can say that Islam commands death for the commission of (certain) sins. See how easy it was to twist that little fact to fit a narrative?
So lets take Brand’s claims into account here. There’s 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, and the vast majority of them aren’t running around blowing up buildings. Yes, true. But Fox was actually talking about human rights abuses, and these occur at an alarming rate in many Muslim theocracies. The problem, of course, is more complex than anything that can be summed up in a simple sentence and plastered on a picture of Morgan Freeman for circulation around the internet.
What Fox is missing is the fact that any criticism that can be leveled against Islam can also (and should be) leveled against Christianity. Christianity had Theocracies with human rights abuses a while ago too. We call them the dark ages now. Islam is currently in it’s own dark age.
You see, the problem isn’t Islam, it’s Theocracies. It’s following bronze age religions in the information age. But you have to love the irony of Fox News decrying a Theocracy, considering how much time they’ve spent suggesting that we become one.
Liberal Pseudo-Intellectual Arrogant Shitheads
In case you’ve been living under a rock, you may have missed the little spat between Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Reza Aslan, and Ben Affleck.
That’s right. Ben. Fucking. Affleck. Because his opinion is somehow important.
So let’s recap to bring you up to speed.
First this happened:
Just in case you didn’t take the time to watch those (or they’ve been taken down since I posted this) I’ll recap:
Bill Maher: You liberals who defend Islam suck. Islam is bad. Rih rih bad. They kill you n shit. Liberals who don’t speak out against the violence of Islam suck.
Reza Aslan: Oh no you didn’t! Bill Maher is wrong because he’s dumb. I’m smart. Listen to me. Islam fucking rulez, beeches! BTW I’m smart and he’s dumb!
(Spoiler alert: that’s called the ad hominem attack and is a way for pseudo-intellectual assholes to assert their superiority without actually making good factually based arguments. I kinda hate that shit)
Bill Maher: Huh? Islam kills you n shit for not being Islamic. Or leaving Islam. Or drawing Muhammad. Or basically doing fucking anything that isn’t sucking Allah’s imaginary motherfucking dick.
Ben Affleck: Whatever. Islam is awesome.
Bill Maher: WTF? Here’s some facts. They’ll fucking kill your ass!
Ben Affleck: Whatever you motherfucking racist!
Bill Maher: Racist? Islam isn’t a race, it’s a motherfucking religion, bitches! WTF are you talking about?
Ben Affleck: I’m right because I’M MOTHERFUCKING BEN AFFLECK BITCHES!
Bill Maher: But… but… facts?
Ben Affleck: FUCK YOUR FACTS BITCH! I’M MOTHERFUCKING BEN FUCKING AFFLECK AND I SAY ISLAM IS FUCKING GREAT N SHIT! MEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!! COME SUCK IT BITCH!!!!
Sam Harris: Ok, I’ll concede this one point to you…
Ben Affleck: FUCK YOU BITCH! WHO’S YOU DADDY?!? ME!!! I’M YOU MOTHERFUCKING DADDY! CUZ I DID UR MOM! LIKE THIS!! OOOOOH YEAH!!! SMACK THAT ASS BABY!!! WOOOOO!!!!!
Okay, full disclosure: I’m drinking while I write this, so my synopsis of the exchange might be slightly off, but I think I got the general gist of it. Basically I’m the Mr. Cranky of the liberal atheist blogosphere. Except people actually read Mr. Cranky.
So as you might have surmised, I have a slight problem with this. I’ll give you the right answer in advance: Bill Maher was right.
It goes like this. When you say “black people be like” you’re a fucking racist. There’s no African-American manual where you can glean what they think from. They’re people. If you generalize them, you’re a bigot. End of story.
When you say “White people be like” you’re the same fucking thing. To get to the point slightly faster, you can put any race or gender in there and you get the same thing. Bigot.
But religion is different. When you criticize Christians, they have a manual. They’re more than happy to wave it in your face and quote from it. They get pissed off if you know more about it than they do and point out the bad parts. But some of them actually read the bad parts, and dutifully try to apply them. We call those assholes extremists. Islam is the same. You’ll find plenty of “moderate” Muslims who don’t go killing atheists or Christians or former Muslims or beheading cartoonists or filmmakers who have the audacity to tell the stories of abuse from the Muslim world, but they’re not exactly speaking up either. And the bad shit is in their holy book too, same as the extremists. So you can paint Muslims and Christians (and most other religions) with the same brush, because they actually have a source they’re getting this shit from. And we can go right to the source and criticize it, and we should, because there’s a lot of bad shit in there.
You see, the difference is that religion is an idea, not a set of physical attributes. And as an idea, like any human idea, it is open to criticism. And it should be. Religion is a terrible idea.
