Easter

What one come across in one's travel through the BlogShare's-indexed blogosphere:

Easter, as you probably know, is when Christians celebrate their myth of a dark-skinned Middle Eastern man emerging from his tomb looking like a very white, neatly-bearded Mid-Western Bible salesman wearing a dressing gown and sandals.

(The Easter Story, American Fez, March 21, 2008)

Pitiful

Now Mr. Rantzypants says he was never my friend. Interesting. I suppose that's why he introduced me to his wife, right, because we weren't friends? And why we played so hard together, right, because we weren't friends? And why he was constantly telling me about his most important relationships, right, because we weren't friends?

And why would he tell me about the pain and disappointment he experienced about the behavior of his former lover, the father of his precious Birds, if he didn't think of me as a friend?

Or tell me about ...

• the intimate details of his personal life


• the details of his medical conditions


• about his boss and his work life


• about his daily pain levels

Those are things you'd talk about with someone who wasn't your friend, right?

Let's see. What else. Oh yes, here are some other topics of conversation between us. They clearly indicate that Rantz never thought of me as his friend:

• his need to leave work, or stay home from work, or go on vacation


• his efforts to get promoted


• his beliefs


• his home life, his apartment, his proximity to the beach


• his plans to move in a year or so


• where he had lived in the past, where he came from


• his former lovers


• his first, middle, and last names, his heritage, etc.


• who he found attractive/ who he'd "do"

Yeah, it sounds like he never thought of me as his friend.

Especially when you consider how often he asked me about how I was feeling physically, and how often I asked him the same. Chronic pain is an experience we have in common. But again, that kind of frequent checking in with each other certainly doesn't connote friendship, does it?

Right.

You engage in intimate sharing of private information and feelings with someone, but you don't consider her to be a friend. OK. Some times when it looks like a friend and acts like a friend it turns out not to be a friend.

I was mistaken, deluded, right?

Pitiful.

loving the skew-er, hating the skew

Today, while looking for a few good blogs in the 500-750 top blogs list, I ran across the Pownce blogs of various players, so I checked them out. And there I found Rantz spewing more skew.

He asks indirectly if I remember the day I asked if he, BB, and I should exchange passwords so we could cheatypants.

ROFL. PIFFLE. SKEW.

Backstory: An age ago, Rantz, BB, Hildy, and a handful of others, including me, were playing in the trenches together against the coalition of super players who were and had been dominating the wee little bit of the Shares Market that was worth playing. We were hooking up in YM conferences all the time, we had our little blog where we communicated, tracked who owned what blog, and who owed whom money for arte uses. Yep, we were a regular little corp in the days before corps were created: friends, friendly, chatting with each other all the time while fiendishly hyping, buzzing, PRDing, slumping, PPing, passing blogs around among ourselves, and strategizing. We were having fun, working and playing together, and smarting off all the time. The language was fierce, as was the play.

Rantz' (indirect) question has reminded me of those times, and of a tough battle that had artes worn out and victors giddy, when I said something like "I don't suppose we should share passwords with each other, should we?" It was a rhetorical question, a bit of banter among players-in-arms and nothing more. I'd say I'm surprised to hear that Rantz took it as a serious request, a serious suggestion to cheat among Index Managers, but unfortunately I have to say I've learned, to my sadness, that Rantz has ways of seeing things that are at odds with the experience of my senses.

If I were anal, or a true geek, I'd have a copy of that YM, but I don't. (Yes, I looked.) To the extent I can even remember it, I remember something said in fun, in adrenalin overdrive, in jest. I suppose if I were really a cheatypants, there'd be lots of other players who could come forward and remind me of the day I asked them to cheat with me. Probably some other IMs, too. But there aren't. And they won't. Cause I didn't.

This charge is, well, sheer piffle.

And that's the thing. Rantz. Did you think I meant seriously to engage you and BB in cheating, when our primary connection was a joint venture of protecting and defending the integrity of the Index? Did you think that and not bother to discuss it with me? It's not like we weren't having weekly meetings where we discussed IM/Index things and personal things, too. Or did you just add this to an apparently growing list of dissatisfactions that you never mentioned to me, despite those weekly meetings? Apparently so, and how sad that is.

It's not the first glimpse I've had of your skew. In some blog post when you were pissed off at Island Dave, you said you left the game (the first time) because BOD wouldn't let you present your (whatever) case to them. Rantz, have you forgotten the meeting I worked hard to organize, the one that you, Dave, Rob, Jason and I all agreed to, and scheduled? Did you not understand that I went out of my way to make this happen, just one more of the many ways I supported you as Lead IM? Did you not understand that Dave went out of his way to agree to a meeting, when he had been rarely on site because of family and work demands? Did not the conversations you had started in the Water Cooler suffice, conversations that both Game Admins (and SubWolf, too, if I remember correctly) participated in?

Clearly not. And then, what did you do? You cancelled the meeting out of the blue, told us you were going to take the weekend to decide whether to continue with B$ or not, and then after that, you quit.

I still don't know why you quit in such bitterness and acrimony, but of course we've seen that happen again since then. You posted crap about me on your blog and refused to let me respond there. Why is that, Rantz? We'll never know, since there's only skew, innuendo, and gossip where there should be straightforward communication and confliction resolution, adult behavior among adults of good will.

If by some miracle you've read this far (any of you), I'd just like to go on the record as saying this:

Rantz, I love you. You'll never know how much I grieved the loss of our friendship.

Sage