An interlude of self-reflection, introspection and bullshit detection.+PLUS+ Alternative titles

Got a mysterious message on Facebook:

I appreciate the sentiment, but I’ve had too many people leave before their time, so … I’ll pass.

This was a Facebook “friend”, in the version that is a complete stranger, spurning some advance I didn’t recall making.

Question marks floating around my head, a kind of agnostic’s halo, and a flashback to my drunk-dialling days.

You know, when I would get hammered on six cans of “Maximum Ice“, call my boss or co-worker or acquaintance—the common factor being someone with whom I had only the most tenuous or most strictly delimited social connection— and confess my romantic and-or lust-fueled love, or give them my unvarnished critique of their current personality disorder, take your pick; pass out, then regain consciousness in a newly expressed, still-moist cocoon of blackout-fueled existential dread.

Ick! Ick! ICK!

I’ve since mastered existential dread without the amnesia, and can I just say thank you bloody thank you, Bill W. and Doctor Bob, with a hurried fifty bucks under the table to Jean-Paul Sartre, for your gift that keeps on giving.

But one’s nature will out, and I retain my genius for throwing shade by the act of simply breathing—someday I’ll regale you with the story of how I was kicked out of San Francisco, which probably represents my own personal Golden Globe Award for Most Annoying – so I asked my complete-stranger-friend what I’d “done”.

What I’d done was invite him to “like” the Facebook page associated with this blog.

In other words, he was offended by the title and unable to get past it or understand it as just a random statement.

He was triggered by the title to recall the AIDS crisis of the ’80s and he was thinking that “slow painful death” was the literal, and the only, topic to be found here, when it is actually – if I think about it at all, and better late than never, I guess – just a way to signal “in your face / hyperbole / exaggerated / satirical / hey, pay attention”.

And that’s giving me every break, which I like to do until such time as someone else gets the hint.

Well.

Sound of penny dropping,  but since the penny has been removed from circulation, think “Sudbury nickel”.

A satori, adjusted for inflation and linked to the Consumer Price Index then expanded to the proportions of a 1950’s B-movie UFO.

I wonder, as I look at my underwhelming stats, how many others have been repelled by the title of my blog, without even giving themselves the chance to be repelled by the actual content, and without giving me the feedback.

To paraphrase Noël Coward:  “Bloggers should be struck regularly, like gongs.”

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Feel free to comment.  I need the attention.

QUICK CHALLENGE
I will now come up with 12 14 15 alternative titles for this blog in two forty-five minutes.

 Voting is now open.  What am saying? Closed, OK?   Closed…

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