Geekspotting - Episode III: Revenge Of The Aging Boomer

I quit once before. Really I did. After all the arguments around election time and being accused of being a "neocon" by some dumbfuck Baby Boomer because I talked about John Kerry being a crappy candidate, I decided it was enough. Besides the fact that I would get into arguments with an idiot college kid from some southern Christian school when he would compare homosexuality to pedophilia and bigamy (gay marriage issue was being pushed by the right during the election you remember) or the moron conservative from Kansas claiming that the NAACP is a racist organization, there was the attacks and diatribes from the aging Boomer. It wasn't that one had to be left to get his respect, it was that one had to agree with every one of his ideas and be his kind of lefty or you were just "helping the right." LouieB was trying to hold onto some sort of semblance of his past coolness, if it ever actually existed, that bagging on other people made him feel better about himself. He tried to use the words of the great anarchist Emma Goldman to prop up his reasons for voting for John Kerry. (I had a picture of her as my "avatar" - a picture that accompanies all of a person's posts - for a while, which is why he tried this tactic) I tried to explain to him that he was crazy if he was trying to argue that Emma Goldman would endorse a guy who lives in a $12 million home among other expensive vacation property. I would get long rants about how he knows so much more about anarchist than me or whatever other bullshit he would say, and then for some weird reason he then kept calling me comrade for a while. I'm telling you, he is a bizarre little man.

He actually preferred that others not be as liberal as him because it made him feel special to be the old lefty voice of reason or something. It made him the king of the board and woe to anyone who appeared to want to knock him off his throne. He loves being the old guy on the board, he thinks it makes him wise by comparison or something. He loves to tell us "young liberal" that we don't know how to have a good protest. He obviously missed the news during the week of the WTO protest in Seattle a few years back, when I choked down more tear gas in a week than he probably did during the entire Vietnam years. But it didn't matter to the dipshit, you had no lefty cred unless you did the exact same things as him, during the same time frame. This is a common illness among many in his over-hyped and under-achieved generation.

It was funny during the build up to the election because he got so frustrated with other people from the left who didn't see things exactly his way that he posted another long post that included the promise that this was the last he had to say and was going to stay out of the political threads until after the election. This of course lasted about an hour before he was back in it. My favorite thing to do was quote his promise every time he posted something in the political threads. He got really angry with me and accused me of stalking him because I was reminding him that he promised to stay out of the political topics. He really never had any intention of staying out, he just post things like that so others on the board would say "Oh Lou come on, stick around we like you" and other stupid shit like that. He would also call people something like "neocon and then ten minutes later claim he didn't do that. Someone would then show him the post where he did it and he a lot of the time would still deny it.

So I had enough of the headache and stopped checking in at viachicago.org.

And I was really good for a while. It had a lot to do with me starting this blog, which was the purpose of it at first. But I eventually fell back in. Really I just started checking back in to see things like tour dates that this guy who calls himself Solace (probably the one guy I would actually want to meet from the geekboard) would post and would often be the first place I heard about somebody on tour. But I made the mistake of checking out the threads again and I eventually was just sucked right back in. And this lead to more insane arguments with the southern Christian kid who calls himself "ikol" (apparently the name of some angel backwards. Who knew? Who cared?), or the Kansas Christian who calls himself "Uncle Wilco" and would claim that he was an "independent" even though you could get him to admit that he never voted for anything other than Republicans in his entire life. It still boggles my mind that Wilco has fans like this. My rejoining the fray also lead to the previously mentioned confrontation with the white-middle-class-fratboy with low self esteem, EL FAMOUS.

Then there were the music arguments that are just stupid. The whole "I know more than you" attitude just got so annoying. You know those record store clerk characters from High Fidelity? Funny, right? But imagine an internet message board full of them. Not so funny and cute in real (or virtual) life as they are in movies. Jamming an icepick in your eye can be more enjoyable that talking to these people. And a lot of them love Wilco, which is just a shame. I was talking to my buddy Trevor not too long ago, a guy who is a musician and also promotes shows for his job. He said something that really struck me as right on. We were talking about music, and Wilco in general, when he said something about avoiding getting into a conversation about music with a guy in a Wilco shirt because you're just asking for trouble. Trouble meaning basically about an hour long treatise on music where you don't get a word in edgewise and when you do you are told you're wrong. About everything. Our friendly neighborhood Baby Boomer was awesome at this too.

