Counterpoint

My brother, while neither blonde nor blue eyed, is a posterchild of the Nazi temperament. Efficiency! Honor! Killing people who disagree with me! These are my brother's core values. Oh, and don't forget: Holding people to unrealistic standards with which Superman would struggle! as well as Be kind to no one! It would be an understatement to say that Ben is lacking in the patience department, and even more of an understatement to say that he generally expects everyone to be as singlemindedly serious about everything as he is.

Do you like baseball? Don't tell him that because he will begin to let you know how much more he knows about it and how stupid you are for thinking that you know anything about it when obviously you don't know as much as him.

Do you like movies? He will make sure to let you know how much he hates every movie you like and throw in several film theory terms he knows just to put the nail in your film ignorance coffin.

Now, you can see why employers love my brother. He will get tasks done on time, and be better than everyone else, but largely because he pulled off and ate the skin of everyone in his way. Then, while they ran around screaming without their skin, he chased them around with a salt shaker taunting them about how stupid they were and how much better than them he is at life.

Now, imagine that you are on the same team with him. Being on the winning team; that's good, right? Wrong. Because you have to be as good as him, or it's quitsville. "I can't work under these conditions," you will be constantly informed, "Your so-much-less-awesome-than-me-ness is draining all the energy out of the dark, sticky oil that serves as my soul. You're not working as fanatically as I am. You should really read Mein Kampf." He will tell you things like this all the time so that if things go south, he can always say that he'd been telling you for a long time that you sucked.

And what you didn't know up till this point was that he has a well-conceived plan to destroy everyone he knows, and especially the people he loves, just in case he ever needs to use them. Contingency plans are a must in Benhawkofascism.* For an example of this, consider the fact that though Ben and I were the only contributors on Admittedly Hawken, Ben made sure that he was the only administrator. He could/can edit and delete my posts, or even kick me off the blog (which was my idea to begin with) but nothing he did could be touched. So, what you're reading right now may not even be something I wrote.

But I digress. What my brother so characteristically claimed in his previous two (zealous? no! not Ben!) posts, is that I posted so rarely to the blog that it withered like a houseplant in a meth lab due to the soul-crushing loneliness it felt for my words. This is always the final deathblow delivered by my brother in a situation like this. After the fact, when it doesn't matter anymore, he points out your infinite worth. The moment he's made it clear with his actions that he thinks you're about as valuable as a secondhand dog anus, he lets you know that he thought you were great all along and that he told you that all the time (which is obviously a bold-faced lie), and that it's really disappointing.

(Also, I waited till now to write this post because I knew that he'd write a second post showing how I "proved his point." Now you see how long it takes Ben to become impatient about me posting to the blog: he couldn't even wait a full 12 hours. But, this probably won't make sense when you read it, because he'll probably have gone back and deleted his "Point 1.1" post with his magical admin powers.)

When Admittedly Hawken was in full swing, Ben was working and was done with school. Yes, Ben was busy. Of course he was busy. He's Ben, and being busy is what he does. In fact, if you were to take some of his blood out and throw it on paper, it would eventually congeal to form - in black - the words "work work work work work work" over and over again. But as stated earlier, Ben has no patience for anyone who has a lower tolerance for busy-ness. If you are working with him on a project, and you are opposed to developing stress ulcers, he will have none of it. I'm going to school? And working two jobs? And eating breadcrumbs for dinner because the two jobs don't cut the mustard? Well I can just go to hell because those are not acceptable excuses.

So, ultimately, what really caused the downfall of the Admittedly Hawken empire was a hissy fit. Ben couldn't understand how I liked to sleep sometimes, preferred not to have ulceric blood in my stool, and that my full load of classes and jobs didn't quite lend itself to posting between 400 and 3,287 times an hour. That was just unacceptable, so Ben, in his time-honored tradition, decided that he was quitting and that somehow his quitting was actually something that I was doing, and that all bad things that he had ever done had actually been done by me, and that I hated kittens, and also that I caused the Civil War.

AH died because Ben didn't get his way and wanted to cry about it through redirected self loathing. There you have it, my friends.

*Copyright 2009 by Jake Hawken, as is Benjihad, and TaliBen.

Point 1.1

As if to prove my point for me, a day after suggesting we engage in such a dialog, Jacob has already forgotten about the idea and/or lost interest in it (probably because he saw a dog with a puffy tail).

Point 1

After going dark approximately seven years ago, it's time to revisit the once-hallowed halls of Admittedly Hawken and determine, once and for all, why such a brilliant flagship sunk to the ocean floor so quickly and so unceremoniously.

For the purposes of explanation and clarification (and also, possibly, rejuvenation), I would like to formally open a point-counterpoint dialog on this very subject.

The reason for Admittedly Hawken's demise is simple, and forlorn readers need look no farther than the younger half of this celebrated blogging duo.

My little brother is a talented writer and an energetic wordsmith, but his great mind is also, oftentimes, his undoing. Jacob has never encountered a monumentally important task that, if an ice cream truck drove by, could not be permanently forgotten in a moment.

This infamous levity is the very buoyancy which allows such a brain to remain so agile, but it does not lend itself to finishing projects which it starts, or remaining engaged to said projects over extended periods of time.

Regular incentives (e.g. baked goods, physical violence, physical violence with baked goods, etc.) are necessary to ensure his commitment does not wane. In this respect, he is not entirely unlike a poorly bred hound -- minus the proclivity to sleep in his own fecal matter; a practice his wife now prohibits.

It is this reason -- indeed, this sole reason -- that this otherwise fantastic blog came to an abrupt halt after several weeks of posts from me alone.