Tag: Me Myself I

Personal stuff

It’s All Fun & Games, Until

Men & Women

Okay, I might as well admit to it: I love reading Britain’s Daily Mail Online. I know it’s trash, and they’re absolutely the worst people in the world, but it’s like Train Smash Women (I’ll explain that term tomorrow): it’s foul and horrible, but you can’t help yourself.

Here’s a wonderful example (from the DM last Friday): Naked man is spotted teetering on a window-ledge of French apartment block ‘after woman’s partner arrives home’. Go ahead and look (you know you want to); I’ll wait.

I think one of the reasons that these ridiculous stories appeal to me so much is that so often, something very similar has happened to me. And the above story is one such example.

Back when I still lived in Johannesburg — from memory, this was in about 1980 — I lived close to an area called Hillbrow, which was Johannesburg’s equivalent of, say, what the Bronx is to Manhattan: a dizzying array of high-rise apartment buildings in what was at the time the most densely-populated area in the entire Southern Hemisphere (back then it even rivaled Hong Kong in terms of population per square mile). Where I lived was a similar, but not quite as densely populated area known as Braamfontein, which was walking distance (about three miles) from Hillbrow, and next door to Johannesburg’s enormous main train station. All this is to give you some kind of scale for the calamity which is to follow.

I was at some party or other in Hillbrow, and ended up flirting with this rather cute woman. She told me that she was engaged to some guy, but he was always away doing contract construction work and because of that she felt lonely and neglected. One thing led to another (booze, mostly), with the inevitable outcome that we ended up in bed at her apartment. (Nowadays, of course, Good Kim would never have taken advantage of her vulnerability, but in 1980, 25-year-old Evil Kim ruled the roost, so to speak.) Here’s what happened next:

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My Friends, Part 1: The Yanks

Grief & Loss

Today is the day I finally move out of the Plano house where Connie and I spent the last dozen or so years of our lives together, raised the kids into adulthood and ran two consultancies as well as my blog and our podcast. We loved the place — actually, Connie found it in the online listings, loved it, ran through the numbers to make sure we could afford it, then found us another house to look at first just so I could say that I preferred the second one, and she could get the one she wanted in the first place. Sneaky? No, respectful. She knew that as much as I respected her judgement, I’d want to be part of the decision-making process, and she engineered the thing so we could both get what we wanted. Did I care when she later confessed her little subterfuge? Of course not; on the contrary, I was grateful for her consideration. And I wasn’t the only grateful one: for the first time in their lives, the kids were living in a house that wasn’t rented, and it gave them a solid grounding and foundation — a place to call “home” — at last. And they flourished.

Now they’ve all left home, and Connie’s left as well. And finally, we get to the point of this post.

The generous people who have contributed to my GoFundMe appeal have helped me take care of many of my outstanding financial obligations stemming from Connie’s medical condition, and at least my financial condition is no longer the looming disaster it was — THANK YOU. I know some of you quite well — we’ve met in person, even if just briefly — and of course there’s been that relationship with my Loyal Readers developed over many years. (As one Longtime Reader put it when I wrote to thank him for his large donation: “Let’s just call it a late payment on all those years of enjoyment you gave me with your old blog. Now get going on the new one.”) What the appeal has done has taken the burden of financial ruin away (mostly, anyway; I’ve got a little way to go still — if you haven’t been there yet, please consider it). But I have to tell you all, the incredible and generous response to the appeal has lifted my spirit beyond measure, and the horrifying prospect of utter destitution has been staved off. Thank you all, again.

Then we have my close friends.

I have spoken of these friends in the past, and it is absolutely no exaggeration to say that without them, I have no idea what I’d have done in the dreadful month following Connie’s death — or, for that matter, what I’d do with the rest of my life altogether. I’m going to list my closest American friends first — we’ll get to the Brits in another post — and use their online handles to spare them any embarrassment (and if you know their real names, please avoid using them if you go to Comments). They have been astonishing — “they” being Doc Russia, Combat Controller (CC), and Trevor (my South African buddy of over thirty years). They’ve called me daily with sympathy, support and advice, and sometimes just to check up on me, despite their own hectic schedules, and if I’ve called them in varying stages of despair and melancholy to bleat out my woes, I’ve never hung up the phone at the end without feeling better, more hopeful and less lonely than when I dialed.

