Is it a feud when it's entirely one-sided?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Eric Graff continues his stalkerish man-crush on me and Diogenes.

For those of you who haven't been hanging out with us as long as you should have, Eric (or "Eman," as he styles himself) is a chubby unimaginative chucklehead who I ran into last June, never imagining that he would fixate on me like this. You'll see his name in the comments every so often, where he'll poke his head in, scream incoherently, and run off sobbing. After two or three repetitions of this, with his breath stinking of sacramental wine, he'll shout drunkenly that he's never coming back again, and he lurches off down the street, proud of himself for having braved the heathen hordes.

And a month or two later, he comes wandering back to repeat the cycle.

(To be entirely honest, incidentally, "chubby" might not be accurate - that's just the impression I get from his profile picture, which might have been taken at a bad angle. But I'll stick with it anyway, because it will really piss him off if and when he reads this.)

In last week's entry, for instance, he kept babbling about how unfair I was to suggest that Joe the Plumber might be anything but a fine, upstanding and (most importantly) heterosexual person. I think it also made him a little bit unhappy that I'm not particularly polite to him any more.

With Eric's fascinating concatenation of personality quirks grinding against each other and creating friction, I was almost willing to bet money that it would boil over into his blog. And it did.

You remember back in high school, when you were in biology class and you'd run a few volts into a dead frog and the legs would twitch? And every time you did it, they'd always twitch the same way? But you still had to zap it a couple of more times, just to make the little frog-zombie jump again?

Yes, that's right. Eric Graff is a zombie frog.

His blog entry is a roller-coaster journey through the depths of his twisted little mind. I'm not clear whether he hates Diogenes or me more, but I think that I was the only one he suggested should be tortured and then beheaded. (It's hard to tell with Eric.)

Apparently, I love gays, Obama, muslims and socialism (interesting that he makes a distinction between them, considering the narrow pathways his mind runs on), and I hate conservatives, Republicans, christians and America (and at least he sees that there is a difference between conservatives and Republicans). Oh, and he, in no uncertain terms, supports the killing and torture of all muslims. Everywhere, as far as I can tell; he makes no obvious distinctions.

But I'm a bad person because I curse.

He sticks with Times New Roman all the way through, but the last fifth or so is a random collection of changing font sizes and bold-facing, ending in his usual all-cappy shrieking - you can practically see the cheeto-orange spittle aerosoling out from the screen as he Glenn-Becks into frequencies only dogs can hear.

I couldn’t help myself. Reproduced below is my response to that post. You’ll never see it there, of course, because he continues to "ban" me.

So much anger, Eman. Sad, very sad.

I'll ignore your ridiculous mischaracterizations. (I mean, you were the one who doesn't understand "libel.") But let's see.

19 people working for a small-time Saudi thug named Osama bin Laden ran planes into the World Trade Center, killing 2,993 people (including themselves).

Now, because 15 Saudis, one Lebanese, one Egyptian and two guys from the UAE commit a terrorist act, we attacked Iraq? How does that even make sense?

Now, what would you do if, unprovoked, the Chinese invaded America, killing millions of our people and destroying our infrastructure? Would you just sit back and take it, or would you fight back? Think about the actions of the Iraqi people in that light for a minute.

Meanwhile, looking at that last half of your post, I just have to say that you must be a great Christian, since you so obviously live by the teachings of Christ. Wasn't it Matthew 5:39 where we are exhorted, when attacked, to slap the other cheek?

Am I getting that quote right?

Thank you for the laughs, Eric. We love you. Get some help.
__________

Update (11/25/09): Well, three weeks later, I couldn't help myself. Like a child picking at a scab, I knew I should stop, but was hypnotized by the strings of goo dripping off the bottom of the crusty bit of congealed gore.

(Wow. That metaphor even disturbed me a little...)

Having gotten comments from both Dio and Real that Eric seems to have not just gone of the deep end, but crossed his legs and planted himself obstinately at the bottom of the pool, I thought I'd take a look.

FIrst of all, he seems to have decided to become, almost exclusively, a hate site for Dio and me. Almost exclusively. It looks like he's specifically shrieking at the two of us in every other post, by name. He centers entire posts around one or both of us.

Keep in mind that this is somebody I haven't had contact with in months. Essentially the internet equivalent of waving from across the street: a single sentence in response to a question he was asking rhetorically (but making fun of somebody he thought was Dio for trying to answer), and the hundred words or so above.

(Admittedly Dio has been there - not, apparently, as often as the voices in Eric's head say he has, but still...)

His latest post is about family troubles (not going to go there - no doubt he would, but I got class), but the one right before it made me pause for just a second. It looked for a second like he was answering my post of last night. Which might have pinged a little on the creepy-meter.

A quick check on the dates, and he beat me by about 24 hours. (So hey, at least he's prompt...) But again, he's specifically calling out Dio and me?

So I skimmed his comments, and found two points that I thought were interesting.

One was that he completely misrepresents our little debates - you know, the ones he requested - as if I did nothing but insult him. (Hey, I'm sorry that the truth has a liberal bias, but still...)

And two, having been voted off the island here, our racist friend Slam/Pat/Rodger is now posting there, and probably feeding Eric's weird delusions.

(There's even a string of comments where Eric is trying to pretend - or, sadly, might actually believe - that Dio is emailing him sobbing and asking to be allowed to post, and to please not report him to Blogger again or Dio will be banned. That's odd, since twenty seconds of research will tell you that's not how Blogger operates.)

Things just get uglier and uglier in that sad little corner of the world. I mean, wow. It was like a quick tour of post-Katrina New Orleans - that's 45 minutes of my life I'm never getting back.