Bitch!

This post is about releasing some anger.

So, I use the Facebook site. I like the Facebook site. It is a good site for stalkers and pedophiles alike. If you're unfamiliar, www.thefacebook.com is a website designed for college students to stare at people they vaguely know from their classes for prolonged periods of time without negative social repercussions. Through Facebook, you can pretend to remember which days your friends' birthdays are, surprising them by wishing them well while in front of others, thus appearing considerate. This is an excellent tactic for people who secretly hate their friends, but can also be used by losers who try to win people over into liking them by showing bizarre interest in their personal lives. In this way, Facebook plays off the creepy, hobbitesque weirdo in all of us, giving us a window into the internet-friendly world of potential serial killing. One of the most popular functions of the site is the creation of meaningless Groups supporting whatever asinine tripe you find remotely interesting. The Groups run the gamut from Oregon Trail River-Fjording Therapy Clinics to Eddie Izzard Fan Pages (ed. note: My roommate made one.), and are generally considered fun for the initial twenty-four hours of creation until you forget they ever existed.

Such was the case with my Violent Femmes fan Group. Titled "The Violent Femmes Hallowed Ground for Children of the Revolution Who Like to Blister in the Sun," my Group contains a modest 11 members. This number would appear pathetic as compared to most other groups which generally contain around fifty members at the fewest by the time of their retirement (i.e.: whenever people forget they exist), but to be fair, I'm surprised there are ten other people who like the Violent Femmes on campus, let alone the world, so I was pleased with the effort that had been made. For those of you who don't know, the Violent Femmes are my all time favorite rock band, for reasons that supercede the natural and enter a realm of ghosts and faeries, where gumdrops dance across raspberry waterfalls, and penguins frolic in the aftershave hills. In any case, despite my loyalty to the band, I, too, forgot about my Facebook Group relatively quickly after its creation midway through this last school year. It wasn't until today that I, on a lark, decided to check the old page and see if anyone new had joined.

Upon entering the Group page, I was greeted with this message:

Subj: I didn't read your comics

and at first I was rolling my eyes at the guy who starts a group and links to his own dumb webcomic, but then I saw that they're just photos of your messageboard art or whatever and that's cool

The author of the message will remain nameless, because even if I told you his name, none of us would know who the fuck he was anyway. He's just some guy on Facebook who stumbled across the page and decided to start leaving messages. Now, primarily, this group exists for me and my friends to have a momentary laugh. It exists secondarily as an experiment by me to see if anyone else at NU liked the Femmes. I hadn't considered that dumbfucks could use it as a breeding ground for their word-vomit. This guy took time out of his day to find my site (which probably would have taken a shitload of random searches on Facebook and consumed enough time for the monkeys on the typewriters to finish their first and second drafts of Merchant of Venice) and decided that he was going to develop a strong opinion about me, research it, change his mind, and then fucking tell me about it.

Newsflash: I DON'T GIVE A SHIT.

Let's analyze this, shall we? The subject line "I didn't read your comics" is meant to grab my attention, functioning under this shithead's assumption that I created the Femmes fansite for the sole purpose of advertising Kyle and Vlad. What's that? You didn't read my comics? Dear me! Whatever am I to do? A person on the internet has chosen not to view a webpage he dislikes! Call fucking Homeland Security, because this sounds like goddamn 9-11 Two.

The point is, he wanted to piss me off. It's apparent he gets off on the idea of flipping off people he considers pretentious. I'm not arguing that I'm not pretentious. I fucking love me. But the fact remains that he guessed I was pretentious based on the fact that I linked two of my webpages together. That's the equivalent of saying someone is pretentious for eating a sandwich. The only reason there's a fucking internet is because websites are linked to each other. I linked to Kyle and Vlad because the site had an "about the creator" section that you could fill in upon creation and one of the blanks to fill was "home page." I thought, why not. No, you know what? I didn't even think. I just typed. Because there was no way in hell I could have possibly conceived of a situation where my creating a hyperlink could create some sort of condescension cast on me, like I'm the Pimpmaster 4000, trying to get my webcomic whore out for a night on the town. I'll tell you one thing, he succeeded in pissing me off.

What really gets me is the utter pointlessness of his message. He start by insulting my comic, calling it "dumb," then says that it's just message board "art" (which even I don't agree with), so it's cool. Well, I'll tell ya. I'm just happy as a lark to have his approval after he made a faulty, baseless judgment about me and my work, only to have to mentally correct it after he actually saw what I was doing. Why did he even bother sending the message? It feels like he wanted to say something snide to someone so desperately that he posted it even after realizing he was wrong. If he had sent this message directly to me, maybe I could have understood it as some sort of apologetic, "sorry for prejudging you" type thing. But he posted in a public forum so that everyone could see. This leads me to believe that he wanted to look like a badass and ran in with guns blazing, only to realize halfway through the jungle that he was out of ammo. Instead of chucking the matter up to simple misunderstanding, he sends it anyway, still hoping to come off looking cool.

He might have done so, if he'd stopped posting there.

The following day, our friend, who I'll refer to as "Stevie" posted this message:

Subj: Also Make Me the Drummer

I don't know his name, but Rolling Stone once declared him the worst drummer in rock, and he played the tranceaphone sometimes, which is a garbage can on top of a snare, so I think I've proved I'm more than qualified

Here, Stevie is requesting for me to make him an officer in the club (which means nothing except getting an arbitrary title). I gave Vlad the title of bass guitarist, and drummer was still open, so Stevie decided that he would demand to be made an officer and take the position. Here he tries to be affable with a cute little self-deprecating joke, one that really doesn't make much sense when you actually think about it. I'm not sure if he's trying to impress us with his ability to spew out factoids from our nation's number one, longtime shitty music rag or trying to legitimize his existence in the club by insulting one of the band members, but in any case, I'm not sure if saying "what you like is shitty, give me something" is the right approach for me to not want to stab you in the eye. I don't give a shit what a tranceaphone is, Stevie. The only reason why you bothered to explain it at all was to sound like you know something. It's true, you certainly have learned a lot of things, none of which seem to be about normal human interaction. Not that I can blame him; being a Northwestern student doesn't really help with people skills. But this kid seems to be taking the wrong approach to winning us over. It seems like he doesn't even care about making us like him, as long as we notice him and give him what he wants. Still, you have to applaud a guy who's retarded enough to belittle a Group founder, demand to be made a member of the Group the next day, all while forgetting to ever join the fucking club in the first place.

I wish it stopped there.

ONE WEEK LATER, after coming back to check to see if he'd been bestowed his precious honorary title in a now abandoned Facebook ghost town, Stevie posts this in reply to his previous message:

oh that last thing I said doesn't make sense, but it was supposed to be prefaced with 'make me the drummer'

Desperate, scrambling for any sense of reason in this mad world, Stevie hopes against hope that perhaps I didn't understand his previous message, that through some cruel technological twist of fate his words had been garbled. Yes, that had to be the reason why he hadn't been made drummer! Yes, this is important enough for him to devote a week's worth of thinking towards! No matter that no one's responded to me! No matter that I haven't interacted with any of the other group members! Please! I NEED THIS. MAKE ME THE DRUMMER. GIVE ME YOUR LOVE. I SIT AT HOME AND MASTURBATE TO INTERVIEWS OF KID ROCK ON E! I DESERVE A LITTLE RECOGNITION!

Well, here you go, Stevie.

This page is all yours.