Keep Your Friends Close … and Your “Friends” in the Trash Bin

Please excuse me while I repost some things from the Word Press site so I can delete it for good.

Previously published 1/21/2010

I can’t tell you how many “friends” of mine have shown their true colors over the past 14 months, since pResident Barack Obama was elected. I suppose it has just as much to do with me becoming more politically vocal by the day through this forum as it does their being appalled at my decision to elect my Constitutional right to speak freely.

What surprises me these days is how quickly people I have known for years … and I am talking back into the 1990s … try to back me into little corners that narrowly describe who I am and what I stand for, the minute any conversation descends, or should I more correctly say, transcends into the realm of politics.

These are people who went through college with me, or worked with me early in my career. They saw me at my poorest, most desperate moments in life, when a box of Ramen noodles was the day’s only meal, when choosing between paying a small credit card balance and the rent was an agonizing but inevitable decision. They also saw me when I had let my guard down, when I was at my most vulnerable – most likely when I was drunk and puking over someone’s porch railing, or when some crazy woman (who, thankfully, did not turn out to be Mrs. ADHD) was raking my devotion over the coals of false love.

These folks I once called my “friends” got to know me through discussions about my past history in the U.S. Army and my divorce early in my ’20s and my more than arduous struggles to find some sort of coherent voice in what passes today for my so-called writing.

And they knew my politics, even back then. Maybe they didn’t know the extent of my passion for the Constitution and the freedoms that have been ripped from the American people, incrementally, since the turn of the 20th Century, but they knew enough about me, even back then, to place me under a narrow category: That guy’s a conservative.

But they let it slide. Maybe because, just once in a while, I could buy a round at the bar, or tell a joke. But what could a 20-something naïve little fool know, at the time, about what would become reality?

I used to think it was a miracle that we could all sit around the familiar bar in a friend’s house, night after night, when collective, and cheap, drunken stupor would devolve from the “high moral platitudes” of the latest Tarantino movie down to “politics,” with me, invariably, being one of the token few who would argue, drunkenly but correctly, of course, the values of conservatism. (I know it’s quite peculiar to read about values and conservatism and drunkenness in the same sentence … but I do have a point, so read on.)

I thought I was lucky; I thought we’d be friends for life.

But as we graduated and moved on and away from that little microcosm of time, into the reality of starting families and careers and finding our niches in the world, I never realized just how far apart most of us were back then.

And now.

I haven’t changed much in the decade plus since I graduated from college (though, it is true, I now prefer a $6 London Pride to a $3.50 Bud Yuck), but since November 2008 some of the people I once called “friends” have, since Dear Zero came to power, defined me as this:

• A racist
• A loser who should submit to our socialist overloards
• A Nazi

Tonight, one of my long-time “friends”called me The Unibomber.

After being painted into such narrow, and untrue, corners, I have to admit, I can stomach only so much of a response, not because I’m embarrassed by what these people who I once thought were my friends think of me now, but because I’m embarrassed that I allowed myself, all these years, to consider such cretins as my friends at all.

My moral? Delete early and often. Only those who will fight beside you are worth calling your friends. The rest aren’t even worth elevating to collateral damage.

And we’ll all know that soon enough.

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Keep Your Friends Close … and Your “Friends” in the Trash Bin

Things That Piss Me Off

If it bleeds, it leads, they say in newsrooms. If it’s stupid, you can find it here, at least once in a while. (I won’t claim to be able to cobble all stupidity together into one mindless blog. There is, after all, far more to go around than one human can capture.)

For today, let’s get into a few things that get on my nerves:

Mass emails. I’ll cut to the chase: This one is aimed squarely at your stupid narrator. I’m your typical corporate flunky. On any given day, I’ll write an important (to me) email about something that will never get accomplished in my lifetime, and include the addresses of half the company. I’ll also make sure I cc two people no longer with us, the plant lady, the night security guy, and the window washer (sorry about knocking your ladder down today, dude).

Naturally, when I recently wrote posts containing important information about absolutely nothing, I was very OCD about emailing every last contact from my gmail, Comcast, and (two) Yahoo accounts, not to mention everyone on Linked-in and Facebook. (Did I forget Twitter?) I guess you could say I was dreaming I was still at work, keeping everyone on The Team informed.

