Geekspotting - Episode II: Attack Of The Whiteys

Prologue
When I was still living in Chicago I would go to this great internet place near my apartment. It was great because it was cheap and they were open 24 hours and I didn't have a computer so it was my only way to go online. All I did online anyway was email, read several newspapers, check for music news/tours of my favorite bands, and see what was happening in baseball. The 24 hour aspect of the place was the best part. Since it was such a cheap place (I don't remember for sure, but I think it was something like a dollar/hour or close to that cheap, which is probably why they went out of business) they were always really busy during the day and I couldn't always get on a machine. Since I like to stay up late anyway I would go in the middle of the night, say 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning after a rehearsal or a show I was doing (or after the bar), and there would only be a couple of other people in there. But sometimes those one or two other people would be freaky. There was sometimes these couple of guys that would be at different computers but on the same web site that was either a chat room or message board. And they would type like madmen and talk to each other while doing it. And they would be saying things to each other like "Oh my god, did he just say that to you?", or "Ooooh, you burned her good", or "Fuck him man, he's an ass hole", or "Watch this man, I'm totally going to scorch this guy."

And they would get really worked up and animated, punching the keys harder and harder if they were having an argument with some unseen internet person. Loud gasps at perceived slights and cheers for each other when they "got somebody good." I remember thinking how pathetic they were. "What losers. That'll never be me...."



I love music. Sometimes I'm an obsessive music fan, as many of my friends would tell you. I especially love Wilco. I've seen them now somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 times, including Jeff Tweedy solo show. Probably the only person I've seen more is Robyn Hitchcock, who I started seeing before Tweedy ever even started touring with his first band, Uncle Tupelo. Wilco is certainly not the first band/musician I've been obsessed with (the list includes U2, REM, Hitchcock and Billy Bragg, among others), but no doubt they have been my favorite band since their second album, Being There, came out in 1996. The name of my blog was even inspired by a lyric from that album. So, it's fair to say, I'm a fan.

I always thought of myself as "the music fan" in my group of friends. You know, the one who knows so much about different bands and is tuned into what's going on. You know, I saw myself as the "hip" guy when it came to music. Turns out that hasn't really ever been the case. I might be more "music obsessed" of most of my friends but I am not by any measure the only one who is into music in a big way. Mostly it's that I like a lot of different stuff than a good number of my friends and I've always been way more vocal about my opinions on music than most of them. Like a lot of music geeks, I wear my heart on my sleeve and a chip on my shoulder. I would get so annoyed with friends who I would play something for, that I considered a masterpiece and they wouldn't dig it. "What are you, CRAZY!!!" I would say to them. I always thought it would be cool to know more people who were into all the same music as me, especially people who are obsessed with the same band. You know, other people that would also do things like go to all three nights of a Tweedy solo concert at the Vic Theatre or plan a trip out to the east coast to visit your fiance around the dates of the Vermont and Boston Wilco shows. This would turn out to not really be the case.

As I wrote earlier, I signed up on the Wilco fan site message board after moving to Boston in 2003. After several months of trading for copies of live shows and entering conversations on a multitude of topics on the message board, I was already an addict. Like any drug, you don't realize your an addict while you're still having a good time. It is only when you start to hate it and can't stop that it may (or often may not) dawn on you that you have a problem. Even petty little arguments didn't make me realize it right away. Someone might shit on me for professing a love of Michelle Shocked, or call me an ass hole for saying I consider Guided By Voices or Radiohead overrated. But it was all OK at first, just some spirited conversations. My favorite was a woman who really didn't like The Replacements and referred to them as "just drunk Midwesterners." I completely disagreed with her but told her I loved the way she made fun of them. Some people took great umbrage with her though and would start digging on her favorite band just to be ass holes about it. And that would eventually disintegrate to name calling and other insults. Basically, some people took things way too seriously. A person could get called all sorts of names for not endorsing the greatness of whatever indie cool band or classic rockers

Then we got closer and closer to the presidential election of 2004. And just like everywhere else in the country, tempers got hotter and hotter. Mean spiritedness became the law of the land. Even people that apparently agreed with each other politically would snipe at each other. I was told by this pathetic baby-boomer called LouieB that I wanted Bush to be reelected. According to him (and many others), not only was I to blame for his first election by voting for Nader, but I must obviously want him to win again since I was supporting Kucinich. Gotta love it when someone tells you your motives for how you vote or do anything else. I tried to explain that if I wanted Bush to win I would just vote for him, but that didn't seem to compute with the dumb hippy.

One of the worst is this douche who calls himself EL FAMOUS. You read that right. You really have to wonder about the self-esteem problems of someone who gives himself the nickname El Famous, with all caps no less. He seemed to see himself as the all-knowing cool kid on the board, as well as "the funny one." You ever meet those guys who think they're really funny, but aren't even close to actually being funny? And that their insults or put-downs are clever, but are really just childish and stupid? Everybody seems to know one of them, and ViaChicago has their very own George Castanza. Most of his humor seemed to be centered on something to do with Yetis. My guess is that he found out what one was and thought it was a funny word. Kind of like Beavis and Butthead would. "Heh heh, Yeti. Yeah, heh heh, that's a great word. I'm going to use that in all my jokes now."

