Well, first I got toaded. They threw me out of the room. They said I wasn't behaving within the parameters of civil discourse in ways that remain a mystery to me, and what kind of anarchist free space is this you can't express yourself? I came on to some chick, or not even that, really, it was more philosophical, only it went on from there, pointless to elaborate, you know the drill, so I'm toaded into the blue. Or whatever color it is between one room and another in cyberspace.
Toaded, by the way. That's where you are denied access. The Committee of Elders gets together behind your back and hold a meeting and vote on it and if a majority wants you out, well, there you go.
Now, I don't have much to do with myself. I drink and toke up, watch the DVDs. Sometimes I go outside and take a look around. Not finding it much to my liking, I come back into the house. I spend a lot of time on the web, too, of course. I belong to a lot of groups, mostly just to lurk. But then there's this chat room where I actually participate, it's like a bar only you don't have to be there so you don't have to put up with all that bar nonsense, the evangelical TV or the shrill assholery and guilt trips you get in bars these days. All you get are lines of type representative of people, of what they're saying. You respond or you don't. They respond back or they don't. Or they attack you and you can choose to counterattack or not, as you wish. I'm not the attacking type, and when someone comes after me, I either shut up or say something funny or sometimes just incomprehensible, sometimes both.
Sex is another thing, though. You come on in the wrong way or to the wrong person, or respond inappropriately to a come on directed at you, well, it can get weird. I guess this chick, or maybe not a chick, I don't know, but look, when a chick tells you she's got this job for the summer at the Church camp or farm she calls it sometimes where the main project for the children is to learn how to castrate pigs; how they take rubber bands and place them around the top of the scrotum like the way some people do with doorknobs for reasons I've never been able to understand, anyways, you put them there, you know, right at the root where the bag hangs and not too tight, you use a special size rubber band for the project, and by this painless, natural process, she says, the pig's testicles will eventually just fall off ... This is what they're going to teach the kids at camp, a religious thing, I guess. What it has to do with that I can't imagine, but I'm a goddamned heathen, so what do I know? But somehow this got me started and one thing led to another. You know, you start talking testicles, what can you expect? I don't even remember what it was that finally got called harassment, but there you have it. I got all this legalistic email back and forth, suggesting I write up a statement, which I did. Then I was shown a counter statement made by the chick. I could see no difference between to two except in the wording. Yet I was asked to make a rebuttal. I told them that I had nothing to add to what I'd already said. They asked if I agreed with her statement and I said Yes. They thanked me and said they would get back to me within forty-eight hours with their decision.
I waited. Finally it came. A toading notice. Very lofty in tone, like a judgment from heaven or something. They talked about abuse, harassment, sexual cruelty. I really didn't understand it, to tell you the truth. And they warned at the end there, "This could go further. We continue the discussion and you will be kept informed of what we have determined with regard to the final dispensation of your case."
Well, I laughed it off. I figure, they're gonna get that weird, I don't belong in the room in the first place. There are plenty other places to hang out where they don't get weird like that, although it's getting rare for my type of guy to fit in.
But now there's a squad car waiting outside my house. I guess it has gone further. It's just routine questioning, they tell me, but a complaint's been put out. "Just routine," they tell me. "Don't mean the farm or anything."
"The farm," I repeat.
"Yeah, you know," he shrugs. "You should go ahead and get your things, though. Change of clothes, that sort of thing." He was trying to be all casual and genteel.
"Remember when we used to call you guys pigs?" I said then. In a friendly way, I thought. I was trying to cover up, I was trying not to show any fear or guilt and the like, and it seemed to work because they both just cracked up laughing.
"Yeah, I remember that," one of them said, and they just kept on laughing.
Brent Powers says, "all your readers need to know about me is how important I am."