We all know the part about actions speaking louder, right? CC and Trevor both live in Austin, but they come up to the Big D fairly often, and always spend time with me.
Trevor canceled a business trip (to Tokyo, I think) to be with me the week after Connie’s death, and helped me with the funeral home arrangements as well as with countless other painful details.
CC has been a voice of commonsense in financial advice — in my fucked-up state I would have made some appalling screwups  without him — and on more than one occasion his level-headed analysis has saved my bacon.

And now we come to Doc.

When the oncologist gave us Connie’s final, dreadful diagnosis, Doc told me in no uncertain terms that he was not going to let me move into some tiny little apartment and stare at the wall all day and night; instead, he told me (and I mean ordered me) to move in with him for a whole year so he could help me get through this horrible shit storm that was going to be my life. Clearly, he knew better than I how much Connie’s death was going to devastate me, and he was not going to allow bad things to happen to me. (He’s divorced, so there’s no wifely issue on me moving into his house.) When I feebly protested his overwhelming generosity, he basically told me to shut up. “I work long hours in the E.R., and it’ll be good to have someone look after the place. Also, when I go on my African safari in the spring, that means the house won’t be empty. And in any case, I’ll always have a hangout buddy, a companion to go shooting with, and a drinking partner when I feel like going to the bar. Believe me, there’s no downside to this.”

So today I move not into the apartment I rented in downtown Plano — Daughter’s living there and paying the rent until I’m ready to claim it back — but into the guest suite in Doc’s house.

As I said earlier, I’ll get to the Brit contingent in a later post; but it is absolutely no exaggeration to say that Doc, CC and Trevor have literally saved my life, in just about every sense of the word. They have been friends in need, and friends in deed.

“Thank you” can’t even begin to cover it.

Not That I Care, But

Culture

According to some smart guy, here’s how you know that you’re genuinely intelligent:

  1. You learn from mistakes
  2. You read for fun
  3. You can argue from multiple perspectives
  4. You think before you speak
  5. You don’t care what others think.

Well, duh.

  1. If you don’t learn from your (and others’) mistakes, then at best you’re like the socialists, who never acknowledge the failure of their pet philosophy, but keep on repeating it in the vain hope that this time it will work. It’s also one of the main reasons I’ve always studied history, especially European history, because they’ve made more mistakes than just about anyone else — or at least, they wrote about their mistakes, unlike some African societies I could mention.
  2. Anyone who doesn’t read for fun had better have a decent excuse, or be thought stupid. When we homeschooled our kids, three hours’ reading a day was mandatory. Now they read more than I do, which is a little scary. This is why when I see the moronic expression “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read) in any forum, my response is inevitably “ts;dd” (too stupid; don’t debate).
  3. If you can’t argue from perspectives other than your own, then you’re going to lose the argument. Every single one. Knowing the other guy’s thoughts is critical to rebuttal.
  4. Gotta say that I don’t always think before I speak. Generally, however, that’s in response to an insult or a threat; in genial discussion, I always consider not only the words I’m going to use, but the effect they may have on others, just out of politeness. This is true when I’m with friends; with strangers, I’m a lot less careful.
  5. Guilty as charged. I found out that caring about the opinions of others makes one too vulnerable, and it also makes one’s writings and arguments less compelling. Not caring also makes one impervious to insult, which is why all those screams of misogyny and racism hurled at me by liberals and other twerps had (and have) no effect on me whatsoever. I especially love it when they call me “stupid”.

This doesn’t mean I’m “genuinely intelligent”, however. It’s just wisdom learned from experience, which I guess is just an encapsulation of all five points. No intelligence necessary, just common sense.