You could always tell when he didn't have a counter argument to what you were arguing. He would do something like post a picture of a crying kid (Get it? He's calling you a baby. Genius!) or some bad put down that he would follow with his trademark "Owned!!!!11!!!!"

I understood the "owned" part of his pedestrian, Midwestern, middle-class white boy exclamation, but I never did understand the exclamation points with the number 11 in the middle. I suppose it was meant to be funny, whatever it meant. There were a lot of things that I think he meant to be funny that just never were.

It is so glaringly obvious that the guy was extremely unpopular in high school and got beat up a lot. Later in life, by his own admission on the board, he couldn't get his wife pregnant without help from medical science. So I guess everyone else has to pay for his doubts about his manhood. He couldn't fulfill his dream of being a bully in the real world so the cyberworld will have to do. He is a legend in his own mind. And he decided at some point that I would be his main target. I think mostly because I wouldn't put up with his shit or just let him bag on people without calling him on it. I like to stand up to bullies. Even pussy cyber-bullies. It really became some sort of weird stalking thing. I could be engaged in a conversation with someone else on the board and he would suddenly chime in and start bitching at me about something I said to them. And he would say he was just defending a friend I was attacking. He would even get defensive about shit I didn't even say or mean. I made a comment one time, how this conversation even got started I have no idea, about how less children get adopted because of the increase of the effectiveness of fertility drugs. He jumped all over me of course. He seemed to think I was attacking him because he and his wife had fertility treatment. He went on and on about the cost of adoption and that was the real reason for it. It was just ridiculous. I wanted to say, but didn't, that if you are going to be defensive about needing help to knock-up your wife, you probably shouldn't tell everyone on an internet message board about it. But he needs the attention, that's why he does it.

This guy was so starved for attention that one time he posted a long monologue proclaiming he was quitting the board and that he wasn't appreciated and he was sorry if he offended people and blah blah blah. So of course he got what he was fishing for. People telling him he was all right and "please don't leave the board" and other stupid shit. Of course he didn't ever actually leave the board, nor did he ever have the intention. That same day he had already signed up and started posting with another user name, I believe it was El Diablo. He stuck with that for a while before too many people had figured it out. Geez, what a loser.

Really I shouldn't have even bothered talking to the little twerp. He is exactly the kind of suburban frat-boy type I try to avoid being around at all cost. The suburbs around Chicago, where this dweeb lives, are full of them too. Guys who wish they were back in college doing beer-bongs and date raping drunks sorority sisters but instead are working some sad, unfulfilling office job at a shitty place like Motorola in some horrible office park complex in Schaumburg. All the while stuck in a horrible town like Palatine, where the most exciting thing to do is go get $1.50 PBRs at Durty Nellies and listen to yet another crappy suburban cover band. If you're lucky, maybe they'll do that Journey song and dedicate it to the World Champion White Sox! All you need to do is puke in the Burger King parking lot by the end of the night and you've had a classic Palatine Saturday night.

It really came to a head during the whole hurricane Katrina week when I got sick and tired of his (and others) holier-than-though judgments of the survivors. Typical of the white, middle class members of the ViaChicago community, he kept going on and on about the people looting and "how can they do such thing?", and "I can't understand" and "WHY WHY WHY?!?!"

I then made a point that it was really easy for middle-class white folks to be sitting in their air-conditioned home or office (where they are so overworked they have plenty of time to be posting on pointless message boards) sipping on their lattes judging the actions of a group of people that have just experienced a disaster beyond their comprehension. I pointed out that these people were trying to stay alive and that if they had been in that position they have no idea what kind of things they might do to survive. Well, I really upset the herd this time. I heard it big time. I was told by several people that they knew for sure they would never loot from a store no matter what happened. It was so ridiculous that these idiots couldn't even wrap their brain around the idea that they could do something irrational or even officially (gasp) illegal in a desperate situation. My typing became pounding as I tried to reason with these privileged white people in their comfortable lives passing judgment on a group of people that had basically become refugees in our own country. The best, of course, was the response from El Famous. Not only did he defend his statements, but he went in to a long passionate defense of his right to buy a latte from Starbucks if he wants because he works hard for his money and if he chooses to buy an expensive coffee drink then I shouldn't judge him for that.

That was just priceless. But not nearly as priceless as when he decided to defend FEMA and accused people of being armchair quarterbacks for criticizing Michael Brown and Company. He was an even bigger dumbfuck then I thought. And I had found myself in the same cyber-social situation with someone so fucking stupid. It made me want to scream.

At that moment I thought of the immortal words of Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show. You know the lines:

"Why do we always come here?
I guess we'll never know
It's like a kind of torture
To have to watch the show."

I also thought of something my buddy Mando said to me one time about only listening to music that was so incredibly white. I think it was finally starting to dawn on me what he was trying to say.

My addiction was at its peak, though. But I was about to hit rock bottom. And the bottom would look a lot like an old baby boomer.


To be continued...