Bugaboo

I have a friend from whom I need to escape. We met in Egypt, and we both lived in the same city at the time. Surprisingly, our friendship was of an acceptable level at that time. We mostly socialized through a mutual friend/third party and had limited, appropriately-spaced independent interactions. Unfortunately, our mutual friend and he got into a fight. Around that time and perhaps because of that, the friend got super-clingy. He started calling me more often, and every time he called, he wanted to stay on the phone for at least two hours.

I don't like talking on the phone. I talk to my mom, my brother, my grandmother and Teeny. There are people I consider soul mates, people I love enough to name my children after, people I have known for more than a decade to whom I do not speak on the phone more than once per year. I realize that makes me unusual. A secondary problem that I believe makes me less unusual is that I don't like people clinging to me.

The friend does not seem to have any emotional intelligence. He calls and calls, leaving one voice mail message after another, and he does not desist even if I never return any of his calls. Normally, if I call someone, and the person doesn't call me back, I assume the person is either busy or not interested in talking to me and I don't try calling him or her again for at least a week or two. I finally sent him a Facebook message telling him that I'm impossible to reach on the phone and he should just message me on Facebook if he needs me. (Yes, this was kind of a punk move on my part.)

I was punished for being kind of a punk by the following actions on his part: (1) daily Facebook messages (at a minimum frequency), (2) always commenting on my Facebook status and (3) deciding he wants to come visit the city where I presently reside. He asked if I want to hang out with him when he's here. The answer is clearly "no," but I said we could have dinner when he's in town. In his typical "take a mile" fashion, he now wants to dragoon me into spending a day sight-seeing with him.

I have lived in this city for about a decade in total. I have seen all the sights I care to see. If someone I liked came to town, I might be willing to endure either the seeing of sights that never interested me to begin with or a review of sights I've seen already. I'm not going to spend my entire day schlepping around to see a bunch of shit I don't care about with a person I don't care for. In a rare display of backbone, I told him that not with chloroform could he get me to go sight-seeing with him. Then, he proceeded to call me on the phone when he knew I was out of town with my mother, sent me a Facebook message imploring me to reconsider my anti-sight-seeing stance, and I received a postcard from his recent trip overseas.

I would say that I have no idea what to do about this Klingon, but I know exactly what I must do. I must sever all communication with him. If I'm going for bonus points, I should also tell him that he's too clingy and intense for me and I don't want him ever to contact me again for any reason.