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People who defect to you from your 'enemies' <snivelling grovelling little bastard-centric>
Word of caution before reading on: This thread is so totally fucking ludicrous I'd probably mock anyone who posted this. Feel free to mock me too although I maintain this whole situation isn't my fault:
Anyway, tonight it was confirmed to me that I have an enemy. This is quite exciting in a James Bond-style way. Or more accurately an "I'm sure I left primary school several years ago"-kinda way.
But basically a guy I know and don't like cornered me at a gig tonight (this was a real fucking pain as by all accounts him talking to me meant I missed an excellent band who I'd have liked to have seen).
As he tends to do, he talked about all manner of things. Mostly about gig nights he's putting on and how he might put my band on at some stage (which'd be fine in itself and I'm grateful for every gig we get except it annoys me how he acts as though he'd be giving me an enormous opportunity when he knows as well as I do that he's completely out of depth with the venues he's booking and he needs us as much as, if not more than, we need him...)
But anyway in the course of this conversation he apologises for having been off with me for several months (something he'd utterly denied a few months back when I asked him why he was off with me) and explains that he was overly-under the influence of a friend of his who has taken a disliking to me and who had induced him to do the same.
This was an incredibly bizarre thing to hear from a guy in his forties. Surely you'd have, by that stage, grown out of disliking someone 'cos your friends do? Or is this normal behaviour? How should I react to him now? Am I obliged to be nice to him or am I allowed to ignore him (to be honest him not liking me over the last few months has been a blessing as he hasn't spoken to me and I'd forgotten how irritating I find him...)
In a way this has all been quite useful in so far as that for a few months now I've wondered if his friend dislikes me and sees me as some kind of rival and has been trying to turn mutual friends against me but I'd dismissed this as ridiculous given that it is a ridiculous thing to do. It's nice to know this has been happening and that I've not turned paranoid.
At the same time I've got limited time for someone who decides they don't like me based on other people's accounts of what I'm like. Surely people are more likely to get a sense of someone by speaking to them in public...