The following essay was written some time ago. This is meant to explain the references to El Paso and Dayton, two towns that experienced mass shootings within days of each other. My suspicion is that anyone stumbling onto this little essay will have forgotten those events, as we are conditioned to forget tragedies perpetrated by American citizens, especially when they have to do with guns. I post the essay here and now after failed attempts to place it elsewhere and a sense of finally needing to get this off my chest in a public way.
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Today I unfriended and blocked a Facebook friend because he claimed the recent mass shooting in El Paso was a false flag operation. The friend in question is not a real friend, at least not anymore, by which I mean that we knew each other when we were in high school and used to be close, but we haven’t breathed the same air— literally or figuratively— in years. So many IRL (ugh, acronyms) friendships migrate to social media, where they are preserved in digital amber to be taken out and looked at with nostalgia or something close to it, but few of these relationships can be called “friends” in the traditional sense. I’m hardly the first to make this point— a very dead horse by now— but it bears repeating for the purposes of what I’d like to get into for a bit.
My “friend” has been sending me troubling messages through Facebook for. . . wow, maybe a few years now. Coming from anyone else, these messages would be alarming. But I know him. Or knew him. I have spent enough time with him in the past to know that he is what my wife calls “a funny chicken,” sort of like an odd duck but without as much charm. He’s a weirdo. That’s fine— so am I. But his previous brand of weird manifested in obsessions with quirky music, deep fondness for the ‘80s pop culture on which we were reared, regular visits to swing sets well into his thirties, and an odd but benign fixation on Amy Fisher. None of this was too weird, though things got progressively stranger the longer we corresponded.
Perhaps the most relevant story is the one about his BB gun. My friend bought this minor weapon, which he was excited to show me. We had plans to get together after I finished my shift at the rotten mail sorting facility where I worked. The thing about that job was that one never really knew when they were getting out. The mail needed to be sorted, and no one could leave until the task was complete. I estimated that I’d be done by 9, so my friend drove to my family’s home around then (these were the days before texting) and waited in his car for me to show. Growing impatient, and wanting to play with his new toy, he went to the backyard and started practicing how he’d pull the gun on a would be assailant, basically doing a Travis Bickle routine sans “You talkin’ to me?” My mother was in the kitchen and saw a shadowy figure with a gun in her backyard. She was seconds away from calling the police. Lucky for my friend, I walked in just as she was reaching for the phone.
That’s a typical story about my friend, and it paints an accurate picture of him: intimidating in dark, but in the light. . . just a harmless oddball. To be sure, he was (I can only use the past tense because, again, I’ve not seen him in years) a strange dude, though never so much that it bothered me. I’ve been told that I attract oddballs, that I have a higher level of patience for them than most people. This may be true, and is likely a reflection of my own oddball nature. I can certainly state that I find eccentricities fascinating. While not inclined to make a Kerouac style proclamation about how “the only people for me are the mad ones,” I’m often bored by conventional conversations, small talk, accepted ideas of normalcy, cookie-cutter theories, easy answers, slogans, anthems, popular notions of right and wrong. But that sounds pretentious— let me put it this way: my friend, like many other people I’ve known, was rarely boring. And I apparently like that, even if the excitement gives way to ugliness. How else do I explain putting up with racist rhetoric and aggrieved male bullshit for the last few. . . again, has it been years?
For a large amount of time I’m still trying to calculate, my only interaction with this person has been through a computer. First emails to my work address. Long ones that waited for me each morning as I drank coffee and prolonged the daily tasks. Before answering my boss or the numerous clients waiting for replies, I responded to my friend’s angry missives. And they were quite angry. He had his pet issues: liberals, the Frankfurt School, socialism and communists and Marxists (all the same to him), the LGBTQ community, feminists, Muslims, minorities, basically anyone who was making his tiny world seem smaller. Claims of white genocide were common. Brutish quotes and skewed data pulled from Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and Jordan Peterson were repackaged in drunken screeds against all things leftist, and often at me directly. I was no longer Vince; I was the enemy. The progressive Marxist who was either directly plotting to unseat white men from their place of power, or just the useful idiot who’d been duped by the sinister forces of The Left. Gays were out to force their agenda on straights. Feminists were seeking to wrest control from men, upsetting eons of established order and betraying the cherished archetypical traditions that were just the natural way of things. A secret plot to rid the world of fair skinned, red headed humans was underway. Immigrants and refugees were flooding white spaces and muddying things with their pigmentation.
