Part 2

I check my statcounter a lot. Not as much these days, but I always go back and see who's linking me when I get a little spike in my online traffic. Tonight, I got home and saw I had a little spike and found I was quoted here. Jason Winders quotes me from time to time, and I always consider it pretty cool to have a guy from the paper naming me in his blog.

Part of what he had to say on what I had to say:

Interesting stuff. One part gossip, one part character assassination, one part consumer warning, I can see what drew my e-mailer’s attention to this post. It’s the kind of thing that makes for great across-the-bar chatter. But that’s all. It’s not a matter of delivering “all the news.” Far from. In fact, what she’s taking for fact, turns out, is only one man’s opinion. No matter how well-informed, spot-on and entertaining the report, this is still opinions from one guy who can take pop shots from an anonymous position.

He's refering to my post about Joseph Mills. First of all, I'm not one to decide what's newsworth and what isn't. That's the papers job. I only have a blog and I write in it about shit that happens downtown. It's pretty simple. Recently, there's been a lot of bad things happening to girls downtown, and I happen to know the guy who got arrested for some of those things.

It's difficult for me to effectively argue with anyone about how true the things I've said are because I'm anonymous. Unless I say my name is X and I work at X bar and I saw these things happen on X date, ultimately no one will take me seriously. But that's okay. The trade-off works for me.

Keeping that in mind, the things I wrote about are true. I know they're true because I watched them happen with my own eyes. In fact, actually there's a lot more to the story than I'm letting on to because to divulge any more information than I already have might compromise my anonymity and I'm not willing to do that.

To anyone who reads this blog on any regular basis, I can promise you this: I won't lie. I have no reason to. No one knows me and that's the way I'd like to keep it. That's also part of the reason that I don't have to lie.

I'm not accountable to anyone for the things I say, and I'd like to keep it that way. I'm a pretty decent person. I'm honest. I have nothing motivating me to embellish my stories. I don't make a dime from this blog.

Truth is always stranger than fiction, anyway.

But on another note, if you come downtown and do stupid shit and I see you, then I might write about you. I'll tell a story and some people will read it and think it's funny and ridiculous and sit around and tell their friends about this ridiculous story that the AthensDoorGuy wrote about. That's the risk anyone takes when they come downtown and get drunk and fight and puke and try to steal stuff, or worse...go around assaulting girls.

And allegedly, that's what Joseph Mills did.

He creeped people out. He picked his favorites from Allgood, Wild Wing, The Loft, Doc Cheys, Barcode, Locos and a number of other places and visited those places and sat there and stared at them.

He didn't drink. He didn't start fights. He didn't make a scene. But to a girl who's constantly surrounded by drunk guys hitting on them and throwing money their way in the hopes that they'll convince the hot bartender to go home with them, the silent guy sitting at the end of the bar by himself drinking his coke or sprite staring at her in silence for hours creeped her out more than any drunken frat boy could.

And apparently there were a few nights where staring just wasn't enough for him. He grabbed and groped and tried to kiss girls who weren't open to that behavior. And odds are, they were drunk. Guess who probably wasn't? Joseph. And to me, that's fucked up.

So I wrote about it. I told the truth. Are my stories really true? You decide.

Regardless of any of my opinions, his actions caught our attention - and apparently the police, too - and it eventually caught up to him and now he's facing a bunch of charges that he'll probably get convicted of.

And if he's convicted, then let that speak for itself. A jury of our peers deciding he's guilty is more than enough for me to take it as fact.

But if you ask my opinion, you can probably tell I already have my mind made up.