Crying soft tears today; Long Beach-based, Orange County-blessed poet Mindy Nettifee unfriended me from Facebook.
It probably didn't help when I wrote a poem last year called I'LL BE YOUR DEAD MAN FOR THE EVENING (look it up in the archives here) that was an account of how uncomfortable I felt during the portion of one Lightbulb Mouth (a now-dead reading/"show") event I attended in Long Beach last June. Mindy and Derrick Brown (Write Bloody small press publishing majordomo) were the engines driving Lightbulb Mouth.
And it probably didn't help even more when I wrote her backchannel at a later time and made the mistake of criticizing a Long Beach Icon she holds dear to this day.
But I can understand. If you're Mindy Nettifee and you've accomplished quite a lot locally and nationwide as a poet and promoter, you're not going to want to hear from someone who, by stark contrast, can seem like a sorehead and a loser who just doesn't know how to be nice to nice people.
So the moral I've living with is that of the time-honored cliche: "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."
In the LA/OC poetry communities, you can quadruple that.
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