{"id":3200,"date":"2014-04-25T01:00:04","date_gmt":"2014-04-25T07:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/?p=3200"},"modified":"2026-07-01T12:39:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T18:39:26","slug":"dear-hank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/dear-hank\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear Hank"},"content":{"rendered":"

(As a reminder to those of you who are not Hank, Hank\u00a0slammed me pretty hard\u00a0yesterday. <\/a>You’ll need to read his comment\u00a0for this reply to make sense.)<\/p>\n

Dear Hank,<\/p>\n

I’m pleased to know\u00a0you don’t hold a grudge, but it\u00a0leads me to wonder how much nastier you could have been if a grudge were<\/em> part of the equation.<\/p>\n

You call me\u00a0“useless,” and I can’t deny it. The fact is, my uses are few. The best I can muster is that I’m a competent breakfast cook, a licensed driver, and a nearly-adequate installer of ceramic tile. I don’t even know any card tricks.<\/p>\n

As for my being\u00a0like unto “road kill,” everyone knows that roadkill spurs pity, not contempt. (That poor raccoon!) Perhaps, then, my squashed-mammal presence was a solemn reminder of your own mortality – there but for the grace of Michelin go thou.<\/p>\n

Yes, I was obnoxious, loud and rude and mean to everyone, but that you understand. \u00a0Apparently I crossed the line when I “took every opportunity to be a douchebag.” Does that mean\u00a0there are obnoxious, rude, loud teenagers who see an opportunity to be a douchebag and\u00a0don’t<\/em> take it?\u00a0What good is it to be obnoxious, loud, and mean if you turn up your nose at a perfectly serviceable douchebag-being opportunity?<\/p>\n

All sarcasm aside, this is why it’s very hard to take your criticism with any degree of seriousness – it’s all snark and no specificity.\u00a0I can’t think of anything I could have possibly done to you to merit such a Captain Ahab-esque bile screed twenty-eight years after the fact. I assume that in the decades\u00a0since we last met, worse things have happened to you\u00a0than being teased by me for a few months in 1986. (If not, then congratulations on your charmed life.)<\/p>\n

So when bad things happen to you, do you always lash out like this?<\/p>\n

“Triple A was twenty minutes late to jump my car battery –\u00a0 damn them, their demon spawn, and their douchebag-being livestock!”<\/p>\n

I am not surprised, however, to learn that I was\u00a0“nothing but a \u2018negative\u2019 to everyone and everything.”\u00a0 Truth is, I was shunned both by people and inanimate objects. Not only did I\u00a0have no friends, but even the furniture hated me. \u00a0The silver lining is that Neil Diamond’s complaint in “I Am, I Said” about chairs not listening to him makes more sense.<\/p>\n

You lose me when you start going off on my “dubious” writing skills, as\u00a0people who write “you\u2019re platitudes” when they mean “your platitudes” really don’t hold the literary high ground, as it were.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, and also tangentially, how did you find this dubiously written blog in the first place? Why would you seek out someone to whom you’ve given no thought at all who writes like an ape?<\/p>\n

I have done you no bodily harm, I don’t owe you any money, and I haven’t published any compromising photographs. (Yet.)\u00a0 And still\u00a0your rage endures like a thirty-year-old canker sore.<\/p>\n

Fact is, this is now officially your problem, Slick, and not mine.<\/p>\n

Please know I don’t hate you. I’m not even mad at you. And I think you have talent! (You were an especially good fencer in “Desdemona,” and I’m sure you’ve only gotten better with age.) I’ve actually gotten something of a kick out of this. Anytime you want to call a truce, I’m in.\u00a0 I have no interest in extending this animus any further beyond its expiration date.<\/p>\n

But the fact remains that while I readily admit I was kind of a jerk thirty years ago, you’ve made it clear to everyone that can read English that you’re kind of a jerk now.<\/p>\n

I think I got the better end of that deal.<\/p>\n

Toodles!<\/p>\n

Jim<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Asa reminder to those of you who are not Hank, Hank\u00a0slammed me pretty hard\u00a0yesterday. <\/a>You'll need to read his comment\u00a0for this reply to make sense.)Dear Hank,I'm pleased to know\u00a0you don't hold a grudge, but it\u00a0leads me to wonder how much nastier you could have been if a grudge were<\/em> part ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3200"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5117,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3200\/revisions\/5117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}