Sucks Or Rules

I lol'd

Travis Smiley.

My apologies to you sir.

Just one last thing, and it doesn't require, or even gently whisper for, a reply. I feel compelled to re-iterate that I find the HS Thompson comparison to be beneath you. I can already see it's beneath you because you despise racism and appear to be well read. But then you drop this unbelievable offensive insult right in my face, which would have even been ok in a humorous, affable context. But I think you called it my "Hunter S. Thompson routine." Or "act."

That's like telling a gay person with AIDS to stop his "Bob Fosse Routine." And people can make fun of me all they want, that's fine, and happens to be your right. But look at it from my point of view, seriously. In 1998 I had a nervous breakdown and tried to kill myself in front of 300 people in Boston's Copley Square. I was working for the Mass. Banker's Association at the time. I liked that job. Good money, worked alone mostly. Then I get a phonecall from my girlfriend, who tells me that she is married. She goes on to say that everything she said was a lie. Everything that mattered, anyway, and that I was good for "Some romance and great sex." I had fallen in love. My second time.

I was already diagnosed suicidal and bipolar, avoidant and borderline. With anxiety bordering on paranoia and crippling bouts of panic attacks on par with a petite mal seizure.

I had decided to kill myself next to the aisle that contained the works of Dostoevsky. At the Boston Public Library right down Tremont St. from Mass. Banker's. Dostoevsky, it was his fucking beautiful short story, "White Nights," that inspired such feelings of romantic urging, deep swells of love and lust for this fucking broad. But I love my Russian Romantics, so I sit down and start taking Benadryl, slurping them down with Coke. I took close to 100, around 85 give or take. A security guard told me I couldn't drink in the library. He didn't know I was shoveling pills down my yap. I went to the Men's room at the BPL, and it was being cleaned. I bolted across the street, and long story short went unconscious for a few days, and scarred my heart.

Isn't that romantic? The hurt caused my heart by an...indelicate woman. Literal and figurative.

I have a lot of stories like that. They do not represent me trying to be some celebrity, this is Darren W. Lyle's life. I was raped by a neighbor when I was eight, that's a good story. What celebrity does that most resemble. Probably quite a lot. Do you know if Hunter S. Thompson had electroconvulsive therapy started the very week his mother died? That happened to me, and I can't remember the last year of our life together, my mother and I. The brain damage, intentional, of ECT has caused permanent memory loss.

I'm appealing to your sense of decency. Don't demean my suffering, and frequent triumphs, by robbing me of my name and implying that my life is a cheap imitation of someone else's.

Of course people will make fun of me. It matters not, sincerely. I would just appreciate you do me the courtesy of not insulting me "to my face," as it is in this context. This disease, which is me, has crippled me, made drugs more appealing an option, scarred my body, gotten me arrested.

If you want to irritate me and piss me off, then keep up the Thompson reference.

I hope that's clear. It will cause some people to make sure they mention Thompson every time they talk to me. What I've said is only of import to people who, for whatever reason, like me.

I got cut off, but I'll leave it at that. There are local activists who influenced me, like Jewell Maxie, but that's just dropping names nobody knows or gives a shit about. He did matter to me.

Brian Moore, too, the current Socialist Party USA candidate. I like him a lot, but for complicated reasons I marched out of the party on a matter of principle, with 12 other people. Again, long story. But I still like Moore. What he had to say to me inspired me and was damn wise.

That's it.