In my final days LouieB posted a long monologue/diatribe about the newest Wilco release, a double-disc live album called Kicking Television: Live In Chicago. His rant went on forever (like most of his postings) about how dare people call it "non-essential" and it is the greatest recording of an event ever and if you don't like the set list you are not a real Wilco fan and blah blah fucking blah. Someone would then post a short something about why they didn't like it very much but if LouieB does then that's cool by them. LouieB then would post another long rant questioning the persons taste, sanity, and intelligence. And he also did one of his favorite things to do when arguing any point about Wilco. He started a sentence with "When I was talking to Jeff (Tweedy, lead singer of Wilco) after the Otto's show last year, I said to him...." And then he would tell us what Jeff said back. He would do that a lot, somehow thinking that because he's one of those backstage hangers-on it gives him some sort of credibility. Or that if he says Jeff agrees with him that that somehow proves he's right. Yea, the guy who leads the band is at all likely to say "You know Lou, I disagree with you about this being the best version of Wilco ever, this line-up is just really weak and I'm really disappointed with myself."

It would go on like this forever, but I stayed out of it. The new live album had already become a tired argument. Basically, Wilco has put out the most boring live album since Depeche Mode's 101, or maybe even since Frampton Comes Alive, but if you dared say so you would feel the wrath of the old hippy wannabe. Seriously, I'm the biggest Wilco fan in the world, as most of my friends would attest, and this live album is a snooze-fest. Just like their most recent shows have been.

Mr. Generation Vietnam could even combine the music and politics idiocy from time to time. During the build up to the presidential election, Jeff Tweedy had taken to making a lot of funny jabs at Bush during Wilco shows. I, of course, think they were great. There were some people that weren't a big fan of him doing this. Wilco has never been a particularly vocal political band and a lot of people liked it that way. Some people don't go for the Bono treatment at concerts. To each their own. But if anyone said that on the message board they caught the grief of Mr. B. There were some people who said that even though they agreed with Jeff's politics, they just wanted to hear the music, not any political rants. LouieB attacked these people mercilessly, calling them neocons or "not real liberals" or even Bush supporters. Even after they would explain that they hated Bush and Republicans, they just didn't like their music and politics combined, the stupid Boomer just didn't get it. He continued to accuse people of exactly the opposite of what they said they believed. He then brought out his "big guns" of "When I talked to Jeff after the last show, I thanked him for his political speeches."

Well good for you fuckhead. I began to think how sick of this guy Mr. Tweedy must be, with Lou lurking backstage waiting to talk to him all the time.

But the straw that broke my back would come right after this. LouieB had been posting for some time for a get together of the Chicago based people on the board at a club on Chicago's South Side. He was basically unsuccessful, as a lot of people expressed interest, but nobody else went. The funny thing was him writing a review of the night after he went by himself. I was mildly interested in the thread because I miss Chicago and like reading about places I've been to. One thing that he said at one point bothered me. He mentioned at one point that there was no good way to get there on the CTA and he wouldn't suggest that anyone try it. My public transit geekiness kicked in at this point. Now, there is virtually no place in Chicago you can't get to on the CTA so I took issue with this. I wrote that this was bullshit and then wrote detailed instructions on how to get to the club with a combination of "L" train and bus, which would include getting off the bus at the stop right in front of the club's door. I also explained how you could call a cab from the club after the show, since it would be so late, to get to the L station for only a couple of bucks. A completely doable situation that I had done before. I ended my post with a flippant remark, "I swear, North Siders act like the South Side is a Third World country some times." This set off a fire storm. By the time I checked back in LouieB had already responded with two long posts, which means he responded to himself before I even wrote a second thing about it and was basically debating himself. He started off by saying that this was just my way of "dumping on" him like I always do. He also defended himself against some sort of charge that he was a racist. A couple of others chimed in to say that LouieB wasn't a racist and I couldn't figure out what the fuck they were talking about. So I responded that I didn't call anybody a racist (what I had meant by the "Third World" comment was that North Siders act like the South Side is a far away distant land with no modern conveniences or transportation), and even put more details in about the public transit options there are to that particular place. LouieB then posted another long diatribe that basically accused me of wanting the girls of VC to get raped and also repeated that he wasn't a racist. Then me again: "I didn't call anyone a racist, nor did I imply that anyone was a racist."