I’ve never identified myself as a liberal, even though most people consider me to be so. Most of my political leanings are to the left, because I believe that people are more important than things. That’s right, you don’t have to have a holy book to think morally like that. But these pseudo intellectual shitheads like Affleck and Aslan piss me right the fuck off. They’re liberal because they think it’s cool. They don’t give a fuck about facts, they take whatever they think they’re supposed to think and run with it.
Fuck that shit. Islam deserves criticism.
9/11/2013
It’s become a little bit of a tradition, I suppose, for me to evaluate where we are every September 11th. I thought about this earlier today and realized, I don’t have anything very profound to say this year, the 12th anniversary of the worst attack the United States has suffered in my lifetime. Not that anything I ever say is all that profound.
However…
The day before, President Barack Hussein Obama addressed the nation on the current Syrian crisis. I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about this.
The Syrian crisis is complex (as any international conflict is) and I’ve only taken a cursory look into what’s happening. The only thing the government and the media have really focused on is the fact that the Syrian government appears to have used sarin gas in a suburban area killing something on the order of 1400 Syrian citizens. I don’t know all that much about sarin gas either, but it’s apparently quite nasty. Foaming at the mouth, bleeding from places you should never bleed from, altogether a quite horrible death.
The United Nations has outlawed the use of chemical weapons and for very good reason. Some have made the argument that dead is dead and we don’t get that worked up when thousands are hacked to death with machetes. We should, in fairness, but chemical weapons are especially nasty.
But strangely the U.N. seems reluctant to enforce this law when it comes to Syria. The reasons for this, too, are complex. Syria is a Russian ally, and Russia is boycotting any action to be taken as a result. It seems odd to me that Russia is single handedly powerful enough to prevent the U.N. from enforcing international law, but I don’t pretend to understand all of the complexities here.
Long story short, since this isn’t really a post about Syria, is that John Kerry seems to have accidently stumbled across a possible diplomatic solution, and Russia and Syria so far seem to be on board. I hope that pans out, but I find it slightly amusing that John Kerry, former Vietnam war protester, who in 2013 seems to be all for bombing the fuck out of Syria, accidentally found a possible peaceful solution. Again, this isn’t really about Syria, so I’ll leave it at that.
The reason I bring up Syria, and more importantly president Obama’s speech, is because as I was watching it, I was uncomfortably reminded of President Bush and his administration’s arguments for the invasion of Iraq. We all know how that turned out.
As I said, the Syrian conflict is complex. The Syrian government seems to be tyrannical and despotic, but from what little I’ve learned about the rebels, we really don’t want those assholes to replace this guy. I read a story just yesterday about how one of their leaders shut a boy in the face in front of his mother for supposedly blaspheming Mohammed. By the way, if any Syrian rebel leaders happen to be reading this FUCK MOHAMMED AND FUCK YOU YOU SICK FUCKERS. TAKE YOUR FUCKASS BLASPHEMY SENSITIVITIES AND STICK THEM SO FAR UP YOUR ASS IT COMES BACK OUT YOUR SHITTY EARS.
Sorry. That kind of shit pisses me off.
The point was, I hope history isn’t repeating itself. I hope we’ve learned something from the past 12 years. I feel for the Syrian people, but at some point we have stop going to war.
Goodbye, Mr. Ebert
Roger Ebert died today. I haven’t talked about him much, but in recent years he’s become a real inspiration for me. I knew he was sick, but I didn’t expect that we would lose him so soon.
I forget the exact article I read that keyed me into the fact that Roger Ebert was so much more than just a movie critic, but I began reading his blog. My favorite posts was the ones where he was not writing about movies, but pondering on our polarized political climate, gun violence, and other issues. I think one of his most powerful posts was one of his last, this one: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2013/03/a_shooting_in_harsh_park.html
He doesn’t posture, he doesn’t preach, he simply relates yet another senseless killing by gun related violence. The power of the post comes from the fact that it’s short, for the most part simply relates an incident most of us probably didn’t hear about, and most importantly the final paragraph. You can sense his frustration with humanity, almost defeat in his tone. There’s a world weariness that comes through. He sees this incident through a lens that most of us don’t. This is a story that should have made national news. It should have dominated headlines across the country for weeks. But it didn’t. It was lost in an onslaught of other, equally tragic, gun related murders that happen each and every day. We, as a society, as a people, as humans, should all be working together to find a solution, but we don’t. The only discussion that every happens is political posturing. One side shouts “guns don’t kill people, people kill people!” and the other side shouts “gun control now!” All any of us seem interested in is winning an argument, but in the meantime we continue to kill countless numbers of ourselves every single day.
