How it all started

The Enemies List was started because of a Facebook application called “Living Social”, in which you could make a list of 5 people, places or thing that you wanted to categorize as your favorites: My 5 Favorite Actresses, My 5 Favorite Brands of Beer, etc. To jazz up the presentation, you applied images from the Living Social database. But I quickly discovered that I could add my own selections to the database – not only images with captions of celebrities and products, but of people in my life. I began innocuously enough, adding Kelie McIver and Di Burbano – two actresses of my acquaintance – to a “My 5 Favorite Actors/Actresses” list in order to suck up to them (it worked like a charm, by the way), like this:

But I soon discovered that I got more of a cathartic thrill out of busting my friends’ chops than in generically listing 5 movie actors or porn stars that I admired. So my lists tended to feature the people in my life rather than pop-culture icons who I didn’t really give a rat’s ass about. It all came to a head on April 21, 2009, when I posted a little entry called “My Current Enemies List”:

You’ll notice the good-natured ribbing from the peanut gallery in the Comments area. That was nothing compared to what it would become.

I found the Enemies List was an amusing little outlet to vent against the people in my life in a tongue in cheek fashion, so I made a list the next day. And the next. Soon people were consciously doing their best to get on my nerves just so I would put them on the Enemies List. The one who was the most successful at this was my friend, the actor and singer Dan E. Campbell, who I would start to devote whole lists to:

Ultimately, I found that the writer in me wasn’t satisfied with a simple listing about the people and things that annoyed me, and I began to write longer and longer descriptions of the people who were getting on my nerves – to the point where the database cut off my listings because I was putting in more text than it could handle – until my lists started looking like this:

This didn’t sit well with the people who wanted to use the Living Social application for what it was intended for, and my long descriptions started clogging up the database. I was finally approached by my brother David (who is something of a geek and enjoys making lists of sitcom stars and science fiction novels) to ask me to find another way to post my lists, so I began writing them in the “Notes” area of my Facebook profile. The only problem with this approach was that the one or two sentence rants I was doing on Living Social no longer seemed to suffice, and my complaints against the annoyances in my life got longer and longer.

The whole thing turned into a nightmare, to the point where I am now defined by my friends by this idiotic Enemies List. I continue to post it on a daily basis for my small circle of friends on Facebook, but after a considerable amount of pressure, I am sharing my rants with the world on this web site. While some of the names are changed to protect the innocent (Misty LaRue is a compendium of female yentas idealized in the posts by the beauteous visage of adult film actress Kayla Synz), there are numerous references to the Facebook society that continues to make my life a living hell. So I hope that you enjoy these posts, and that you will take pity on me as I continue to wage battle against the forces of evil in the hopes that someday the forces of good – in the form of yours truly – will prevail.