Why Are You Here?

Blog: The Bitter and Unremarkable

One of the strangest things to any sort of notability one earns in life is finding out that other people think of you more than you think of them. I’ve experienced various degrees of this throughout most of my life (I’m not claiming any sort of real fame here, but everything in life depends on scale), but this post isn’t really about me.

No, what got me thinking about this today is something that happened to someone else.

Some friends of mine do a recurring panel at cons modeled after a talk show. I guess that’s the best way to describe it? In any case - they do it, and it’s quite entertaining. The host is one of the four people I model Max from UnCONventional on. That will probably flatter him too much, but whatever. It’s true.

Anywho, a mutual friend of ours expressed appreciated for said panel in a Facebook status. Perfectly innocuous, and not at all unexpected. What was unexpected was a response comment posted to it, dripping with vile douchery by someone who I will refer to simply as “The Douche.”

The Douche made some, as you guessed it, highly insulting comments about the panel. I, of course, being the nosey jackass that I am, inserted myself into the conversation - calling The Douche a… well… douche. I was super mature.

Anyway, The Douche proved his monicker immediately after that, and said some rather nasty things about me along with more nasty things about my friend’s panel. What was clear throughout all of this though, was that these were very, very personal feelings to him. He had, in some way, gotten very personally angry not just about my friend, but myself as well (dropping a piece of personal information about myself I don’t talk about publicly these days).

I know this was a rather long set up, but this got me thinking. Here is this guy, this guy I don’t even know. This guy I’m fairly certain I’ve never spoken to, and who I’m fairly certain has barely spoken to my friend who runs the aforementioned panel. This guy who really seems to care a lot about us though.

He’s sitting there, focusing all this emotional energy on us. He’s bothered to research me, and hunt down errant statuses about my friend. Even if this is just a micro-fraction of his life, it’s still there occupying brain space. He cares about us.

And I wouldn’t recognize him on the street.

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