Altered Ego

Guy Stuff

Writing that postscript about my friend Patterson last week brought up a random thought about alter egos, because when I first made him public on the old blog a couple of people genuinely thought that I was using him as a proxy to make all sorts of outrageous and non-PC utterances. I let it ride and never commented one way or the other because I found it amusing.

For pretty much all of my online life I’ve blogged, written and commented using my actual name — it’s called “taking responsibility for what you say” — and therefore I don’t need to hide behind anyone else’s persona to call Hillary Clinton a rancid Commie bitch, John McCain a wartime hero / peacetime fuckup, or Chuck Schumer a loathsome cocksucker, as I have been known to do on occasion.

With all that said, though, I have to say that there have been two Kims in my lifetime: a naughty, horrible, cruel and mischievous Kim who would do anything for a laugh or a dare, the more outrageous the better — and let’s just call him “Evil Kim”. Evil Kim once told a boss to stop fucking with me and instead go home to fuck his wife, as I had done the night before (and yes, I had indeed done just that, while he was out of town on a business trip — it was her idea, by the way, and she eventually left him because he was a total dickhead). As Evil Kim, I once put a fist through an office wall because I got sick of some asshole taunting me — actually, the punch was intended for him, but I misjudged the distance between us.  When the CEO called me into his office to reprimand me for the action, I told him the circumstances behind the punch, and said that he could fire me if he wanted to, but I wasn’t going to apologize either privately or in public. He didn’t fire me (I have no idea why not, other than maybe because I was really good at my job and our clients loved me). Evil Kim was also a serious philanderer who kicked down the door of several ladies’ boudoirs to have his way with them, sometimes two in the same night and once, memorably, four times over a single weekend. Evil Kim also stuck a gun (Colt Combat Commander) into a guy’s nose when said guy took offence to Evil Kim having bedded his wife on a camping trip while the cuckold was out on the lake in a boat, fishing — and it wasn’t the first time I’d stuck a gun up a guy’s nose, either.

That, then, is a thumbnail portrait of Evil Kim.

Many years later came a quieter, kinder, less abrasive Kim — and we’ll call him “Nice Kim”. Nice Kim was (and is) more respectful of people’s feelings, would be less likely to get into fistfights in bars over trivial arguments, is not on first-name terms with most barmen (and especially barmaids) in the area, and might only lash out when severely irritated or provoked.

Nice Kim came about because I met and fell in love with a woman named Connie, back in 1996. Within a very short space of time Connie gentled me, made me less of an absolute bastard and more acceptable, say, in polite company — something that no other woman, including a brace of ex-wives, had managed to do.  What may astonish you is that the person you’ve known through this and earlier blogs has actually been Nice Kim writing.

I’ll leave to your imagination what kind of blog would have been written by Evil Kim.

I won’t say that Nice Kim has had the field all to himself, though. A good friend once called me long-distance to tell me of his frustration about the fact that his kid sister was being abused by her asshole of a husband. I listened till he reached the end of his story, and asked him what he wanted me to do about the situation — and without prompting, Evil Kim outlined his options. Did he want me just to chastise the little prick, say, into a hospital ward? Or did he want the wife-beater to go away? When my friend realized the implications of what I was actually offering, he calmed down a great deal and told me that I didn’t need to get involved, he’d take care of the matter himself.

Now that Connie has left my life, I’ve noticed that Evil Kim occasionally pokes his head around the corner, eager to make my re-acquaintance. I have to say, I’ve kinda missed the old rogue and we may go out and play together in the future.

Just in closing, I told a close friend about Nice Kim and Evil Kim (he’s only ever known Nice Kim). He listened as I went through a small part of the catalog of horrors (and they were far, far worse than the ones I mentioned above). When I was done, I warned him about the possibility of Evil Kim putting in the occasional appearance. His only comment: “I can’t wait.”

Which should tell you all about the caliber of my friends.