Think about it. Don't we all know someone like this, on one Internet forum or another?
Something happened to them, something lost in time and carefully hidden by Those To Whom It Was Done. They might have had a father who rewarded them only when they engaged him in the only form of intimacy he was capable of -- arguing. Or they might have been the Xanders and the Willows of their high school classes, never the Buffys. Or they might have invested heavily in a spiritual trip and its preferred suite of dogma, only to find out thirty-to-forty years on that it had never actually delivered on many of its promises. Whatever. The Buddha, whom I still admire as a fairly Cool Dude, even given what people have tried to make of his Dudeness in the years since he Duded, tried to avoid conversations that focused on the why of such things. Who the fuck really cares? The only thing that matters is that the effects of this imprinting are still in place, and still attempting to replicate themselves in our human social networks. The effect is that some human beings -- for some karmically indetedeterminate reason -- find themselves so devoid of any other form of contact with their fellow human beings that luring them into a head-to-head argument with them is as close as they can get to relating to them. >From an objective point of view, this is as acceptable a way of relating with your fellow sentient beings as any other. >From a subjective point of view, it's Pretty Fuckin' Sad. Who do I miss on Fairfield Life? No problem. Curtis. Peter. Rick, for the most part. Sal. Ruth. Human beings who were driven away by other posters whose view of human interaction was so limited as to assume that the only way that one can get attention from the cool people who wander into one's life is to insult them and attempt to draw them into an argument.
