BLOCKHEADS: THE (UN)FRIEND…

I hurt someone’s feelings on FACEBOOK, a few days ago, through the reckless expression of an opinion, based on that time honored concept, contempt prior to investigation. I have indulged in this before in my review of STAR WARS movies and the like, dismayed, bemused, and amused in equal measure at the yea or nay ecstasies of passion invested in that nonsense by people capable of child bearing, using money and voting.

I forgot Stephen Sondheim’s dictum to only speak ill of the dead, because the dead can’t defend themselves and you can’t hurt their feelings.

Having been on the receiving end of such treatment, it would be lovely to congratulate myself for knowing better, and being better, but no. Not here. Not that day. Restraint of tongue, pen and keyboard were AWOL hereabouts, and I trampled the bounds of probity.

I regret hurting those feelings, and I regret not minding my own business. I have said this privately, and I now say it publicly. And to be very clear, those are the only regrets I have in this regard.

Again, only those two things.

Which is to say, to be clear, that the opinion expressed remains my opinion, but I should have shut the fuck up about the nonsensical drivel, unworthy of criticism, that I criticized. My ego got in the way, in its need to point out just how flat out dumbassed this material was in its description.

To quote a pal who will remain nameless, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making garbage for morons; piggies need their slop. But it’s maddening to have people claiming it’s high art.”

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to the discussion at hand, specifically the modern redefinition of friends, and of friendship, as we have become a culture that has digitally expanded its capacity for connection, while at the same time become isolated from anything identifiable, by me at any rate, as intimacy in those connections.

I fell into the trap that all too many have succumbed to before me, of believing both that I was safe behind my keyboard, and that because I believe something, I had a reason, a right, a need to share my opinion.

Fuck that. I should know better. And I promise here, that in the future, I will.

I am reminded here, in this regard, to what at the time seemed a curious exchange with someone, his name long lost, in regard to a post several years back. The post indicated that I had created an email address for the specific purpose of collecting, collating, and curating any anecdotes, heard or experienced, that might serve as springboards for a series I announced in that same post, HEY KIDS! COMICS!

The first response was that person I mention above, who, rather sniffily, dismissed the very idea of what I sketched out as the franchise of what would become three series and three trade paperbacks. He said, and I paraphrase, that he expected this comic book to be no more than a settling of scores on my part.

I have to assume that this fellow presumed, on his understanding and interpretation of my reputation, my character, my branding, if you will, that I am some sort of bitter, vengeance obsessed fuckwad who would carry a series of lifelong grudges into the pages of HEY KIDS! COMICS!

Needless to say, my feelings were hurt. And, for the first time, I unfriended someone, and blocked them, too. I have never needed my work to serve as a beard for my attitudes. Rather, I am not equipped with a politic filter, and tend to say what I mean. I don’t need to slip it into my work.

This has, of course, gotten me into hot water before, as noted above for a most recent example. At least, for now, it hasn’t gotten the shit kicked out of me in decades, but, as they say, there’s always tomorrow.

Finally, comically, not to say ironically, when I began to collect those anecdotes which were sent to that email address, all but a pitiful few were, not to pull any punches, a settling of scores.

So clearly, this fellow was onto something, just not in my case, but in the culture itself. He knew his way around the zeitgeist before I did…or maybe he was just indulging in that classic Psych 101 game of projection—that he was assuming I’d do what he’d do in the same circumstances.

Now, over the years since, I have blocked a number of people. Trying to dissuade me of the true meaning and murderous implications of the phrase “Globalize the Intifada!” and its attendant weaponizing of victimhood is a guarantee of a permanent residency in the Phantom Zone.

Of course, the majority of the bounced were trolls or troll adjacent asocial assholes, witless dipshits blessed with too much spare time and too little sense of decorum, who came on board my digital space and insulted me.

These insults ranged from the personal— “I don’t like his attitude and he isn’t nice!” to the professional— “I don’t like his work and he isn’t nice!” with all the usual banal bullshit, the modern equivalent of “I’m rubber you’re glue” nonsense, mistaking facetiousness for wit, that makes up the rugged terrain of no man’s land in between.

