Radical Georgia Moderate

It’s been a little over a year, so it’s time for another list of ways to avoid setting off my bullshit detector. This list is a sequel to this one.

1. Don’t beat around the bush if you’re going to make an accusation. Or, unspoken implications with plausible deniability built in are for cowards.

   Person A: “It sure is interesting that you were out of the office the same day that two joggers were bludgeoned to death in Piedmont Park.”

   Person B: “Are you saying I blugeoned two joggers to death?”

   Person A: “No, I’m just saying it’s interesting.”

2. Don’t claim that because person A makes person B angry, that person A must have a point. If that were the case, Ann Coulter would be the most insightful person in the world. She’s not.
3. Don’t respond to an accusation of malfeasance or general dickery by pointing out an occasion where someone else has engaged in malfeasance or general dickery. I don’t give a good goddamn what Bill Clinton did or didn’t do. He’s not the president anymore.
4. Don’t evaluate a subject area by criteria which its own practitioners don’t evaluate themselves by. Most bloggers aren’t journalists, and don’t claim to be.
5. Don’t try to rationalize a stupid and/or offensive statement by questioning the audience’s sense of humor. All I did was call your father a toothless disease-ridden baby-eating overall-wearing three-eyed goat rapist. I obviously was kidding. Where’s your sense of humor? Baaaaaa…
6. Don’t claim that profanity or poor grammar/spelling weaken an argument. Neither of these things are inherently true. Try addressing what was actually said instead of projecting your arbitrary puritan grammatical mores as a means of weaseling your way out of an argument. Alternately, give me one good fucking reason that shit is profane and crap isn’t.
7. Don’t pretend like you being too dense to understand something makes it worthless for everybody. I’m not very good at math, so math must suck, right? Stupid calculations. I’m not going to pay bills anymore.
8. Don’t use the phrase “hate-filled” to describe criticism motivated by anger. This is meant to dismiss people who were placed on the defensive by something inflammatory that was said about them, and who are righteously pissed off about it. You can also play bullshit bingo with the words “shrill” and “sensitive.”
9. Don’t use an irrelevant list of terrible things someone has not done to try to distract from a list of terrible things someone has done. Okay, so Ted Bundy killed like 30 girls. That was bad and all, but it’s not like he ate the bodies! And he NEVER cheated on his taxes!
10. Don’t try to pass ‘but think of the children!’ off as a reason to do anything. People from all ideological corners are often guilty of this rank bullshit. Just because you don’t watch your kids closely enough to keep them from downloading Midget Watersports 4 1/2 on Bittorrent doesn’t mean the rest of us should be deprived.

It’s takes a bullshitter to know one. I’ve probably partaken in at least some of these at one point or another, and am not claiming otherwise. But that doesn’t let you off the hook for using them (read rule 3 again).

This during the hottest month in the history of Atlanta, with eight days already that have topped 100 degrees.

Also noteworthy:

Between 2000 and 2005, DHR and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 36 heat-related deaths in the metro Atlanta area.

What kind of property manager — or person, for that matter — would expect a tenant to inhabit a unit with broken A/C under those conditions? My landlord, that’s who.

Amber and I are very fortunate that we have friends who will put us up some nights and money to pay for hotel rooms on the nights when that doesn’t work out for some reason. I can’t imagine we’re the only tenants in the building whose A/C is out. If someone gets heat stroke and dies under those conditions, hotel bills and pro-rated deductions from rent will suddenly look inexpensive.

I feel tired all the time. This has been like a long, shitty business trip. Single serving soap, take-out food, borrowed towels and a new, strange bed most nights. There’s also the ever-present conundrum of not wanting to sound like a complainer but simultaneously having so much to complain about.

Did I mention my dad spent a few days this past week throwing up violently every hour because a gall stone had escaped and blocked his bile duct and he couldn’t digest food properly? He’s having them removed tomorrow morning, and because he has so much scar tissue on his chest from past surgeries, they may have to cut him open instead of doing it laparoscopicly. That’s big boy surgery compared to the procedure I had done a few months ago. And because I’ve been so caught up with finding a place to sleep every night, I haven’t even had the chance to visit him. So thanks for that landlord.

