I had had a theory for a while that the hit I keep getting here from Denver, Colorado was from my kid. But I noticed tonight that this person’s hitting the big man’s fan site as well, so unless my daughter knows the website address for my Rory McCann fan site, it’s someone else in Denver visiting. I suppose it could be her father. He could have had all manner of bullshit tracking my online activities when I lived with him and I would never know. It sounds paranoid, but with him being a programmer and a software developer and basically in control of the internet connection in his house, it’s not off the table.
[edit: I just remembered I link to the big man’s fan site from my real-name homepage. So that could be it. I had just been thinking that if he tracked me online at all while I lived there, he could have gotten the URL that way, but that’s the more paranoid and complicated explanation when really all he had to do was follow links. Same for the kiddo, actually. And that’s what I get for forgetting my own content. D’oh!]
Orrrrr it’s someone else in Denver entirely. Who fucking knows.
I still need to fill in from this past week. Will I? I don’t know.
I do know I posted this to my Facebook and that when I get done pasting it here, I’ll unpin it from there:
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Okay, I’ll stop vaguebooking about it. You can think I am drama-mongering if you want, and you’re entitled to your own opinion. He’s blocked me anyway. I’ll be surprised if that changes.
For starters: Stuart Parker may be complaining that someone has canceled him again. He may be referring to me. I will not ask anyone to say anything to him once they’ve read this, but if you want to point out that I’m nobody with no power and can’t actually cancel anyone and that unfriending is not canceling, I’d appreciate it. You don’t have to, but if he’s complaining and you decide you want to, go ahead.
Now the back story. Let me try to be brief with it, anyway. (I’ll fail.)
I don’t know when he and I became Facebook friends. I don’t even know who friended whom. I just know it’s been a while. Over a year, for sure. Over that amount of time, whatever it was, he’s been friendly but mostly impersonal. “Mostly” because once in a while he’d do a “care” react on my nicer photos and once, he liked someone else’s comment saying I looked lovely. And I thought he seemed like an interesting guy, so I wasn’t against the idea. Still am not. That sort of behavior isn’t what you’d call creepy anyway, but I wouldn’t have labeled it such from him.
I knew about Corey — I remember him being in the midst of the breakup — but I also know it’s been a while.
So when I heard he was coming here for the DGR conference, I was mad excited. I thought, wow, we were already sort of hitting it off — let’s see what we think of one another in person. And when he first got here, it looked like that might be promising. We hit it off pretty much immediately and he talked my ears off. I went into the weekend fairly hopeful.
And then when we were there, yes he was busy with food prep and cooking — sure. But when I was doing one of my *three* volunteer time slots, he wasn’t half as chatty with me as he was with some other people. Later, when he suggested I go to BC for the campaign I was dead shocked — not only because of what a big change it would be for me (and a big risk) but because up to that point, not counting our first meeting, he hadn’t been behaving like a guy who’d ask me to go to BC. I didn’t know what to think. It was why I talked about it a lot here. Like, “Does this sound in any way reasonable to anyone else?”
I thought when we parted ways on Sunday [25 August] that was it, but then he and Brandi and Melissa showed up on Monday because Brandi’s car was broken down and they had to sort out a tow truck, which took hours. And he and I had time to chat and the upshot of that was his declaration that he’s done with dating and relationships. We didn’t even get hugely personal, it just sort of went in that direction. So okay… all the care reacts, the invite to BC, and now this? I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on.
I had so much more to say in that conversation but didn’t because I didn’t know how to get it out properly and didn’t want to cross a line, but it kept nagging at me so I wrote a thing online for further elaboration that I knew he would be able to read, not naming any names, knowing he’d get a notification and probably go see what it was. I know for a fact he opened it at least once (my stats said he read it twice, but that could have been a glitch — they were pretty close together). Thought that maybe it’d spark another conversation. Nope. Silence.
Messaged him directly soon after that to ask him about the BC thing, what it would involve and why me, and he said he was settling in and he’d get back with me Thursday or Friday. Not this coming Thursday or Friday. This *past* Thursday or Friday. That have gone by now.
By today, I still hadn’t heard from him. But he was on Facebook complaining that no one “on the left” had given him a nasty nickname. Not so much as a “sorry this has run so late, here’s what I’m doing.”
