Occasional Jots and Tittles

I hate being snarky. OK, I obviously don’t completely hate it, since I do it often enough, but I don’t really like myself as much when I am. Still, every once in a while I have to vent and I guess it’s better to do it here than at the object of my, well, snarkiness.

One of the good things about the Internet and all the profusion of socializing (a broadly applicable term) sites is that it enables people who can be shy in public to open up a bit and talk with strangers, something they might never do in person. Still, online or off, I think certain customs should be observed. Most sites allow a user to bookmark certain profiles of people you find hot interesting, which is fine. Many sites also allow you to tag “friends”, which is a reciprocal action; if I tag you as a friend, and you accept that tag, then each of us is listed as the other’s friend. If it’s not accepted, then… it doesn’t show on either profile.

So I keep the lists separately. The people on my “friends” list are people I’m friends with – usually offline, though for long-term online friendships I’ve certainly made exceptions. My bookmark/hot list, on sites that allow such, are separate. As they should be. And I make it clear in my profiles, on sites with “friend” type lists, that if you don’t know me already, and you’ve never even said hello online, and I get a “friend” request from you… it’s likely to be ignored or returned with a “Who the hell are you?” note. And yet I get them, over and over. Obviously, it’s people who’ve looked at part of my profile (my pictures? surely not) and didn’t bother to read most of it.

I swear, the next one that does that, I’m going to go off on.

Still, it pales in comparison to the cheekiness I had yesterday. One such “social” site allows you to sign a member’s “guestbook” with one of several pre-selected comments (I like you, you’re hot, you’re handsome, etc.). It’s a nice way to halfway introduce yourself to someone, and if the person you tag wishes, he can either sign your guestbook in return, or initiate a real conversation (or just say thank you). This one said (first words, I swear): “I’m a competitive bodybuilder, looking for sponsors. Interested?”

Leaving aside the vaguely whore-like aspects of asking people who think you’re hot to pay you money, since when did the expense of his hobbies become my concern? I know taking all those steriods supplements gets expensive, but then, whose hobbies don’t? I’m a birder; a good pair of Swarovski binoculars would set me back about $1,700. A nice Leica Televid spotting scope is another $4,000. A decent, lightweight but solid tripod and head? Add in $600 or so. And like Mr. Muscleboy, birding involves travel, so add in all those travel expenses too.

I don’t go around asking for contributions to the optics fund, and honestly I’m appalled at the gall he had in asking… but then, I guess, there are people with gall out there and some of them get what they’re looking for. I guess that’s what separates the whores from the rest of us.

A friend has a tag for posts he calls “snarky”, which I translate roughly to mean “OK, I’m being a little bit of an ass here, but you can see it’s deserved.” You can imagine, in dealing with people in general and with gay people in particular, it could be very useful. I’m adding it as a category here.

So I’m online the other day, on Gay-Oriented-Service-1, and I see a profile for someone I remember from Gay-Oriented-Service-2. Part of me was a little hesitant about contacting him, because I’d eventually deleted him from my friend list at Service-2, but I couldn’t remember exactly why. I did remember, though, that he enjoys big pickup trucks. We have an F250 Crew Cab (Powerstroke Diesel) so they don’t get a lot bigger, and I figured it would at least give us something to chat about. Bad move.

As I soon remembered, one of his huge fetishes is getting a truck like that stuck in mud. I mean axle-deep, spinning till you’re almost buried, stuck. Odd fetish, but I’m not one to judge, as long as nobody gets hurt, right? I just figure it’s not something we’d want to go do on purpose, as the truck weighs about 9,000 lbs and isn’t easy to tow out of a “stuck deep” situation.

So I told him no, I wasn’t interested in getting the truck stuck in the mud for him, so as to not incur a towing charge. No problem, he says – I’d pull you out, you wouldn’t need to pay anything!

Mind you, he’s in Houston, 4 or 5 hours away. What am I supposed to do in the meantime? (Don’t answer that; I already know what his answer would be, and it would add an interior detailing job to the tab.) No, I said… I’m not going to do that.

Let me call you and talk with you about it, he says. Now, I know what that means, and you know what that means. You don’t call someone to discuss a fetish, when that person has the object of your dreams and doesn’t want to let you use it the way you want, unless you’re going to (A) try to talk him into it, or (B) get off online talking about it, or (C) both. None of which interested me. Struggling to be polite, I told him so, point blank, because I was getting a little tired of this whole line of discussion. And here’s the response I got for my trouble:

you fucking little inbred white trash LA coon ass….I’ve been wanting cuss your little nellie ass out your fucking QUEEN worthless piece of FUCKING white trash or whatever the fuck you are, I’ve never met anyone from LA that was worth a fucking piece of shit, so why don’t you go fuck yourself you piece of faggot shit!! I put you on ignore…haah your screen name almost reads cowboy in bra is more like it !!!! FUCK YOU!

No good deed goes unpunished, it seems. But at least this way, once I blocked him on Service-1, I made a note to block him wherever I saw him. Still, you have to wonder about someone who can come that unhinged over a simple turn down – and hope he doesn’t have access to firearms.