We’ve already got plans in motion to address this situation, but we can’t publicize them now. Thanks for the previous suggestions. I’m just venting, and really not fishing for “aww, poor fella” comments.

Sarawara and Audacity have been kind enough to put us up for a couple of nights each. They are awesome.

When “PawPaw” (my mom’s dad) was stricken with cancer, I visited him in the hospital several times while he was undergoing treatment. I saw the disease gradually whittle down the former Georgia Tech football player — who at one point weighed nearly 350 pounds of muscle and sausage gut — down to about 150. His memory faded along with his body. On one visit, I reminded him how he used to babysit my brother and I while my mom worked, and how I ruined all of his vintage typewriters by banging on the keys, pretending to write something. He was just lucid enough to try to be polite and pretend like he remembered, but I could tell he couldn’t.

The night he died, I wrote a lengthy, graphic account describing what I saw, what other people were doing, and what I was thinking. He was the first person to die that was close to me. We visited him once or twice per month up through when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old and he remarried after his first wife (my mom’s mother) died.

Last Thursday, when MiMaw (my dad’s mom) died, I didn’t write anything. A few months ago she took a fall she never recovered from, and has been virtually comatose in various facilities ever since. She also turned out to have cancer in, I think, her spine of all places. My parents visited her most days, but I could never bring myself to.

MiMaw, like her mother (Mama Mac), had moments where she was impossible to live with or speak with. When she got mad at my dad once, she tore up all her photos of him (some of which were decades-old and irreplaceable) and threw them away. She drove my mom crazy complaining about her various ailments, some of which were real and many of which weren’t. When she got into fights with my parents, she’d try to turn my brother and I against them. Every passing year brought this out a little more in her, and by the time of her fall she’d run off all her friends in Georgia. She wasn’t even welcome in church.

If you’d just met her for the first time, you wouldn’t sense any of this. She came off like any other sweet little old lady from Alabama. And there was a big part of her that was really like that.

Growing up, once per year in the summertime my brother and I would spend a week at her house in Montgomery. My brother enjoyed the attention, while I dreaded going a little. Typically, my dad would drive us there, drop us off, then come back around a week later to pick us up.

Most of what I remember of the drive from Marietta to Montgomery is that I knew we were getting close when we hit a stretch of highway that was lined thick with trees. It was almost like driving into a tunnel. When we reached her exit, there always was a sign for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. To the right, a procession of car dealerships. Left to her house. We’d drive seven or eight miles, pass a mall and an Arby’s with the old-style giant cowboy hat sign on the right (probably 40 feet tall), and when we got to her turn-off there was a pedestrian bridge overhead covered with chain-link fencing. Left again.

I don’t know exactly when her house was built, but I’m guessing the late 1950s or early 1960s. The front yard was a small patch of grass, so the house was relatively close to the road. It was one story, with a carport. The car she owned most of the time I remember with her was a maroon 1986 Oldsmobile. There was a slight odor of gasoline inside. The interior was also a dark maroon cloth, and it was almost always hotter than hell to sit in. Walk past the carport on another small patch of grass to the left, and there was a gate that led to the back yard. She’d wash her clothes in a washing machine in a small room behind the carport and hang them out back on a clothesline to dry.

We slept in the guest bedroom on dusty-smelling beds with yellow wool comforters. One summer I spent most of my week inside that room drawing my own brand of sports car that looked suspiciously like a Ferrari. Even the logo was a knock-off.

We’d watch TV. One summer we brought our Nintendo with us. A few summers, we’d toss baseballs back and forth. She watched soap operas (her “soaps”), and would be quick to explain that she doesn’t approve of the characters’ behavior. Sometimes at night before bed she’d read comics to us (the “funnies”). We’d go the the grocery store or to the mall, where she didn’t mind waiting on us to play arcade games. The first time I saw Mortal Kombat was in the arcade at the mall near her house.

At some point during every trip over there, she’d take us around and show us off to her friends and neighbors. She even introduced us to people who worked at the grocery store. This was the worst part of the trip for me. I hated being paraded around. But few things made her happier than showing us off to people, so I bit my lip and suffered through (mostly).

