All you have to do to win an argument with me is talk louder. Yell, even, if my precision dismantling of your logic makes you nervous.
I just found this sentiment expressed in an e-mail from 14 years ago, from me to someone of whom I have zero memory but with whom I exchanged voluminous correspondence for several months in 2002. Re-reading the e-mails I started to remember some of the substance of the conversation but nothing makes the identity of the other individual any clearer to me.
It’s not just arguments. Just yell over me regarding any goddam thing and you will be proven right, or it will be proven that no one knows the answer to some life mystery even though I have chapter and verse citation to relieve the mystery.
That scenario was manifest on Thanksgiving, at a friend’s place. Said friend is a fairly big-name mucky-muck in the Internet sphere. I consider him a good friend and somebody I feel comfortable being around. But people like this attract sycophants, and Thanksgiving dinner at his place was swarming with them.
Seemingly complementary to the ass-kissing came a couple of behaviors common to the “startup” mentalists who pollute the sycophants. One such behavior is to ask a question to which no one has an immediate answer, typically a bit of trivia.
In this case it involved the name of a once-influential web site that went kaput 20 years earlier, and which for some reason held a public reunion the week before at a publisher’s conference in San Francisco. No one but I could remember the name of the site.
In the tantrum of unease and insecurity that formed among these old-time internet professionals I saw that they started throwing one gag web site name after another, the volume of their voices progressively increasing in volume as if to compensate for their lack of ability to recall the real name.
After as much as 30 seconds of this the collective rise in the volume of this primal yawp reached a climax. It seemed to flash like lightning in the distance, never actually clapping with the thunder one expects from distant lightning.
I had the answer they sought but by the time I could have mumbled it the noise had vacated any need to know.
…
Getting to sleep has been like murder the last few nights. I don’t know if I am only dreaming or if the barnacles forming on my skull and which disappear when I swat at them are real. Same goes for the fish and livestock crawling out of my mouth and ears, which scamper away when I open my eyes.
