You're so vain you probably think this post is about you

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BUT FIRST, what’s the deal with Substack comments? I have comments turned on, but you can’t leave comments. Here I thought you were all just quiet people when, in fact, I wasn’t letting you tell me what movies you want to watch. Which is quite the bummer.

Fiddling around with that movie post, I got it so you can leave comments now (please do!) but I couldn’t get them turned on on another post where I wanted to leave a post (which is how I realized this is STILL happening even though I’ve fixed it over and over; why is this not happening on other Substacks?).

Anyway, the thing I wanted to say about that other post is that I was wrong. It wasn’t Helmut Newton who said that thing about payphones. It was a guy named Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. And this is the photograph:

(If you click on the photo, you can see the issue of American Photo it came from. I was right that it was no later than 1998 but my assumption that it was exactly 1998 was off by five years. You can see Helmut Newton’s photo there (his wife eating breakfast with her breasts out) and, um, a bunch more of “the world’s finest photographers...selecting the images they made that, they feel, provide the best answer” to the question “What is erotic?”

In case you’re wondering, they did not all choose telephones.

I found this issue quite by accident. I selected songs from our collection that had the word city in the title, one of which was Vertical Horizon’s “Life in the City” (which I didn’t know we owned and which sounds way different from how I think Vertical Horizon sounds). Anyway, curious if Vertical Horizon was still around in 2026, I looked them up on Wikipedia then I got curious if their albums all looked similar (kinda) which led to me learning the name of the photographer of their most famous album cover which led me to her Wikipedia page where I learned she made all those famous Betty Page photos once of which is what you’ll see first if you click on that sexy photo above. You’ll have to scroll down from there for the Newton or the phone-photo page. Anyway, how wild to see that photo for the first time in almost thirty years—accidentally!—just a week after I spent almost an hour looking for it.

But back to the comments, I’m going to try something different WHILE POSTING this lil essay thing and see if that doesn’t get the comments a-working. Please go to Thubstack and say Polo if it works. Thanks.

Marco!

Anyway, on to the post promised by the title...:

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I was recently “doxxed” by an old acquaintance in the comments to an old blogpost. Scarequotes because anyone who reads this blog and doesn’t know my legal name and place of employment probably doesn’t care. I’m hardly hidden. As an exercise, I encourage you to uncover my middle initial right now and put your time in the comments. My guess is no one will take longer than ten minutes and most people will clock in around two. (This guess is partially based on the assumption that my readers are old enough [ie, not Gens Z or α] to know how to find things on the internet.)

Anyway, the doxxer in question is a narcissist and probable sociopath. Deeply charming upon first meeting, I grant you, but he was forced to leave our shared environment because, after three years, literally everyone refused to associate with him. He called that a victory and went on to greater things.

I don’t know what he’s up to now (I have chosen to do no research) but I always assumed he would soon be wealthy, boldly living life at the edge of white-collar crime. But, if he’s reading old posts of mine and identifying himself in anecdotes, maybe things aren’t going so well? Or perhaps this is normal behavior for narcissists / probable sociopaths. I mean, I wasn’t that surprised he popped up. Perhaps, when bored at home, such people look for old enemies to rage against.

But it’s hilarious (-ly narcissistic) to consider me an enemy. You might need to be a sociopath to interpret our past that way.

Anyway. Carly Simon.

 

Whenever I heard this song as a kid I would get apoplectic and demand of my mother well isn’t it? ISN’T this song about him???

I mean…isn’t it?