In the South, everybody’s grandma makes the best pound cake in the world. And MiMaw’s was no exception. More than anything else about those trips, I looked forward to eating the pound cake she made. My mom tried making it a few times, but it never quite came out as good as MiMaw’s. She also happened to make the best fried corn bread in the world, which even she couldn’t duplicate after she moved in with my parents in Marietta since the brand of flour she liked to use wasn’t available in Georgia.

Even before she got too old to take care of herself completely, she was an awful driver. My parents felt my brother and I would be safer with me behind the wheel at 15 with a learner’s permit than they we would be with her driving. And so, for that week, I drove us everywhere. That was the last year we went to visit her before she moved to Marietta. She moved into my parents’ house, sleeping on the fold-out couch bed in the living room while my parents started the process of converting the garage into a mother-in-law suite.

Things were rocky early on, as she wasn’t used to living with other people. Because of the construction on her mother-in-law suite, we couldn’t park our cars in the driveway for a while. We didn’t speak for almost two months once when she insisted on parking her car in a spot that forced me to parallel park my car. Petty disagreements would frequently escalate to the verge of disownment with MiMaw. I can’t believe when I was home for college one summer I actually told her that I don’t believe in God.

She eventually apologized and started parking her car in a different spot.

My dad is so much like her in many ways, and they were like oil and water when they were together. I don’t ever remember relations between them being anything but strained, but when she tore up those childhood photos of him over what I remember being another petty disagreement, she was pretty much dead to him. And I knew it was real because he didn’t get angry when he talked about her from that point on.

But then, I also remember all the birthdays and Christmases when she sent my brother and I cards stuffed with money she couldn’t afford to give us. And how happy she was when we gave her good news about what was going on in our lives. And how awful it made her feel if something bad happened to us. And how she just couldn’t contain herself when someone did something nice for her, even if it was something trivial.

I feel a tinge of guilt about not visiting her after her fall, even though she likely wouldn’t have known I was there. It’s heavy to watch life slowly leave someone’s body. I did it before, but I couldn’t convince myself to do it again.

I’ll be in Montgomery tomorrow for her funeral.

We were fortunate during our trip to stay with Audacia Ray, and to meet Belledame for cupcakes before we headed to PodCamp New York. Thanks y’all!

No one should perceive this as a bash, because it’s not, but spending some time in New York has made me appreciate Atlanta more.

Our trip to New York got off to a rocky start, with me laying on the carpet at gate A19 in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, clutching my abdomen, writhing and moaning in hopes of exorcising sharp spasms that had incapacitated me completely.

I’ll back up just a bit to how I got there. After baggage check-in and passing through security, we were standing in line at the mini-Paschal’s in the A-terminal food court. An announcement from the Department of Homeland Security echoed through the P.A. system, warning us that the terrorist threat level had been escalated to orange. Amber and I laughed, and we played out paraphrased lines from a David Cross bit.

“The terrorist threat level is orange. Should I be afraid?”

“Yes!”

“Well, what should I do?”

“Just obey.”

Laughing Department of Homeland Security threat levels off is a helpful defense mechanism, for me anyway. I didn’t feel any panic, but I also couldn’t help but follow a train of thought about who I would call and what I would say to them if our plane to New York was hijacked. I determined I’d call my parents’ house, tell them I loved them, and not to fear the people who hijacked the plane because they’re weak-minded cowards. I didn’t really know this about the theoretical hijackers, but that sounded like a good thing to say nonetheless.

I wonder if I’m deranged.

As we were packing the last of our clothes for our move last weekend, I encountered the only suit I own and a couple of sport coats. They had dust on the shoulders, making them unwearable even in a pinch. With my grandmother in the hospital, catatonic for days after falling in my parents’ driveway, it occured to me then that I would need to get my suit dry-cleaned at the soonest opportune moment in case she kicked off.

Before you say that sounds a little monstrous, I’ll defend myself by saying she’s been in pain for a long time, that her quality of life is practically untenable, and that we suspect it would be a relief to her to move on.

Amber had rotisserie chicken, and I fried chicken. Both were excellent. It was a bright idea to place Paschal’s in the airport, as the food is top notch and their presence might even lead to a discussion of the city’s civil rights history.

We finished and were walking up the A1-A18 side of the terminal, away from our gate toward the Starbucks for some lattes. Sometimes my Cobb County upbringing kicks in and I feel like a pussy ordering a sugar-free, fat-free, no-whip Cinnamon Dolce Latte. But I also know my insecurity about my effete drink would only be magnified if I voiced my concerns out loud. A guy with a popped collar once did this at a Starbucks near Emory, and we mocked him for it mercilessly. So, I’ve made my peace with it.

As we were standing there waiting for our drinks, I felt a twinge of pain in my mid-section. I thought (or maybe just hoped) it would pass. As we walked back toward the terminal, it got progressively worse. I was carrying my laptop in a bag, and found myself having trouble keeping up with Amber, whose legs are much shorter than mine.

We finally got to the gate, but there weren’t any places to sit. I needed to sit, as the pain was getting worse. A few moments passed, and a seat finally opened up near the window.

Then the spasm hit like a cannonball with tacks welded to it.

I tried to hunch over, to sit up straight, to lift my arms over my head, but nothing helped. Amber held me gently and tried to console me. I said, “I love you, but please get off.” I was hypersensitive to all stimuli, and none of that sensitivity could be harnassed for good. I started to groan.

“I can’t get on the plane like this,” I said.

“Is there anything I can do?” Amber asked.

“I need medical attention.”

It wasn’t long before I’d slumped to the floor and was rolling around, wailing like a mangy dog being sodomized by a rhinocerous. This should have been completely mortifying, but by then keeping up appearances didn’t really occur to me.

Amber talked to the gentleman calling out ticket zones that were eligible to board the plane. He walked up to me, saw me writhing, said the paramedics were on their way, and asked for my last name. Then he asked where the pain was, as I clutched my stomach. Fucking toolbox, use your goddamn eyes and ask Amber the rest of this shit.

By then the sweat was pouring out of me, and I could feel the whole gate staring at me, wondering whether looking or looking away is the more polite response. This carried on for a few more minutes, until the pain vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

I laid there until the medic arrived. He asked me who the President of the United States was, and I said, “I don’t like that guy.”

He laughed, then said, “Really, what’s his name?”

“George W. Bush.”

He pointed to Amber and asked “Who’s that?”

“Amber.”

It’s just necessary to make sure someone is coherent before they can choose not to be taken to the hospital, he said. We chatted for a little while as I signed the release paper. He ran track in college. My episode cut off the start of the Master’s. Somehow, those topics were all relevant at the time.

What part of your personality, upon reflection, would you say needs the most improvement?

For me, it’s definitely controlling my temper, which extends into areas like patience, measuring my responses, suffering fools, and not assuming the worst in people. The A-number-one reason I could never, ever be in politics is because my fuse is woefully short once a certain threshold of something* is passed. It’s a constant struggle, and I’m pretty sure it always will be, but I am at least trying to be more aware of it and catch myself before the fuse goes off.

On the other hand, I do believe there are a select few circumstances that call for a less-than-measured response. Someone threatening my girlfriend is one of those. You go there, and all bets are off. I’ve read over that comment a few times and have been trying to decide whether I overreacted, and haven’t been able to convince myself that I did. Maybe Victor is just that oblivious or poor a writer that he really didn’t think “be prepared for a bar of ivory soap and a dictionary for your mouth this weekend” would (or even could) be construed as a threat. But I’m not convinced. You tell me.

* - something being a perception, whether it’s correct or not, that I am being slighted, that a person I am having a discussion with is being willfully ignorant, rude, condescending, or obstinate, or other things that potentially call for a more measured response than I typically offer

I’ve been wrestling with a quandary lately, and have had trouble putting it into words in a way that satisfies me.

Basically, allowing myself to be consumed with negativity in what I write doesn’t seem healthy or productive to me. I feel a little sick when I think about all the bad energy I’ve helped spread around.

