The Critics Respond, Part Twenty-Nine

Surprise! You probably thought this was going to be about my long-hair-don't-care article, which went flat-out viral over the past twenty-four hours and at one point held the top spot on at least three major "subreddits" at once. It's generated several thousand comments across the Internet, nearly all of them falling into one of two camps: women saying "yes, this happens to me all the time" and men saying "OMG WHAT A LIAR SJW FAGET I COULD BEAT HIM UP FROM THE COMFORT OF MY GAMING CHAIR USING THE POWER OF MY SOUL."

Truth be told, I wouldn't even know where to begin sifting through all the traffic, drama, and conversation that post has generated. I'll get around to it once the storm subsides. In the meantime, there's a more important thing happening: a woman on the Internet is saying that I'm a lousy lay.

The following post, which was forwarded to me by two different participants in a secret auto-journo Facebook group, is a response to Aaron Cole's new job opportunity at High Gear Media and his subsequent gracious resignation from TTAC. Let me say, by the way, that I'm a bit humiliated by the fact, mentioned by Aaron in aforementioned gracious resignation, that I didn't remember meeting him at Spring Mountain during the Fiat 500 Abarth preview lo these many years ago. As I recall, I was very tightly booked on my travel that day and I was just trying to get my laps in before time ran out and I had to leave for my flight. Apologies, Aaron, and best of luck at HGM.

Alright, now on to this comment. The lady in question is a female journalist, a year or two older than I am. Six years ago, we met at a press event and slept together that night. Over the course of the year that followed, we had a remarkably tumultuous and drama-filled relationship. We were both pretty serious about it and at one point she kicked her boyfriend out of the house and I started making plans to move to California to live with her full-time.

I did something to make her angry, like not returning a phone call or something, and she decided to punish me by starting a bunch of drama with some of our mutual friends. Her actions are beyond the scope of this post but they were pretty hardcore and also resulted in another couple breaking up when she revealed something to one of them that I'd told her in confidence six months previously.

All of this eventually got back to Vodka McBigbra, my roommate/girlfriend, and in order to keep things from getting any crazier than they were I told my female journalist friend that we were finished. She then put a really crazy post up on a car blog at 4am, made a big deal of our breakup on Facebook and elsewhere, and more or less ruined my life for six months as I had to deal with all of the white knights in the autojourno world who were in love with her and who wanted to punish me in any way possible for my transgression.

Over the course of 2011 we communicated quite a bit but I ended up completely letting her go to satisfy the whims of Drama McHourglass, who was a jealous side girl and would have no other goddesses before her, so to speak. In the years that followed we each kind of sank unreservedly into what I think of as our characters. Me: the modern HST/Hemingway/Setright hybrid, imperious and egotistical, a sociopathic serial abuser of female hearts, cursed to suffer one tragedy and injury after another. Her: self-appointed mother to every young journalist, obsessed with the social lives of her gay friends in the business, wearer of increasingly bizarre outfits, fur coats, and hats.

She makes two allegations about me in her posts, one of which I can easily refute.

As for me continually harassing her: here's the full record of our interactions over the past four or so years.

12/30/2015 --- sent her a congratulatory message on a rumor I'd heard that she was dating a mutual friend. She had that mutual friend send me something indicating that he was seeing someone else.

3/27/2013 --- saw her at the New York Auto Show and suggested we have a drink and bury the hatchet.

1/4/2013 --- Multiple emails back and forth in follow-up to the below call, instigated by a very odd dream I had about her.

12/26/2012 --- We had an argument on Facebook after she wrote something mean about me, followed by a long conversation via text and a longer phone call to discuss if we would attend a Fleetwood Mac concert together. Couldn't make the logistics work. She accused me of ruining her life and implied that I abused her, to which I responded that "all the abuse in our relationship was of a musical nature."

11/21/2012 --- She asked via email to confirm to her fiance that we were not seeing each other, which I did.

5/26/2012 --- She left me a long drunken voicemail.

8/16/2011 --- I wrote a piece on her employer and asked her for a quote, she told me to fuck off.

As for the second allegation, I'm no mind-reader so I can't say for sure if she truly found me unsatisfactory. At the time everything seemed more than satisfactory to me. She certainly went out of her way to make sure we had times and places to sleep together. Maybe, just maybe, she loved me for my mind --- but what she actually told me on those long nights together was that I was a repugnant, soulless, manipulative person who happened to do it for her in bed.

She was right. Truth be told, I don't think anybody has ever loved me for my mind, or for my heart. I mean, I'm pretty good at meeting women, and I'm pretty good at getting them into bed, and they certainly do crazy shit to keep me from breaking up with them, but when I close my eyes, this is what I see:

Anyway. For the record, I will not say the same about her. She was a great part-time girlfriend: witty, perceptive, conversational, remarkably intelligent. She had a lovely singing voice. I liked a lot of the things she wrote. And she was simply superlative in bed, a real California treat for this Midwestern boy on his own. It didn't work out because in the long run I valued being in Ohio with my son more than I valued the idea of being on the West Coast with her. Also, we're both temperamental, dramatic people and that's a bad combination. So I had to let her go.

It's petty and bitchy of me to make this the subject of a blogpost but when she decided to go and make these allegations to a secret group of journalists which, incidentally, banned me a long time ago for being disruptive and overly ethical, I feel compelled to respond in the only forum available to me, which is this one. So, to the lady in question --- let's bury the hatchet for real, kiddo. I don't regret what we did and I know you don't either. It just didn't work out. Hope your new life on the East Coast brings you the peace that your old life on the West Coast couldn't. And not that you live in Los Angeles anymore, but this is for you, since you always hated my guitar playing: