In which Velvet says I'm Maniacal

My son says I'm maniacal. He looked me in the eyes and declared me maniacal. I can't decide whether I'm offended or flattered.

Velvet made this observation when he heard that I speculated in a blog post on the likelihood of a connection being made between the professional writings of a man who has made his living for years as an on-line journalist and the x-rated Google trail under his adult dating screen name. I removed that post after accumulating sufficient evidence to confirm that the ip address which had been popping in regularly since St. Patrick's Day belonged to HCW. Who else would look at that statement seven times in thirteen minutes? That wasn't what Velvet found maniacal.

When Velvet heard that I had sent HCW an email saying it appeared as if he missed something about me, he busted out laughing, and said, "You're maniacal!" Apparently, it's bad behavior to taunt a fellow on the internet then suggest he misses you.

But really, how else was I supposed to confirm my hypothesis? Call HCW? The last time I did that I was so far off base that I wasn't going to rattle his cage again.

Over Christmas, there was a preponderance of statistical activity from a blackberry. The blackberry scoured my archives in the middle of the night for days and days. I was stumped because the blackberry first appeared from a direct link - not a Google search or somebody else's blog. Ergo: the reader had to have previous knowledge of Menopausal Stoners. It was a bloggy mystery.

I could see how anybody might have gotten a blackberry for Hanukkah or Christmas and been stuck at Grandma's with nothing to do over the holidays except fool around on the new blackberry. But this person went over the archives methodically. First, s/he looked at January, February and March. A few hours later, the blackberry would be pouring over April, May and June then appear again at 2:00 in the morning in July. Nobody does that unless they have a personal agenda.

I thought the blackberry had to be HCW and it was a sign I had been forgiven for causing a shit storm. That was during the final stages of the life long psychodrama that had fucked up my emotional gestalt, and I was deep into the plak tow.

Plak Tow is the blood fever which possesses a Vulcan during pon farr and strips away the capacity for rational thought. Although in the world of Star Trek, the plok tow only applies at Amok Time, in real life a person can be deep into the plak tow any time.

The blackberry could have been Cretin because Cretin is entirely capable of being stuck in the plak tow himself. I dismissed that notion because the mystery guest hadn't commented or written me personally. Cretin couldn't keep quiet that long. He seems to have developed that skill recently, though. I suspect he's been checking in regularly from a new job, but that's another story.

Turned out the blackberry belonged to ShatAKing - the man whose douchebaggery reaches such staggering heights that the story can only be compared to the alleged shape shifting goat a bunch of Nigerians turned over to the police for being a car thief. True Story.

In any case, solving the mystery of the blackberry was one of my motivations for seeing HCW back in January. Not only did HCW have no blackberry, he still blamed me for every single thing anyone could think of that went wrong in that relationship. Consequently, there was no way in Hell I was going to make the assumption any recurring ip address was HCW despite a very small margin for error. And there was no way on G*d's Green Earth that I was going to say a dang thing to HCW about anything at all whatsoever unless I knew for sure it was him. Besides all I said was that if he missed something about me, I wished he'd pick up the phone once he simmered down. It seemed logical to me.

Personally, I don't see anything remotely maniacal, but when I think of the justifiable complaints regarding being subjected to public ridicule (that would be Cretin's grievance) I have to concede that there is truth to Velvet's assessment.

Velvet was also of the opinion that it was infinitely worse to suggest that HCW's google trail had more to do with being Middle Aged Crazy than with being a perv. In Velvet's considered opinion, it's much better to be a perv than a middle aged goofball - but that's the perspective of a testosterone driven eighteen year old male with no body fat. When he's 45+ with hair sprouting from his ears, he may look at the world differently.

Now that someone turned Menopausal Stoners over to United States Army Information Systems Command (USAISC) Headquarters yesterday, I'm ruminating on this Maniacal thing.

The first image that springs to mind with the word Maniacal is, quite naturally, Mojo Jojo from The Powerpuff Girls. There may be more successful villains, like on James Bond for example, but Mojo Jojo and I are neck and neck in the "generally harmless" department. I can hear Cretin shouting, "Harmless!" as if I've lost all connection with reality, but honestly, people shouldn't take themselves so seriously.

Rhet believes I share Cat Woman's tendency to wreak a little havoc in someone's world then be swamped with remorse. "Own it, Darling," he used to say.

I confess I like the idea of Cat Woman better than Mojo Jojo because she's sexier and because Batman liked her even though she occasionally caused trouble. Personally, I would like to be maniacal in the manner of Bugs Bunny, but the truth is that Bugs is much more clever and slick than I will ever be. A more accurate comparison would probably be Jeannie.

We could accuse Jeannie of being Maniacal, but she never meant anything by it. Everything Jeannie did made perfect sense to her. She could be led astray by her wicked sister or her mother, but by and large, she was well intentioned and loyal.

I always liked her relationship with Col. Nelson because she could have blinked him into perdition whenever she wanted, but he had the threat of the bottle. That's a fair balance of power, and they were both a little maniacal when you think about it.