Don’t confuse this with an apology for anything, as I think in the cosmic sense the people and things I’ve written about typically deserved to have bad vibes, or at least jarring criticism, directed their way. I think somebody needs to do it. I’m just wondering, for purely selfish reasons, if I want to continue to be one of those people who deals in perpetual outrage.

I’d like to refocus my energy, but I haven’t really figured out how I want to go about that. I’m not totally satisfied with this explanation, but it will have to do or I will rewrite it until it reads like a press release.

I know people like their lists in batches of 10. So here you go, in no particular order, 10 ways to avoid setting off my bullshit detector:

1. Don’t project your personal failings onto other people as if they apply universally. Not everyone who sees one titty in Playboy is going to end up in rehab because they quit their job and got divorced to jerk off seventeen times per day to Innocent Bystander Debasement Monthly. And if anything constitutes a War on Christmas or an Attack on Traditional Marriage, it’s your sanctimonious ass skipping church to open presents and get a divorce.
2. Don’t blame the messenger when your failings are put on display. Few things drive up circulation/viewership/traffic faster than a story about a sanctimonious prick who fails to live up to his own hyperbolic finger-wagging. People will pay for it over and over again. And it’s your fault for feeding the market’s demand to watch. Try not being such a fucking hypocrite.
3. Don’t try to pass “protecting tradition” off as a reason to do anything if you’re not talking about sports. Slavery was a tradition here. Monarchy is a tradition in England, and the result has been 1,000 years of inbreeding.
4. Don’t wave a pie and a bag of shit in front of my nose and try to tell me that I have two choices for dessert. To name but one example, by “bag of shit” I mean “Intelligent Design.”
5. Don’t lump two traits together and try to say that anything that can be described by one can always be described by the other. Not all seculars are progressives, and not all progressives are secular; just as not all psychotics are Christians, and not all Christians are psychotics.

   This item could also be described as “don’t speak in terms of monoliths.” Monolithic terms, generally used to make a larger and more imposing bogeyman from a loosely-related group, are The Left, The Right, moonbats, wingnuts, porn, etc. (Yeah, I’ve used “wingnut” before, and probably will again at some point. Sometimes I’m a bullshit trafficker too. Takes a bullshitter to know one.)

6. Don’t pretend like something must be true just because it can’t be proven that it doesn’t exist/can’t happen. Sure, I can’t prove that God doesn’t exist. But you also can’t prove that your mother never had sex with a chimpanzee, and that you don’t have a freakish half-chimp, half-human half brother running around with no pants and a flaming case of herpes.
7. Don’t pretend like correlation equals causation. The states with the highest abortion and teen pregnancy rates also vote Republican most frequently. Does that mean children growing up in Republican-voting households are more likely to get knocked up before they’re 18 and have an abortion because their parents are Republicans? No, dumbass, it means there are more poor families in those states.
8. Don’t pretend like belief for the sake of belief is a virtue. 99 percent of the people who comment on any court case that’s shown on TeeVee know exactly jack shit about said court case. Say it with me: “I haven’t seen or heard enough evidence to have an opinion about this topic.” You sound a lot smarter that way than by saying THARE’S NO DOWT IN MY MIND THAT WOMEN IN THE DOOK RAPE CASE IS A LIAR BECUZ FOX NOOS SAID SO!!1! And if you ask me well, what do you believe in? after I dismiss your opinion, expect to be smacked in the face for being a judgmental moron.
9. Don’t try to pass circular logic off as an argument. This relates closely to the pie/bag of shit as dessert false dichotomy. Atheism is not a religion. (Real) Nihilism isn’t a belief system. Relativism is not dogma. You can’t be a radical moderate. Oh, wait…
10. Don’t hide behind free speech to justify a vile remark. Sure, you’re allowed to say it. Nobody is saying you’re not. But, since we’re dealing with free speech, I am also allowed to call you a bigot or a sexist or whatever other name most aptly describes whatever behavior you’ve just partaken in. And when you whine like a little pussy when I do that, I am also allowed to say that you’re whining like a little pussy. Free speech can go on in circles forever like that.

