engagement, aftermath, formal response

21 June 2006

People, I don’t know if you read Monday’s post or just skimmed it.  Or maybe you read the whole thing, but not very critically (and by ”not very critically,” I mean ”not while sober”).  If you had read the whole post (sober) and processed it (again, sober), you’d realize that I am not, in fact, engaged.

I thought that this was pretty obvious when I wrote the thing.  But maybe I’ve been doing this too long and didn’t realize the confusion and wrath (more on these later) that this would set off.

First, let me give you a summary of the end of the post, which I feel many people overlooked: 

My fiancée is a Mexico-type woman who works (or worked) at Ranch 1.  We met at the restaurant where she served me bad chicken that gave me dysentery.  After that, she visited me in the hospital and gave me a handjob.  We didn’t speak for years but met up after I answered an ad that she had placed on a sex site looking for gangbang participants.  We began dating, and I proposed to her in the parking lot of a 99.  Also she has a retarded son. 

Now, again, maybe it’s me, but I thought it was rather clear that I was playing around.  I wrote it, posted it, and didn’t think twice about it.  The first email response I got came shortly after the post went up.  The subject of the email was ”I get your post!” from a dude saying he picked up on the sarcasm and thought it was one of my best posts in some time.  It made me happy.

But then things started getting weird in the email inbox.  I got an email from my friend’s cousin, who I met for the first time just last weekend, congratulating me on the engagement.  This struck me as strange, because at the time I met this guy I was walking around the bar with two Miller Lites telling women that I go to dental school.  Weird, but whatever.

The next time I checked my inbox, it was filled with emails that ran the gamut from “Are you fucking serious?” to “Congratulations!” to “You lying scumbag sack of shit!”  Again, very surprising to me.  Here’s a sampling of emails I’ve received since my ”engagement” post went up (names have been withheld so that people don’t hurt me):

Congrats on your engagement announcement. Seriously. We’ve all known you’ve been lying to us one way or another since you started this blog. We let it slide, though, because it made us all feel a little better after reading about some pathetic fat drunk in NYC. So why the truth now? We all know wrestling is fake, but we don’t see them ruining it for us after each match telling us that it was all scripted. How would you feel!?!? Imagine that then multiply that by infinity and that is how I feel.  Thanks pal.

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Jason, 

Long time reader, third-time emailer. Blah Blah Etc. (fyi: my first email was about Country Crock Mac & Cheese and the second was about your reference to Fascism)

Um, I’m sure you were expecting a high number of emails from the latest post (“an end, a beginning” June 16, 2006) so I’m hoping you’ll address this in a future post. I’m writing to share my thoughts on the fact you’re getting married. Reading that post today, I immediately thought you were joking. And as it became more and more clear that you weren’t joking, my disposition went from mildly confused to absolute rage.

Why the rage? Well, to understand how I would be mad about you getting married you have to understand why I (and likely dozens of other people) read your site. It’s funny and true. It’s actually only funny *because* it is mostly true. I find it hilarious that you’re hairy, fat and rarely have your penis touched by a woman. So to find out that you actually have had your penis touched by a women really kinda sucks. (I understand this logic is fucked).

Sure, I’m happy you’re getting married. Just like I’m happy you’re not dead. I mean, it would suck to never have your dick touched by a female and die lonely and single. And likewise it would suck for me to not have something funny to read on Mondays. But here’s the rub: I only read your site because it’s true. There is plenty of fiction and bullshit web sites I could peruse to entertain myself. So stick to the facts. You’re funny enough to make getting married funny. There’s really no need to keep up a false premise and mislead your readers.

To find out you’ve been dating and engaged to a women and subsequently having your penis handled by someone that wasn’t actually homeless (“Stacey” isn’t homeless is she?) is like finding out Maddox is a girl. Or Tucker Max has made up all his stories (which he probably has). I guess my point is this: I am offended by being misled. (of couse, I’m offended in a “I could really care less since this is all really pointless in the great big scheme of things” sort of way.) So I hope this new development will mark a new stage of this site. Wherein you’ll start writing about how horrible married life is. Or how great it is to cheat on your fiance with…well, that’s unlikely. Anyway, I guess I don’t really have a serious point. Just fucking shocked. Happy for you. And looking forward to whatever bullshit you’ll be writing about now.

