A Revolution

I have always been a mouthy individual. My first stark memory of it is when I was about eight years old, when, in reply to my mom going "shut your mouth" (most likely because I was talking back) I proceeded to hang my jaw open and say, "Aaaah, it's open."

I still do tend towards a disposition of difficulty and sarcasm. Yes, age and experience have given me tact. I think before I say stuff now.

But I never thought that anonymously expressing a legitimate concern on this blog would bring me under an eye of scrutiny so intrusive, it's almost scary.

If anyone would like to see the original, very frustrated, blog post, please let me know privately. I've taken it down because I apparently can't trust my own city to stay out of my business.

In the post, among other things, I criticized a certain service in my city. The posting went unnoticed, except by a few readers, for a good two weeks. It mentioned the name of the service, the type of business where I was employed, and possibly the name of my town. It never included my name, first or last. After the post, I forgot about it, except for when I'd see the name of it in the blog's stat rankings.

A week later, I put the link to it on my Facebook account, which is private. Only my Facebook friends can see it. All of those people are individuals that I know personally. Old college friends. Old roommates (who are close friends.) People I went to high school with. Most of them don't live in the area.

The next day, I made the admittedly unwise decision to use my cell phone to tweet at my city's Twitter account, using some rather harsh words concerning the very service I criticized two weeks earlier. They maintained that this service was reliable and all that. I deleted my tweets and forgot about it for the rest of the day.

And then the next afternoon, while I was hanging some posters, my boss came up to me and said that someone from the city had called and complained about, well, my complaint. Somehow they had used my name on my Twitter account, read my blog and gone back at least to the post where announced the release of Horror Vacui, which has my name on the cover, and possibly even further. Whatever happened, my blog got a whole lot of page views that day, consistently to the same two-week old post. Thankfully the employer just asked that I not criticize this particular service at work. Not too gruesome. The callers were even told they went too far.

Yes, they did go too far. I have since blocked their Twitter account from seeing mine, removed all references to any of my jobs from Facebook, and took a week off from writing this blog. Someone played detective and poked around and called my job, intending, I'm sure, to harass me because I don't love everything my town does.

I remember once when a representative from a union showed up at my house, first saying that he was there to check the windows. Then he came back later, to encourage my mom to "vote the right way" when the day came to decide if the place she worked would have a union or not.

Oh buddy, you don't even know. We don't take well to intimidation in my family.

I don't know who it was who went to such great lengths to deduce who I am and where I worked. But I know you're out there. I don't know if you're reading this. Obviously you had a link to it, somehow. Whoever you are, your mental bicep is flesh, and honey, it's much weaker than the iron in my backbone.

There's nothing worse than an angry Twentysomething that you just won't leave be. As old as you are, as connected as you are, it is my generation that you will one day hand things over to, and all your local, backroom, old boy politics won't matter a bit.

So leave me alone. I'll give you one very, very good reason, by way of a quote from The Dark Knight Rises.

I'm not afraid.

I'm angry.