This time around, I’m vowing to not hate myself.

I already wrote about a certain dinkweed from my past. It’s so goddamn infuriating, I wrote some more today. Fortunately, some thing’s broke with my posting by email, so ya’ll be spared the extended mix of my anger.

I downplayed in my last post that I linked to above, just how fucked up it was that the guy who asked me to build this website was. The guy who started that site is a misogynistic asshole. I use that description advisedly, and I’m tough enough (and rational enough) to not label all men hating on me as having a problem with women. This guy does.

I started doing comedy five years ago this month. Before I started, I stumbled upon this website, actually an earlier incarnation. I also, before I started myself, started going to the club where the website is based. Being a web geek, it was a pretty cool place to stumble upon. I lurked for months and only tentatively started posting.

Once I had started hitting open mikes around town, I started running into people who encouraged me to keep posting, including the owner of the website and the club. Some people, especially other women,cautioned me that it was a tough virtual room to jump into, but I was pretty jazzed to meet the folks who were part of a new web-based and reality-based world.

Almost from the first day, this one guy added me to his roster of people he self-proclaimedly thought needed schooling. I almost could have been fine with that in the long run, figuring what the hell, a verbal hazing didn’t seem far away from the skills and bravado needed for comedy.

But, the guy is by almost all standards sociopathic. He portrayed me in his online hazing as a lonely, unattractive hag incapable of getting laid, unfunny, a terrible writer, annoying, friendless, desperate and pretty much a blight to comedy. Eventually, with me and other women there were rape scenarios. In my case, my dried out hull of a slash greedily enjoyed the attention after years of non-utilization. Actually, if memory serves, I was likely penetrated with a broom handle, since my disgusting, smelly, unloved crone self would wither any manhood that got too close.

I think my biggest crime was perseverence. But, how could I not perservere? The shit he threw at me rang falsely. I knew in my own personal life that virginal desperation, the depressed spinster, was not my role to play.

At the same time, as I hung out in clubs, I made friends among some of the other women, given our minority status. Sadly, I became the shoulder to cry on for a long line of women who he fucked over. It was a tired and trite ritual. He’d home in on a certain female type looking to understand the misunderstood, crazy artist. He would reel them in with whispered conversations about how they got him, really could see what he was saying about comedy, afterall they were talented and funny just like him. Inevitably, the bedding would lead to less than a week later his heading to the next target.

It was fucking harsh to watch, and there is no way to dissuade a smitten woman that she is not in fact “different.”

Worse than women taking me aside and thanking me for standing up against the bully that kept them from posting online, and men encouraging my online writing, and living the fallout of several women’s failed flings, he encouraged a swarm of anonymous people to go after me. At his peak of writing, right before he got banned from the online forum for one too many attacks, I was posted about anonymously with less drama, just clever name calling, like “stupid cunt,” daily. I got emails and private messages telling me to go away, quit comedy or die.

Apparently, I was the most pathetic and boring person to have ever sat near a computer.

It got to me. I wish it hadn’t, but it did. I suppose your average person can’t be called “ugly,” “boring,” “dull,” “talentless” and a “cunt” on a regular basis and just be chill. Worse yet, I started meeting people out at clubs who had never seen me perform and only knew me as the unfunny chick. (I did post more questions and comments than witticisms, as did others on the board. Statistically, I posted less than the frequent posters, I could see the numbers on the member list, but I was perceived as uncontrollably posting, because he proclaimed it so.)

In a quick review, a guy who has been (repeatedly) banned from a forum where I have posted, who has written pages of insults about me, who has claimed to others I was boring and sad and unfuckable, this man asked me for a favor. A free web design, or maybe he said he would throw some chump change my way. You know the kind of short change that doesn’t make leaving the house worthwhile.

The coup de grace, because his new project needed to start off great, I was talented enough to get his website up and running, but not to contribute. Maybe after I learned a bit about comedy and style and writing, he’d let me sign on.

Again check out its shittiness here at bostonfriars.com Actually, it has a psychotic charm, not as comedy or comedy news, mind you, but as performance art. Whenever he doesn’t approve of something posted by another, he either deletes it, deletes the poster’s account or edits the text. It’s like a virtual version of Monk tweaking.

I told him “no” on the web design, and that should have been that. But, this weekend I made a crucial mistake. I tweaked someone else who I have considered a friend for contributing to the sociopath’s new website. I got called on it.

The comedy is, the guy who mercilessly commented on everything I ever posted back in the day, sent me a private message to please stop, because he might get angry. Better yet, he explained that the site was new so needed to be given a chance. (Um, right, unlike say my trying to get on stage for the first baby steps of comedy.)

After an afternoon of messages explaining to me in convoluted logic that I needed to let go of my bitterness and bile toward the past, because he had offered an olive branch by asking for my help, we eventually came full circle. He wrote:

fine whatever.
as far as”terrorizing you online” goes – basically i was trying my best to keep the open mikers – primarily you, Carol and all the other lonely women – out of the discussions we were having way back when. the days when the kvetch board was actually fun to read.

But you forced your open miker ass into the room and then proceeded to post 800 times a day about everything – and basically drove everyone off the board and turned the kvetch board into what it is today: a shitty open miker chat room. nice work.

fast forward several years – you and I have some decent conversations online before i get my board up – and i tell you well in advance that you probably won’t be in on the ground floor on my board but i’ll probably bring you on later – and you hit the roof – and then you try to sign on anyway without being invited on – and when i delete your application or whatever – you start calling it a “circle jerk” and a bunch of other shit. i guess it would have been cool if drob was in on it, but since she isn’t, then it’s lame.

talk about gall and audacity.

i’m all done with this horseshit, ok barryk?

good luck out in L.A. and all the best to you and yours.

over and out.

A few points:
(1) I think “lonely women” is misogynistic shorthand for “mouthy broad.” I’m OK with the latter, but the former is just so stupid;
(2) I’m in the Bay Area, that’s Northern California. I can’t see myself in LA LA land;
(3) The gall and audacity thing is a quote from my suggesting in our message session that someone who had historically been such a dick to me had gall for asking me to ease up on his poor, little, candy fragile ego;
(4) I have no fucking idea why he called me “barryk” (ah, right, he’s psycho);
(5) He’s mourning for a fictional webland, the one that I almost single-handedly ruined. If it ever did exist, I’m pretty sure his mentioning to rape to every women he didn’t want to fuck kind of helped scare off a few folks. More likely, like many a web forum, it started to lose to weblogs, myspace.com and other fun web stuff;
(6) Then as now, he rails against “open mikers.” He started comedy about a year or two before me. Hardly the grizzled vet. In fact, I’ve met some grizzled vets that think he’s a pissant wannabee;
(7) Better yet, I get paid now and again to perform, he’s drunk in the same clubs he got thrown out of when I started.

In closing, I’m deeply puzzled. Clearly, I am not playing the game like I should be. I’m just a cunty spoilsport. OK, all fair, I guess. But, why, oh fucking why, would someone who ever laid so much shit at my door believe that I should be friendly?

It’s not bitterness if you don’t go along with every fuckhead who asks you to be his chump.