It’s not like every message was so overtly ugly. He did write a lot of things that were just defensible enough to give him a shaky leg to stand on, though anyone with a moderately critical eye could see the larger point: cherished traditions were being destroyed by progressive ideologies. The world was unfair to him specifically, and the cause was well-meaning, wrongheaded liberalism. When I called him on his racism— when he, for example, claimed that whites were more intelligent than other races— he replied along the lines of, “I’m not a racist! There is data that shows the average IQ of different races with whites being the highest, second Asians, and down the line to blacks being lowest.” That this would strike any reasonable person as modern day eugenics, and that sociopolitical realities underpin whatever goofy data he presented, was lost on this Mensa member. (I once told him that “mensa” in Spanish means stupid girl, a point he was not happy to receive.)
The thing is, he would often apologize. He has (and here I can confidently use the present tense) a drinking problem. I’d seen it in person. And I have years of documented evidence of it in writing. There was a reason he wrote me these gross messages at night while I was asleep. He was up late, drunk, feeling vulnerable and angry and untethered. He needed an outlet. I was willing to give him one.
Not anymore. Though lines had been crossed time and again, today I decided that enough was finally enough. What fueled this decision was the tragic news of another shooting, this time in Dayton, Ohio just hours after a seriously terrifying event in El Paso, Texas. And, with the news of the second active shooter, the dead, the wounded, the horror of it all, the numbed reactions of so many (myself included), the immediate call for increased oversight and regulations on the firearm industry, the more “radical” call for banning all guns, the reactionary “Now, now. . . ” from second amendment advocates— all of which predictably precipitated feckless calls for “someone” to “do something,” bullshit thoughts and prayers, and sickening statements from the NRA— none of which will change a fucking thing. . . atop all of this I saw a message waiting on Facebook. Like a scab I couldn’t stop myself from scratching, I opened it, read it. My friend— likely while intoxicated, but is that really an excuse?— claimed that El Paso was a false flag operation conducted in the name of confiscating guns from American citizens in an effort to usher in a leftist police state. My friend had crossed another line. This time I could not let it pass.
I replied as follows: “You disgust me. We’re finished.” Then I blocked my friend.
This seems so silly. Blocking, unfriending on Facebook. . . it’s kind of ridiculous, this 21st century way of being human. Much more has been written on the contemporary culture’s manner of social interaction, and I’m all for taking Silicon Valley and technosolutionism to task, but that’s not really what I’m trying to explore here. No, what I’m concerned with is why the recent horrors in Dayton and El Paso, and my friend’s sickening conspiracy theory, have caused me to finally end what was, sure, a dysfunctional friendship, but also one of the longest I’ve maintained. And why exactly am I going back to Facebook to see if my friend has read my last message to him? And what’s with these guilty feelings?
I can explain the last question simply: I was raised Catholic, so guilt is in my bones. Sure, I’ve renounced the faith, but that’s not enough to escape the feeling that I am largely culpable in any and all situations that befall me. My friend is a racist, sexist, quasi-white nationalist— must be my fault. Not sure how, exactly. Where I can pin some blame is on the way I handled things all these years. I fed the troll. I replied to his messages. I answered his emails. I engaged when I should’ve stepped away. There were many times when I simply ignored him. That would usually result in more messages. Lots of them. It seemed easier to answer him and be saddled with one angry diatribe as opposed to ten. Then I tried humor. He’d write something about how he was looking forward to the day when leftism destroys itself, a day when order will be restored, the day when he’ll have the last word. I would reply: “It’ll be great once white men are finally in change of things.” Not exactly a gentle joke, but it seemed to cool things.