In the name of rigorous honesty, I will certainly cop to the fact that I am not, and have never been, nice. I have tried, certainly in the second half of my life, to be good, knowing as I do that, as Yoda said in an earlier draft of that screenplay, “Trying bullshit is.” It is unfortunate that, as we have devolved as a species, nice has come to be mistaken for and misrepresented as good, contributing to the delinquency of the culture at large.

This is completely understandable, of course, as euphemism has maimed our language in the name of protecting feelings, or, perhaps, to avoid offense, endowing what had once been simply descriptive as a newly anointed pejorative, too frequently wielded and imposed as a given by a detached class unfamiliar in any real way with those they seek to protect.

And this, along with the sense of entitlement that has metastasized via identitarianism, fed by algorithmic digital media that knows what you want to hear and believe, and panders to such ideology, has provided the passive aggressive with the tools to behave like bullies, too.

For all the complaints about bots, an alarming percentage of what is now taken by far too many as simple common sense is actually received opinions, concocted, and fed to a choir all too eager to be preached to by the sort of individual who can pull a notion out of their ass and brand it as a time-honored truth.

I have long ceased to regard the concept of “Influencers” as ridiculous as I once did, as I have come to understand the credulity, the fatuousness, the, you should pardon the expression, FOMO of too many of my fellow citizens who are in the thrall of this deceptively sinister aspect of modern life.

A discomfiting number of these people will believe anything…new terminology that seems to appear overnight from out of nowhere, belief systems that fly in the face of reason, misrepresentation of feelings as facts. Taking “A dream is a wish your heart makes” to a new height of mass delusion is a way of life for millions.

And in the name of getting ahead of your potential gotchas, both sides are victims of bullshit artists. One side’s bullshit simply seems more reasonable, and has carried the day, which, to be brutally honest, doesn’t surprise me in the least.

And, as ever, I digress. But only a little.

Of course, a lot of those who ended up in the cornfield led with the offense mandate. Now, I make a distinction between hurt feelings and offense, comparable to the gap that exists between guilt and shame.

My feelings are easily hurt. Very little offends me.

This dichotomy exists because, for me at least, feelings represent a specific personal affront, an attack on my being, while taking offense seems, again, to me, an arrogant presumption of representing a universal objection to an idea…an idea often fomented and promulgated by the influence of social media, as per above, taking an opinion as a given, floating an idea, weaving manipulative notions wearing the beard of common sense.

“All the right thinkers think this way. You should too.”

I’ve said it before, and frequently, and I’ll repeat it here for those of you who missed it the first few times, or perhaps simply weren’t paying attention. I hold a grudge like a blood stain on silk. I rarely forget a slight, and I rarely if ever forgive without that forgiveness being earned.

That said, beyond the occasionally passing schadenfreude, I don’t gloat over the misfortunes of others. Usually. Mostly. And that schadenfreude is always reserved for the misfortunes of shitheads I know personally. A bit granular a distinction, but a distinction nonetheless.

I was recently reminded of this, that gloat free state of mind and body, by a pal of mine—a man first encountered on Facebook, but now met in the flesh—who pointed me at a few posts on various digital platforms, from people who I have blocked.

The two unifying themes running through their posts were an assumption that I was, indeed gloating at the power wielded in this way, and two, that their blocking was somehow a badge of honor, having achieved some sort of misbegotten ‘gotcha” status—putting one over on the cranky old fuck, pissing him off to the point of blind rage, thus leading to blocking.

And, of course, gloating over such an achievement.

Not to hurt anyone’s feelings any more than necessary, with the sort of peculiar exceptions akin to that fellow’s presumptions about my settling of scores, and a few of the Jew baiters who have taken issue with me for my rejection of their adoption of terrorists as victims, I have no recollection whatsoever of any of these posters pointed out to me by my pal.

What started this screed is my mea culpa in regard to my forgetting/ignoring a hard earned and hard learned life lesson. That lesson boils down to, simply, one should never owe an amends to someone for whom one feels contempt.

Those I have blocked, who have mistaken their dismissal as a badge of success in regard to getting to me, might want to reconsider their assumptions, and consider a second life lesson.

That lesson says, simply, one should never argue with a fucking idiot.

As I go forward, I commit myself to both these life lessons, and you can hold me to this, should the situation arise and you choose to do so.

Trust me on this.

As ever, I remain,

HOWARD VICTOR CHAYKIN…A Prince, with an occasional lapse. I’m only human.