Then LouieB wrote another monologue that again accused me of wanting people to get raped, that I was ridiculous, idiotic, delusional and that I in fact did mean that he was a racist.

Me: "I didn't call you a racist. And all I'm doing is sharing information about how someone could go to this club on the CTA and be just as safe as driving down there and parking a block away and I've been down there many times this way"

LouieB: Looong monologue explaining to me how I implied that he was a racist, questioning my claim that I've ever even been to that neighborhood, let alone that club and wanting me to prove it, and trying to prove that he knows the neighborhood is not a safe one by bringing up a murder that happened on that street - 20 years ago. I shit you not, he really used a murder from two decades earlier as his only example of how unsafe the area is.

Me: I explained I don't care if he thinks I've been there or not, I'm just trying to let people know that you can get there by public transit if they want to and be relatively safe at the same time. If he disagrees that's fine, I said, but just like the argument over the Wilco record, his view is not the only one and there's no reason to call me names or accuse me of calling him a racist.

Other people chime in to say that LouieB is not a racist. Holy Fuck! I post again that I didn't call him a racist and that just because he claims that's what I meant that doesn't make it so. Then LouieB post another long diatribe calling me foolish and what not, and thanking people for defending his honor, saying shit like he's been riding the CTA since before I was born, and that I've probably never even been to that neighborhood (again with that claim, even though I knew exactly where the bus stop was), and then saying something about my wife going to that neighborhood by herself and would I want her to get raped or something along those lines. This got me really pissed. I started a long reply to tell him to leave my wife out of any conversations we have because she's none of his business and how this is another example of what a weasel he is for doing that and I would never bring his family into one of our arguments. I was pretty livid.

But then in the middle of writing it hit me. It wasn't that I was letting some pathetic aging Baby Boomer on a message board piss me off that was getting to me. Or that I was caring so much about what this guy was telling other people about getting around Chicago, even if he was wrong (but that was a sign of the addiction to be sure). It was that I realized I was in danger of possibly becoming this guy. It was then that I had the same feeling as the moment I decided to quit smoking for good. It was a feeling of "this isn't what I'm about, so I'm going to stop." I finished my post with a "So long VC, it's been unreal," and I got out. I didn't go back to check the Boomer's idiotic responses or anything. I just signed out and walked away from the computer.

The sorry part is that I know exactly how he responded anyway, without even looking.



Epilogue
It has been almost a month now since I last logged on to ViaChicago. I think I finally have it beat. Sometimes I find myself looking it up on the favorites menu, but I always stop myself. It's like when I quit smoking and would find myself reaching into my pocket when I got off the subway or while waiting for the bus. Old habits die hard. But I really don't miss it. The number of hours that I wasted on there was staggering. When I left the board I had passed the 2000 posts mark, accumulated over the course of 2+ years. Someone congratulated me when I hit it, or I may not have even realized. I certainly didn't want to become one of the people who bragged about it like it was some sort of accomplishment. Seriously, some people at that place have celebrated their 10,000th or 15,000th post (like LouieB and EL FAMOUS, just to name two) and the site has only been around since about 2002 or so. And they wear it like a badge of honor, even to the point of people trying to catch the leader all the time (usually a guy called Analogman). I always wondered what they are so proud of. It seems to me like saying "Hey, I'm so cool! I watched my millionth hour of TV!"

But it is over for me now. Every day I'm getting stronger and stronger.....