My Number One Fan

In case anyone is wondering why comment moderation has been turned on again...

Here is why:

It's the old, "Write a vile, nasty comment, then check back a million times to see if the author has responded," bit. 

Why don't you just use email notification like a normal person?  That way, when the author responds, it gets sent right to your email!  Oh, wait, never mind...I guess that would take the "Anonymous" out of your "Anonymous" now, wouldn't it?  Luckily, this person is not tech-savvy enough to actually be anonymous, and you can clearly see that somebody logging in from Red Rock Radio in Duluth, Minnesota has entirely too much time on their hands.  I'm not tech-savvy myself, so you know it didn't take much to figure out who this particular "Anonymous" is.  Nicely done.  You don't look obsessive at all!

I've said it before, and I'll say it again....I WRITE this freaking blog and I don't look at it as much as this person does!  So first of all, thank you for your support!

Second, if you are dying to read this every day, like I see that you are, you can also bookmark it instead of doing a daily Google search.  Just sayin'.

Third (and who would know this better than someone in the media?):  All media has an "off" switch.  You think I'm a lousy, awful person, and, I won't argue with you on that, but doesn't it make more sense in life to simply stay away from that which offends, rather than following it around like some crazy stalker?

I had given some thought to maybe saying "Red Rock Radio in Duluth, Minnesota" numerous times in this post in hopes that this blog post would be the first thing that comes up if somebody is looking for your radio group online.  That way, they'd get a good idea of just who they are dealing with.  (Hmmm...is this person going to service my radio advertising account, or spend the day obsessively stalking someone online?)  I thought better of it, though.  Two mentions and photographic evidence of your psychosis will have to suffice for now.

And by the way, I have screen shots that look just like this, going WAY back--almost three years worth--so while I do appreciate the support, I have a mountain of paperwork to turn over to Myron and Ro at Red River Broadcasting if you should ever cross the threshold from "Annoying Creeper" to "Guy Hiding In The Bushes Outside My House".  A girl has to cover her ass these days....just sayin'.

I'm Going To Be Completely Honest, Here...

What kind of an awful person am I?

Let me tell you.

Yesterday, I got a phone call from my ex, telling me about a really bad thing that had happened to his daughter, my former step-daughter.

Upon hearing this news, I felt virtually nothing.

Seriously.  

No, "Oh my God is she OK?"  No, "Oh that's terrible!"  Just...zip.

Tell you what....I won't make you read the archives to figure out where all that cruel heartlessness is coming from.  I'll just tell you.  I do not like this woman.  Don't like her one little bit.  The entertainingly bitchy stuff she did, which made it to the blog, was just the tip of the iceberg in reporting the day to day hell--and I do me "HELL"--of living with her.  The nicest thing I can say about her is that she didn't have body odor.  She lied, she stole, she manipulated, and worst of all, she blamed all of her awful shit on other people, and since my children and I were the closest scapegoats, we usually got the brunt of it.  I actually dislike this person, for real.

A couple of weeks ago, when her father described what an asshole her boyfriend was, I thought, and said, "There are two sides to every story," and I asked him if he had formed that opinion based on time spent with the boyfriend, or on his daughter's anecdotes.  Since she, herself, would never admit to doing anything wrong, certainly everything that could have been wrong with their relationship had to be the boyfriend's fault.  Her father bought into that.  He buys into all of the stuff she tells him--always has.  The fact that her father believes everything she and her brother tell him is actually the number one reason why I am no longer with their father--I couldn't stand to be around it anymore.  No matter what happened, it was always our fault.  

Mathematically speaking, that's some pretty sketchy odds--I mean....how is it possible that a person can go through life without ever, ever making a mistake?  But that was the logic his children would have you believe--that they were above reproach, and everyone else was irreparably flawed.  Having conversations with them in which they would blithely make up some incredible, negative untruth about you, then look at you as if to say, "Yeah, I lied--what are you gonna do about it?" produced the most incredible rage in me.  But as much as I hated them for doing that, I hated the fact that I was letting them have that power--that they could push all of my buttons and get a reaction, to make me look like a crazy person for being in constant disagreement with them.  I had been a happy, relaxed person, and then I met those two and became a hyper-vigilant, stressed out, angry person.  It was not a good thing.  I left.