Congrats on the marriage. Don’t fuck it up.

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Engaged? Seriously? Congratulations… but you do realize you’re saying goodbye to any and all credibility. All those stories about being alone and miserable were lies? Shame on you. Shame, shame on you, sir. How dare you hide behind your sad fat guy facade while, in actuality, you were out hooking up with real, live women?

What comes next? Posts about your wedding, your married bliss, and then what? I’m telling you right now, at the first story about your son’s potty training experiences, I’m out the fucking door. For examples, see any of the past 400 posts on nealpollack.com.

Fucker.

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Traitor,

So this marks the end of a great blog, and my only happy refuge from my daily misery.  Your blog made me feel loved, that I am not alone, and much less sad.  Can you keep up the quality now that you’ve assumedly achieved some semblance of happiness and in the process have lost your edge / hunger?  I doubt it.  

Just remember one thing:  women are the ultimate dream killers.

Good luck.

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I don’t think I’ve ever been so irritated at a blog before that I’ve been compelled to write in.

Seriously? You’re engaged?

You should have waited until your book came out. It’s going to kill your sales. People don’t want to read about a happy person pretending to be miserable.

It’s not fun and it’s really not cool.

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My wife is a fan of your site. She read about your upcoming marriage and went to the Crate and Barrel website to get you a gift. Your not registered. I told her you were full of shit. She said you wouldnt lie about something like this. Again I said bullshit. So now we have a bet. She is claiming that you just havent registered yet. Im claiming your full of shit. One week from today if you still have nothing registered at Crate and Barrel she owes me 5 blowjobs. If she is right and you are registered then I owe her a very expensive necklace.

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Again, this is just a small sampling that covers the range of opinions.  The majority of emails said “WHAT THE FUCK???” and “You suck.”  So that was nice.

But I would like to officially go on record right now to say that I am not engaged.  Like I said yesterday, c’mon people.  Really?  Did you really think that I was engaged, after all we’ve been through?  You’d think I’d just blindside you with something like that?  Sheesh.  Give me a little more credit than that.  I thought we were friends? 

I confess though, I thought I’d get a little bit of a rise out of you when I wrote that, but I didn’t think that so many of you would actually believe it.  I realize that the issue was that you thought I was serious about being engaged but not serious about the circumstances that ”Stacey” and I met, and you have a point.  But still…I honestly never thought it would cause such a big to-do.  Three of my college friends who I saw at my reunion less than three weeks ago emailed congratulations and wondered why I didn’t mention my future fiancee to them.  A co-worker called me in my office because his friend in Chicago who reads the site wanted to know the truth.  A friend of an ex-girlfriend called her and left a message asking if she was OK about me being engaged (the ex told me this; I don’t know the friend). 

I mean, am I that good of a liar?  In sooth, I apologize if I have caused you any anger or whatnot over this.  I was just playing.  Because I’m a player.  A player who is not engaged. 

I guess I can’t fully prove to you that I’m not actually engaged.  I hope that now that I’ve explained myself and you’ve thought about it, you’ll believe me.  But if not, I have a back-up plan.  I’m going to pull a Costanza and invite those non-believers to test me (“You wanna go?  Let’s go!  Right now!”).  I am in NYC all weekend.  Friday, I’m to start boozing right after work.  Saturday, I have a BBQ and should be pretty blitzed by about 7pm.  If you’d like to test my engaged status with a make out session that will leave you feeling less like a woman than you ever have before, please send two pictures, a phone number, and your location for Friday and Saturday night.  I’ll show you how unengaged I am.

(Hey, that last emailer is getting five blowjobs out of this – I should at least get my knob rubbed.)