Gun violence is a complex issue without a single simple solution, but we as a society seem incapable of having a serious honest discussion about it and implementing any kind of solutions at all. It kills one’s faith in humanity.
Gun control is almost certainly part of the solution. What the second amendment actually says aside, I don’t think it’s necessary to ban all weapons, but there is no reason that average citizens in a civilized society need assault weapons designed for combat. An AR-15 has one purpose and one purpose alone, to kill lots of people quickly. It is only being used properly when being used to kill lots of people quickly. Whatever else my be true of the Sandy Hook killer or the Colorado movie killer, they were using their weapons exactly as they were meant to be used. There is no justification for weapons of this sort to be made available to the general public.
But there are so many other factors that factor in to the issue. Poverty, poor education, and economic inequality are all factors that are rectifiable, but we can’t have honest discussions about these issues either.
In short, I share his frustration when watching Americans posture and shout and sling old tired memes around rather than trying to find a way to make life better for anybody. I identified with the man. More than I even knew. Michael Shermer reposted this article written by Ebert then I had never read before:
http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/
I didn’t know he was an atheist. It honestly never occurred to me to wonder. He didn’t blog about religion much. He was simply Roger Ebert, human being, supporter of the philosophy of Kindness. I respected and identified with him without even knowing that he was religion-free just like me.
That’s how it ought to be for all of us.
I will miss Roger Ebert. I will miss his thought-provoking insights, his desire to see humanity rise above itself, his powerful intellect. And yes, dear sister, those times when we were kids and would all sit down and watch Siskel and Ebert review the new movies together.
Good-bye, Mr. Ebert. The world was made better for having had you in it.
Masks
We all wear masks. Each of us. You’re not quite the same person you are when you’re hanging with your old college friends that you are when you’re sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with your parents. We play roles.
Some of us are better at it than others. Some of us go further than others.
There’s a raging internal torment going on inside me. There might be one going on inside of you too. I don’t know. Why don’t I know? Because you hide it.
Just.
Like.
Me.
My masks are well defined. I’ve even given some of them names. I’ve taken this to an art form. As I arrive at work in the morning while my internal monologue is screaming at me about how pointless everything is, how empty and rancid my life has become, a friend texts me to ask how I’m doing. I look down at the screen and imagine replying
“I’m desolate. Hollow. Empty. Hopeless. I want nothing more than to die right the fuck now. How are you?”
I look over at Antonio and say “I think you had better take this.”
He says
“I’m wonderful, darling. How is my favorite beautiful princess this morning?”
Send.
Cheesy. Over the top. Flirting so obvious that it can’t possibly be taken seriously. That is Antonio. He comes in handy for certain people. The reply comes back “You’re in a good mood this morning!” No, I’m not. But I want you to believe I am, and I succeed.
I studied acting when I was younger. I was good at it. I think I was good at it for a reason. In method acting, you create a character in your mind. A living, breathing, thinking person that lives in your mind. This character is part your invention, and part you. You put it on like a costume, and you become the role. You don’t just say the lines in a convincing manner, you literally become the character you’re portraying. Their thoughts become your thoughts. Like an add-on module to yourself.
I have several of these characters. They don’t have lines in a play to read. They’re characters that I’ve created over the years to get me through day by day. People who can pretend to be normal for me so that nobody sees the empty pathetic shell behind the curtain, only the great and powerful Oz.
Heath Ledger died from this, by the way. He was so disturbed by the character of the Joker he had created that he overdosed while trying to cope with it.
Sometimes the masks come instinctively. I don’t even notice myself putting them on. I can’t help it sometimes. It’s like I can’t interact with any other humans without finding a role to play. Like my entire life is one long bizarre stage play with a multitude of roles all played by me.
But there’s one problem: sometimes, when nobody else is around and I have no role to play, when it’s just me, I wonder if there’s a real me under there, if any of these characters I play are in any way comprised of my real personality. If I have a real personality…
The answer: I don’t know.
I think your plan backfired…
Ok, I wasn’t necessarily going to write another blog post today, but I went to go look at my stats since I haven’t really been caring for the blog for a while, and I noticed something weird, the page hits were really high.
