Unexplained Phenomena – Volume 1

The Chronic Shit-Talker

Before I started this blog, I had another public blog hosted by a site that allowed you to subscribe to your friends’ sites and receive regular updates of what they were posting. Almost all of my friends (and mostly people whom I have never met, or spoken to maybe once in my entire life) were subscribed to my site, and usually, I to theirs. This resulted in my postings consisting primarily of mindless, nonsensical ramble about:

a) my dog
b) your dog
c) my undying love for David Wright

All in all, incredibly boring stuff lest I reveal too much to the mindless, shit-talking masses that comprise our great society.

My brother and I decided to create this anonymous site because we knew that we had a lot of opinions to share with the world and doing so anonymously would provide a safe forum where we would be free to say anything about anything without the judgmental eyes of our peers.

In an effort to promote the site, I posted on my old site and invited people to email me if they were interested enough to get the link to the new site. I didn’t think anyone I didn’t know well or who didn’t know that I was a writer or seriously care about what I had to say would actually take the time to write to me but, to my surprise, I actually received a few emails.

One was from a girl I went to high school with who (although we were not close at all), as a fellow writer, I knew genuinely cared about reading another writers’ thoughts. Another was from a guy I knew in college who, as far as I know, is a generally good guy and I wouldn’t have a problem with him reading what I had to say.

Another was from another girl I went to high school with, was acquainted with, but didn’t really know very well. She was also the one person I had actually labeled in my mind “person to never give this link to.”

Let me explain.

If there were ever an award for Most Shit Talked About People You Barely Know, this girl would, without a doubt, win it. Thus, I will henceforth refer to her as the Gobshite, a term I picked up during my stint in Ireland that literally means “shit mouth.” We went to high school together for three years. She was already a good friend of two of my close friends, so we were introduced straightaway, and got along well enough were it not for one small issue. She was literally addicted to talking shit about people. But not just people—people she knew, people she didn’t know, people she met once, people she knew for years and was still good friends with, people who she knew through friends of friends of friends, famous people, everyone. I heard from my friends on several occasions that she had said things about me. Although it upset me that she said things about me under the guise of being a “friend,” what seriously pissed me off was who she was saying all this too. Why would someone talk shit about you to your friends?

It never seriously got to me because as I said before, we were merely acquaintances, and after high school, I never saw her again save for a couple of instances where we bumped into each other, and one time at a mutual friend’s birthday party where I got really drunk and regaled her with some inane bullshit about dating White guys vs. dating Asian guys, traveling, and how delicious beer is, and in turn listened to tidbits about her new relationship. Fine.

One day, my friends and I were all at a café, drinking coffee, chatting, doing the shit you do at a café, when she somehow came up in conversation. One friend, the one I met her through who continues to stay in contact with her mentioned that every time she speaks to her, all Gobshite talks about is, or course, other people.

“Who, exactly, does she talk about?”

“Oh, you know, everyone.”

“Does she talk about me?”

“Well, you know, she…just talks about…everyone.”

“So she does talk about me.”

“Well, sort of…”

“Just out of curiosity, what does someone I haven’t seen or spoken to in years have to say about me?”

“I don’t know, she just sort of makes these sweeping generalizations. Like, for instance, ‘don’t you notice how so-and-so always talks about such-and-such?’”

So, why would someone I barely speak to go through the trouble of being one of the few who took the time to email me and request this link? I asked my best friend that same question, and without missing a beat, she summed it up nicely, "Of course she's gonna ask, she feeds on that shit." In all seriousness, this girl is a professional shit-talker. Even with such limited contact in the last four years, she manages to find something to say about me, and everyone for that matter. So, although I no longer take offense to this behavior as it is obviously not personal in any way, I reserve to right to delete her email and not give her the link to this site lest I provide her with more artillery for her verbal attacks.

I have subsequently removed that post from my former blog.

-L, obviously