One friend called me on it (another said I was a Nigerian spammer, but I think I’ll save that for a later post). I’ll paraphrase to keep the spirit of the criticism, without stealing the words. My friend said the concept of giving his email address to a third party (Blogger, Facebook) is crass. A service that solicits email addresses so I can tell my friends that I’m contemplating the lint in my belly button is “rather sordid.” Any company that says it won’t sell my email address (or those of my friends, when I mass mail them about my latest post) will be hard-pressed to honor that promise when it comes upon hard times, he said. And these are swimmingly good times, so there’s no worry about that issue, eh?

Now, I’m not going to disparage the very services on which I post (and read) about every minor incident in life. Social networking is what it is. You give a little; you get a little (and ignore the ads, if possible). Besides, is there any real “privacy” these days? We’ll definitely pick up that subject at a later date.

The real problem my friend pointed out is more crucial to social communities. If I’m using a service to send these missives to several email addresses at once, I’m missing the fundamental point of communication: Why should I try to reach an email address, when I want to communicate with people? I’m awfully dumb if I send friends a mass, formatted email instead of a personal invitation, no? (Now, about my sharing the contents of emails….)

Beer with twist-off caps. As a consumer helping many breweries profit over the years, I never thought about the contents of a beer bottle. I had my favorites, but didn’t think anything more of beer. It’s not until you start brewing your own beer that you truly appreciate what you’ve been drinking. Patiently stirred wort boiled down to the essence of alcohol, a social phenomenon thousands of years in the making (ask any homebrewing club). Crushed malt so sweet and pure, you can chew it (try it some time). Pungent hops, the taste and smell fused with the liquid, bursting from a well-brewed beer when you pop the bottle’s cap (with a worn opener). Yeast coaxed from dormancy to roil your wort into something bold and powerful.

So, it wasn’t until I made my own that I understood why I always bought beer with a sealed cap. A bottle that needs an opener, I believed, is worth drinking. Then there was the result of twisting off a beer cap: It’s like opening Hemingway to find words written by the Unabomber.

Call me a beer snob, but this is one reason I don’t drink Budweiser (that, and a sense of self-worth). Usually. These are hard economic times, though, and a man can’t go without beer. Needless to say, the other day, I did the unthinkable. I broke down and bought a six-pack of Annheuser-Busch’s American Ale. What the hell, I figured. It’s new. I make ale. The caps of these bottles need an opener. It can’t be that bad.

The bottle claims the beer is “carefully brewed with barley from America’s heartland (Ah…a political buzzword!) and Cascade hops from the Pacific Northwest (code for beer lovers, meaning “You drink. Make you Hoppy!”)…with a distinct hoppy finish.” All of it marketing crap (one class, thankfully, I avoided in college). My advice: Step away from the beer, son. Think Bud lager meets nuclear waste with a faint hint of dung beetle. It’s not worth saving a buck or two per six pack if your taste buds will explode on contact.

If you’re like me and have 5 bottles left, I’d recommend watering the house plants (you don’t like).

Big frickin government. If you really look at it, the two candidates vying for the presidency next week give you one option: Big BadAss, Money-Grubbing Government. Face it, if you pick either Nobama or McLame, you’re picking your own pocket. One will tax your boss, who will in turn pay you less (or lay you off, or cut your benefits, or stop the free coffee/yoga class/lunch buffet service), to fund national healthcare. The other will help you buy more stock in banks, build more armor-plated humvees, and buy more outfits for Sarah Palin/Tina Fey. Admitted oversimplifications, but whether it’s corporate welfare or social welfare, it’s still welfare. That’s not at all fair for the rest of us schmucks trying to survive until mandatory retirement, at age 105, that is, if we even have retirement and health care. This is certainly not the stupidity the Founders envisioned; they thought we could govern ourselves (Ha!). Maybe, no matter who gets in, the Founders, the economy, and healthcare will have something in common: You.

Lengthy blogs. First I was laconic. Now I’m the Unabomber.

List blogs. Every blogger does at least one. I’ve done my part to add to the heap of stupidity crowding the Internet. Now I can roll up my sleeves and get to work.

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Things That Piss Me Off