You Can't Make Me Read My Blog Comments

I write or contribute to several blogs with varying themes.  Sometimes, People of the Internet respond to what I've written by posting comments which are surprising, insightful and enlightening.  Or so I imagine, anyway.  While I do get notices in my email inbox all the time that someone has actually wandered into one of my blogs and left me a note, I never, ever look at what people have written.

When I get my writing dander up, I just let it flow, mixed metaphors be damned.  Sometimes I adopt personalities that aren't like my own at all, or I argue different sides of issues, or I get downright grouchy, sanctimonious, and pompous.  I can get over-heated, overbearing, and over-the-top.   Depending on how well I slept, I may be a sweetheart or a heart-eater, or wear a sweater.  I want to give myself permission to indulge my passions, follow my whims, and sniff up the skirt of whatever muse gives me the wink.  That's why I always write using an assumed identity, even right now.  If I worried what people thought, worried that I might offend someone, I would become frozen  If I tried to write with an eye to what people think of me, I wouldn't be able to write in my blogs at all, and then where would the world be?

Okay, well, that sounds okay but it's mostly malarkey.  The real reason I don't look at my comments is because I'm a coward and I can't take criticism.  Although I notice it's become less problematic since I stopped drinking caffeine, I have real problems with obsessive thoughts which combine in a volatile way with the personal issues I have about being judged.  So if I were to post a blog entry and then get a comment saying, oh I don't know, "You're a fucking idiot and you don't know what you're talking about, go kill yourself retard," it would stun me, I'd become unproductive at my job for a week, and it would probably take that entire week of hearing that phrase over and over again in my head before I managed to come up with something clever to say in response, which I would then edit and add to and edit and add to over and over again for another several days until it was a thousand words too long, but still a wiry ball of white hot hate.  Which I would never post, and which the commenter would never read if I did.  My reading my blog comments would result in my periodic slow self-destruction in a hot gas fireball.  

If someone shoots me a bird in traffic I get tied me up in knots for days.  I often can't bring myself to open my email inbox because there might be bad news in there.  Why would I ever think I could deal with direct criticism of my actual thoughts and feelings in my blogs?  I know better. Hey, I know I can be an idiot, and I'm well aware that I often don't know what I'm talking about, but man, having it pointed out by a third party fucks me up.  But good.

"Let me tell you what I think of your blog."

Now, it's likely that almost all the folks who post comments on my blog are just promoting their own blogs, or posting hotlinks to www.pornsite.xxx, or maybe, just maybe, saying nice things to me about what I wrote.  I might even be missing opportunities.  What if a major publisher has left me a comment requesting that I contact him or her about having my writing turned into a book which  would sell a million copies and be read on toilets around the world (even really cool toilets, after it's translated to Japanese)?  What if a rich widow is a really big fan of my stuff and wants to give me a huge pile of money so I can quit my day job and masturbate in public like this all the time, and she left me a comment to say so?  What if a commune filled with nubile nymphettes have confused my writing with erotica and my lazy editing with talent, and have invited to pay to have me come vacation with them in the Bahamas because they're blog groupies who're just dying to rub me down with the juices of the fruit of their loins, and have said as much, only I don't know and will never know because I'm a fraidy-cat?  Well, it's a chance I have to take, because there's no way I'm looking at those comments. 

And if someone IS trying to contact me to give me money or anything else, there's a better way to contact me than a blog comment.  I don't want to risk giving those who want to say cruel and hurtful things to me any ideas, but it rhymes with "mend me a personal sea snail".
 
Mean people suck, but as far as I know, they don't exist on the internet.  Let's keep it that way.   


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