On Sunday, I was advised that my former step-daughter's boyfriend had thrown the woman to the ground, smashed her head on the sidewalk and beat her up.

I was not taken aback.  I was not surprised, or appalled.  The only thought that ran through my head was, "Wow, just think how many times she made me so angry that all I wanted to do was grab her by the hair and smash her face into a door frame, and now someone has gone and done it."  And that's the truth.

Do I sympathize with him?  Absolutely not.  If you feel like beating the crap out of someone, get the hell away from them, like I did, before you do something you'll regret--something that will give them power over you for the rest of your life.  

But I most certainly understand the rage.

I was unable to provide her father with the appropriate sympathetic responses to a woman being beat up, and instead asked questions like, "Did anybody SEE this happen?" because that's how deep my mistrust goes--it would not surprise me one bit to discover that she made most or all of it up.

I don't feel bad about not feeling bad.  She earned my disdain, one lie at a time, over the course of many years.  I'm not glad this happened, whatever it was that actually occurred.  I really wish it hadn't--not because I wish her well, but because some angry person not so very different from me has ruined his life in one stupid, drunken evening.

Her father used to say, when speaking about his children's mother, that if he'd only just killed her when he first felt like doing it, he'd have been out of jail by now, and the world would have one less evil bitch in it.  We all laughed about that because A) He didn't kill her and B) She really was/is a truly awful, evil bitch.  

I wonder if the boyfriend will be saying that same thing 20 years from now?

Here's Looking At Me, Kid

While looking at my blog stats, I noticed that someone visited the blog after finding it by doing a Google search for the word "Shelly".

Please allow me to introduce you to the odds of finding a blog with low readership and virtually no advertising by searching the un-famous author's not-entirely-unique first name.  

Because I'm here for you, I did the research.

Of the 17 million results, the bulk of the first several pages consisted of web sites for a bunch of people most of us have never heard of, with verbiage stating that "This is the OFFICIAL Shelly _(last name)_ web site!" like it means something.   There were the "Shelly, Inc," sites and the Shellys who are actors/TV hosts/authors, and the Shellys who are wacky stay at home moms with "crazy" lives (Tip: if you own a mini-van, your activities are immediately excluded from being considered "crazy".  Driving your kids around and making it home just in time to make dinner is not "crazy"--that's just a Tuesday), and that's all very entertaining reading for a bitch like me, BUT...

I think my personal favorite was the description under shelly.com, which states "Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here."

I would like to apply that last statement to all of the self-important Shellys on the web, myself included.  I would especially like to say that very thing to the Shellys I found who spoke about themselves in the third person, or peppered their pages with performance reviews declaring them to be the only Shellys we should care about, or those Shellys who appear to be taking themselves too seriously (talking to you, Lowenkopf--you're lucky you're a man, is all I can say. Wait--I would also like to say, Mars, you're cool, so just ignore all that negative shit I just said about all those other Shellys).

There are a lot of singer Shellys, photographer and writer Shellys and, oddly, realtor Shellys on the web.  I'm sure they are all lovely people.  Then again, if they are anything like me, maybe not.

I found a web site for the 2008 Shelly Awards, OK?  The friggin' Shelly AWARDS.

Anyway...my point is that I never did find this blog while searching for Shelly.  I didn't even find anyone named Shelly Payne in the first 30 or 40 pages, so, wow, and also, I didn't know Zac Brown's wife was named Shelly!  Cool!

OK, forget that last part.  My real point is...we all get so wrapped up in our little "thing" that we forget that there are hundreds of other Shellys out there, waiting to be found.  

Except for Zac Brown's wife--clearly, she has already been located.  

Many are, like me, in various stages of desperation, depending on what day of the week it is, and whether or not anybody said anything nice about them that day.  Because you've never heard of most of them, you might be safe in assuming that they have more love than "talent" or "luck"--those two wildly subjective things that determine whether or not people take you seriously enough to throw piles of money at you and adore and/or loathe everything you do, regardless of whether you think they should.

But they keep trying, those Shellys...I like that.  I like the fact that there are a bunch of schmo's like me, getting up every day and doing something, and feeling good enough about it to share.  Even better?  There's somebody willing to power through hundreds of pages of search results to find even the most obscure of them.