Some days I’m very capable of having civil discussions with people I disagree with, even when they say ignorant/oblivious/insensitive/false things. I really like to think that most of the time I try to engage people and at least understand them, even if I’m not likely to change my mind. But sometimes I have moments or phases where I’m fed up with all the bullshit and become very hostile (I bet Grayson can relate). This week falls under the latter category.

A thread on Will Hinton’s blog has spiraled out of control in no small part because I just can’t bring myself to quit calling bullshit on one commenter, who keeps responding with more bullshit. It’s childish and a complete waste of time (and probably burning a few bridges in the process) to even engage this person, whose idea of making an argument is to spam the thread with the first ten links that pop up in Google. And yet, I still do. Heat generating more energy than light, and all that.

On Peach Pundit, I used the word “bullshit” five times in two comments on one thread. There’s no question that that person totally deserved the hostility, though, because he’s a retarded partisan hack.

So, I’ll move back to thinking about the Will Hinton thread I mentioned. It was a book review of Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families (whose second edition changed “Damaging” to “Transforming” “Transforming” to “Damaging”). Let’s back up to the beginning. Near the end of the post in question, the reviewer Expat Teacher writes: “We should treat porn as we do smoking. Lots of naming and shaming combined with public service announcements that show the downside of porn usage.”

There are a few ways to react to that. My first instinct was to say “Fuck you, Expat Teacher. Who the fuck are you to define morality for me?” (this is the same whack job who wrote a post saying meritocracy is flawed, and that only good people should be allowed to succeed) My next instinct was to try to address it in as calm and charitable way as possible. Due to my current temperament, what resulted was something in-between that took less of a bareknuckle approach than “fuck you, you judgmental prick,” but was still oozing with contempt.

Part of what bugs me is that site is promoted as a forum for competing ideas, and not as a bunch of right-wing white dudes patting each other on the back. Yet, when people with competing ideas show up even with the best intentions and on their best behavior (not talking about today), they’re accused (by the moderator, no less) of being dogmatic or instigating flame wars.

Moving away from that momentarily, I’ve been thinking about some things Elizabeth Edwards said at ConvergeSouth. She is really high on political communication on the Internet. Unfortunately, her mic wasn’t wired correctly, so I don’t have a podcast of exactly what she said to reference. But the gist of it, if I’m remembering correctly, was she thinks the Internet is a spectacular place for people to get together and debate ideas. She bases this on her experience with her husband’s political campaigns and on her experience with basketball and breast cancer support forums.

Well, I disagree with her. I think the Internet is usually an awful place to try to debate competing ideas. Even if something resembling a charitable conversation is sustainable for a while, it’ll go to shit eventually. You can put a timer on and wait for the bomb to go off.

Can’t say that I’m sure where I’m going with that, so I’ll just move on for now and perhaps clarify tomorrow.

If this were a morality play going through the paces in a mainstream media cycle, this would be the part where I’d be apologizing for lobbing the first bomb in this case. Oh, I was so harsh, boo hoo, I’m reformed now, if I flog myself enough will you forgive me? But it’s not, and I’m not. That post and everything that followed it was complete bullshit, and it is asking a lot out of anyone to be charitable in the face of such a wretched and insulting pile of shit.

I guess if there’s a point to be made to Will or to anyone else at this hour where the paragraphs aren’t flowing together as well as I’d like, it’s that people shouldn’t confuse civility with capitulation. If I see bullshit, I’m going to call it. And you shouldn’t act surprised or hurt if that’s what happens.

I‘ve been keeping up with college football blogs to an embarrassing degree this year, and the theme on many Tennessee Vol blogs this week is “it’s not right to boo Air Force this weekend.”

Grow the fuck up. It’s a goddamn football game. You must not think much of those boys’ toughness if you don’t think they can withstand a little crowd hostility at a visiting stadium.

When they step on Shields-Watkins Field, they’re the enemy: just like Cal, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, LSU and everyone else on the schedule. They’re there to play spoiler to Tennessee’s national title hopes, just like everyone else who steps on the field; and just like everyone else, they should be socked in the mouth repeatedly until they quit twitching.

It’s a competition, you retards, not a game of wet biscuit.