Even stranger, a lot of the hits seemed to come from here: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/01/11/how-bout-we-stop-this-trend-in-its-tracks/
Um… That’s PZ Myers’s blog…. WTF is he doing linking to me? To, of all things, this blog post: http://taocowboy.blogspot.com/2007/11/reflections-on-devconnections-part-i_10.html
Well, as it turns out, the blog post was about booth babes at tech trade shows and a policy at the most recent Skepticon that discouraged booth babes. So I checked it out. I kind of stopped reading PZ a while ago, There’s a very negative vibe over at his blog and he seems to attract a very hateful crowd. I don’t give people a pass for being asshats just because they’re atheists. If you want to have a rational discussion with me, I’m game. But f your response to dissenting opinions is to be an asshat, I have better things to do with my time. That’s why I don’t spend any time reading PZ anymore. He and his readers seem to thrive on the very vitriol we insist to theists that we don’t spew. I want no part of that, so I choose not to participate. Don’t get me wrong, PZ is brilliant and I enjoy reading his explanations of science, but the vitriol gets old. It’s the same reason I decided not to participate in Atheism+ but rather dropped out of the atheist community. I have another blog post on that topic in the works, but the short version is Jenny McCreight came to Kansas City and changed my mind about Atheism+, but there’s still a lot of vitriol in that community, so while I agree with the virtues they espouse, I choose not to participate.
So back to the blog post: PZ didn’t link to me (ah damn). But one of the commenters did. Round about comment #140 a commenter with the unlikely handle of nightshadequeen posted a link to my post from five years ago about my trip to DevConnections and my experience with booth babes. The link read “*sigh*” and then she posted a large excerpt from the post without comment (without my permission, I might add. That content is technically copyrighted, but never mind that).
The interesting thing about this is that as far as I can tell nobody responded to her (I assume it’s a “her”), but quite a few people followed the link. That much I can tell from my blog stats.
My first thought is “how long did you scour Google looking for that? Couldn’t come up with something original on your own to say?”
My second thought is that she completely and totally entirely missed the point. Had she been inside a barn with a shotgun she would have missed the inside and blown her own foot off. I’m not condoning booth babes. Had she actually bothered to read the post instead of just copy/pasting it into a comment to get a little attention from the Pharyngula crowd, she might have gotten the point. She strikes me as somebody looking for a misogynist to fight. I suggest she contact my ex wife if she wants to pick a fight with somebody setting the women’s movement back by decades. Or centuries. Millennia, more accurately.
The point to the post was to chronicle my experience and my thoughts at the convention. I didn’t hire the booth babes, and they’re not why I went. It was an experience. I expounded on the fact that these vendors that do that sort of thing do so purposefully, and it works. It’s a normal biological reaction for a male to be attracted to an attractive woman of the variety that you normally only see on TV and to go butt-ass stupid around them, and they played me beautifully like a violin. It doesn’t help that I was married to a psycho bitch at the time and that I’m a geek who doesn’t normally attract attractive women. Honestly I wasn’t offering any opinion for or against booth babes, but I would be just as happy at a convention without them. The vendors, however, would not. It was also FIVE FUCKING YEARS AGO. My views have changed so dramatically since that post it’s not even funny. I didn’t even consider myself an atheist at the time.
So the total net result here is that my stats shot way up and I think I picked up a few new readers. Not, methinks, what nightshadequeen was aiming for. I find this kind of funny. It’s nice to have a few new visitors but the regulars at Pharyngula aren’t necessarily the kind of readership I was looking for. I’m not entirely sure I want to get noticed by those people. I like the open comment policy I’ve had so far and would had to have to get my own “ban hammer” as they like to go on about over there.
O Hai! I haz a blog!
I’ve been mysteriously absent from my blog lately. Well, not so mysterious. Many of you know I fight depression. That’s pretty much the explanation in a nutshell. I’ve fought it for years. I was on medicine for it earlier that ironically made my mental state more unstable than I was without it. The rest of 2012 got kind of fucked up for me. I had my heart broken in a way I don’t think it ever has been, not even that girl from high school compares. I went in to kind of a downward spiral. I’m still at the bottom of that. I’d like to say I’m clawing my way back up, but I’m not. Not yet. I’ve driven nearly all of my real life friends away leaving me alone with my cats. Yep, I’m the crazy cat lady now.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time on Twitter, and I’ve found a few like minded people there. It’s strange getting support and encouragement from people I’ve never actually met when my real life friends all ran away. Welcome to the 21st century. Maybe this is better. When I was in high school there was no internet. We didn’t have cell phones. There was no mechanism for people having similar experiences to connect. Today there is. While I’m concerned that we seem to be spending less time actually connecting in person these days, I’m not so sure this is all bad. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It is what it is.
I’m still having dreams about my ex girlfriend. It’s like I’m tapped in to some strange alternate reality where we never broke up and we’re happy together. Deliriously happy. I hate those dreams, because I wake up from them. They make real life seem like a nightmare. I wish I could stop having them. I have a few theories about why I’m still hung up on her, and why I fucked it up in the first place, but I’ll save those for another blog post. I intend to start writing here again some more. I apparently completely missed January.
Hello February. Fuck you, people who blew me off then expect me to write “Happy Birthday” on your Facebook page. You can suck it.
Another Idiot with a Blog 