That’s when I gave up. I’d already decided against BC, as you all saw, but the idea of seeing him continue to post around and clown around and never actually answer my questions rankled. I thought I must have really fucked up somehow, or repelled him, or something, and I didn’t want to engage with that anymore. So I unfriended him. I did, however, DM him to tell him I wasn’t doing it to cancel him.
He replied back with a “huh?” and said he’d been calling around to find me housing for the election work he had in mind — we still had not discussed this in any way, which was what he was supposed to get back with me about — but he guessed he’d have to let them all know it wasn’t an issue anymore.
I mulled over things a bit and then meant to respond to him, and now I can’t. Because he’s blocked me.
I tried one last-ditch effort to start an actual conversation with him through Substack but though he’s probably online, I asked him to DM here, and he hasn’t done that. He’s not likely to, either.
I’m at an impasse. I don’t know what I did wrong in the first place, well before the online misunderstanding (or whatever it was), and I don’t know why it’s gone this direction. I am considering this a dead end because I can’t see what other way it’s going to go.
So it’s not like anyone would have noticed I don’t comment on his stuff anymore, but that’s gonna be a thing. But I don’t hate him — I’m kind of pissed off at him, but I don’t hate him. If I see people accusing him of crazy shit, I will still speak up for him. Whatever his ish happens to be, though, he’ll have to deal with it on his own. His choice. Clearly I am now completely out of favor.
And for future reference, not that I have a line of men beating down my door: You will get a lot farther with me if you fucking communicate with me TIMELY. Either as a friend or as anything more than that. I cannot do inconsistency, expectations of mindreading, or outright fucking games. I just can’t. I went through twenty years of that shit with Matt (and also Craig, the brief period he came back into my life to fuck with my head 14 years ago), and I have done plumb run out of bullshit spoons. And I’m not shopping for more.
That is all. Sorry for the dramafest but I needed to give my side. I know I “shared” Stuart with a LOT of you.
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Along with the unfriending yesterday, I took him off my Substack today. I had comped him in case he wanted to have conversations in the comments, but nothing ever came of that. I was interested to learn he’d read the “thing I wrote online” — apparently twice, but the “read” statuses happened so close together timewise that it might have just been a glitch and he only read it once. But there’s no reason he should have to keep getting emails from me. So I sorted that out.
Anyway, at the Facebook post there was some followup discussion in the comments and I realized that I had not adequately conveyed just what had gotten me wondering if Stuart liked me; it wasn’t just “care” reacts or a like on a “you’re lovely” comment. I’d posted something a while back about how I am weird in ways that wouldn’t let me do well in relationships and he came back with something like “be careful, Dana, this sounds like an old-fashioned and very appealing personal ad,” to which I replied, “You are too fond of peppers. It will never work.” He laughed, I laughed, and I didn’t think anything more of it, though now I wonder if he thought I was entirely serious. Because I wasn’t.
There are lots of reasons it would never work, but having different opinions about food probably wasn’t one of them.
Him flirting when he didn’t mean it OR, meaning it and then chickening way the fuck out when he was faced with actual me in person would be reasons it would never work.
I have a strong feeling it was the latter in play. I realize how full of myself that makes me sound. It’s possible my radar in this area of life is completely and irretrievably broken. But… somehow… I don’t think so. He struck me as a very nervous person when he was here. I had already gotten that sense from him on Facebook before that. I’m just having trouble believing that I would have that sort of effect on a man — or, as in his case, that I would have a magnifying effect on already-existing nerves — given that I’ve become such a troll. Sooooo… but he’s not speaking to me anymore anyway, so I’ll just have to wonder.
I wouldn’t admit this on Facebook, but if he ever gets the fuck over himself and reaches out, I might actually want to talk. Oh, FINE. I do want to talk. I just don’t think it’s ever going to happen. I feel a good bit sad about that. I think… well, I think we kind of need each other. I don’t know why I think that, but I do.
But not “need” in the sense that I’d die without him. So it’s move the fuck on, I guess.
Oh, and yeah. He’s the previously-mentioned-in-previous-posts “S”. If you hadn’t guessed. I’m not bothering to go back and replace the letter with the first name. I only spelled out his name here because I linked to his homepage on the extremely remote chance that he’d notice the trackback. It won’t lead anywhere, probably. But what the hell. I literally have nothing to lose.
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In other news, I’ve been pretty seriously logjammed about writing and it’s pissing me off. I’m seeing signs that’s shaking loose, though. Let’s hope.