Please realize that what follows is only posted for its very minimal historical value. In no way is everything nasty in the roast meant sincerely, and in no way did we intend to include certain names in any terrible way, and in no way did we not mean some of the things we said. We figured roasts are mean things, that men often express affection through insult, that other sites would write much stupider things and we wanted to write something with some basic critical content, and so we overwrote a harsh roast of a sort of provocative "personality," included tons of what we call in the roast "rhetorical horseshit," and let fly. In Neal's response to the roast, he called one piece "jealous, bitter, pathetic, and near-stalker-like." That piece is this one. You decide. We agree that it may be pathetic, but not "jealous," "bitter," or "near-stalker-like," unless he wasn't joking when he said get away from "my bar," when he was clearly at a bar more mine than his, invited to hang out by a friend I often see. We're obviously conflicted about all this. We like Neal. We also think everyone would admit Neal can be a total dick, that total dickness is essential to his allure, whatever it may be. And we think conflicted feelings are natural feelings, and we hope, therefore, that we're innocent in God's eyes, and we hope S/HE reserves judgment upon our soul for an afterworld wherein we'll find ourselves many thousand million years from now, when all this will be as distant as reliance on steam engines, as television aerials, as Billy "White Shoes" Johnson and Oscar Gamble, as the time the dinosaurs of be-bop roamed the earth and inspired a nation of run-on sentences like this one.