Neither snarky gags nor serious arguments convinced my friend that he was deluded, echoing the ugliest and angriest voices, voices that believe solely in their own craven agendas, in building their brands. Voices that would scoff at him, a man whose addiction provided temporary comfort while it pushed him further into a jaundiced worldview. My friend was in trouble. While I often pleaded with him to get help, stop drinking, find something in his life to offer meaning aside from hateful tribalism, his stabs at sobriety were brief, always failing. But he tried. He’d send me messages announcing the number of hours, then days he’d been sober. And I cheered him. I told him to stay strong. But it was only a few days before an early morning Facebook message waited, characteristically sprawling and bellicose.
I tried explaining it to my wife. There was no one else for my friend to turn to. He wasn’t interested in meeting me for coffee, and, truth be told, I wasn’t really interested in seeing him either. But we had a past. We were once friends in the traditional sense. A lot of people abandoned him when we were young. He had that effect on people. I stayed with him. I cherished his oddball behavior back before it turned hateful. He always struck me as kind at heart, maybe even meek. It would’ve been impossible for me to imagine him uttering an unkind word against anyone. He was intelligent, though his mind could be so narrowly focused on his interests to the exclusion of anything else. Interests that became obsessions. Sure, he was smart, but also unwise. Callow at the age of 49. We were both nerds. I was (am) a book nerd, a lover of cult TV shows and movies, the annoying prick who’ll quote skits from Monty Python and The State, a metalhead, un-athletic, goofy looking— the kind of kid who got his ass kicked on the schoolyard. My friend was a different kind of nerd, but nerd he was. And we had that bond between us. And then we grew up and apart.
This is how it works: you lose touch with childhood pals. You pursue your adult life, they theirs. You move to a different part of the city, or maybe a different state— maybe a different country. You lack proximity, so you stop cultivating the friendship. It happens. Once upon a time, that would’ve been the end of things. You might run into that person at a high school reunion— assuming you were foolish enough to attend— or maybe even on the street. And those encounters would be brief, awkward. But not in the era of Facebook. Now we have the ability to reconnect with lost friends. We get to see their children, their spouses, their vacations. We get to see that they’ve gained weight and lost hair. We get to be voyeurs, taking in their carefully constructed narratives. Look how happy! But if we were friends with an oddball, one with a drinking problem and the kind of loneliness that begs for any tribe that’ll have them, we do more than spy on past relationships. We interact, however remotely. This is to say that, much the way a lot of things changed when the internet came crashing into our lives, my friendship with this individual morphed from supportive co-nerd to enabling adversary.
What did I get from this combative cyber friendship? Well, I got to feel like I was right. Moral superiority is addictive. My friend got drunk on booze and a false sense of victimhood. I got loaded on self-righteousness. It was an easy fix to score. I’d see the long message from my friend. I’d pick apart his dumb argument and offer what I was sure was a brilliant perspective. I’d send my response, feel the waves of pleasure run through me. I was right; he was wrong. I was good; he was bad.
God, I’m an asshole.
I should’ve left him alone. I should’ve told him to fuck off years ago. But a heavy mix of guilt (after all, without me, he would have no one to “talk” to) and the need to prove my own moral worth kept me active in this, I think, decade long epistolary argument.
And now I’ve ended it. Why now? Why not ten years ago? Why not way back when he sent me the first signs of his growing far right beliefs? When he insulted women, gays, minorities? When he accused me of treason, which I read as him saying I deserved to die? Why all the efforts to change his mind? Why the arguments? I guess I just needed my fix.
I sincerely hope that my friend finds help. I believe he is lost, but can be found. I remember the socially awkward oddball I loved way back when we were both younger men. He’s in there somewhere, buried under layers of anger, resentment, depression, alcoholism, and easy answers peddled by far right hucksters. But I know that I cannot be the one to dig him out. My life is filled with enough ugliness. I live in a city where shootings are routine, where political corruption is de rigueur, where segregation has led to poverty and crime, where the rising costs of living have further isolated the rich from the poor. I see and feel frustration daily. Hell, the constant traffic and unending construction are enough to drive a person over the edge. Add to that the nightmare of our political moment and the hardening to violent stories that would’ve once stayed news for months, not minutes. Add my own personal struggles, which often seem trivial in comparison to the above, yet can be daunting. Add it all up and it equals no more time to feed the troll that was once my friend.
Sorry, buddy. Miss you already.