Some Blog

Shiver me timbers

04/11/2006

Deep down in my knees and up through my stomach, I shiver, maybe it’s more a quiver or a tremor, a soulquake that rocks me to my core. I’ve learned today, by accident of deceit. I thought I was too smart to not see. The lie, to be expected for the Internet is a fount of liars…

Lately the anamnesis has been hard work, but then all blogging has been hard work, and I know it hasn’t gone unnoticed. For all those of you who noticed, um whatever.

Last week’s topic (Follow) still resides in draft format and one day will work it’s way out to the blog, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.

I had the thread, that’s how it starts. I see the word, I have an idea, the thread is formed and off I go with the whole writing thingy. I had the connections, I was going to share about how my innards shiver when I do coke, e, k, or speed. There is this time elapsed photography that my body does and in between the dancing and the endless proclamations of how great this is, while I dance until my feet bleed (but I don’t feel it) and drench my clothes with sweat, my insides start shivering. This is not like being cold when your teeth chatter and your muscles shiver in response to early onset hypothermia, this is the exact sensation of your stomach shivering. And then your intestines. And then, and then, and then the shakes come and my ankles start to get dancey. The twitching and endless motor ticks outlast the high. Yes, that was what I was going to write about here, in great detail. Maybe next time.

Today, I was perusing the great big blog world and ran into a wall.

Long ago and far away a good friend once said: “The Internet: Where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents.”

My friend has always been a pretty smart person, and cautioned me against trusting the Internet:

On non-threatening—I happen to think I’m pretty harmless and try to do the right thing. But, stepping into the third-person for a moment, if I had to render disinterested advice on this point, I’m not sure that it’s really that easy to sort the sheep from the goats—it’d be hard for you to figure out if I’m in fact telling the truth. There are a lot of people who are capable of saying pretty words, and who have the patience to apply them in a way that evades your threat instincts. Particularly true in the online world, frankly, where most of one’s normal critical intuitions on human interaction get dampened out, and hopeful fantasy has a way of filling in the gaps. There are people who understand this, and know how to exploit it. In some odd sense, we should be thankful that the world is full of unsubtle idiots, because a world full of wolves would be a hard one to live in.

Mind you, I believe in trust. I’m not so cynical that I think trust is foolish—the old canard “trust no one” has very limited practical application (in most cases, it is useless). But you have to be careful. I guess what I’m saying is that “the rest of the class” may not deserve your trust. In fact, based on the information you have, I probably don’t deserve your trust (although I think it helps that I’m boxed into a little corner of your life, where practically speaking there’s not a lot I can do to further my own interests at your expense—kind of a non-threat in that regard).

PS. If I haven’t said this in a while, everyone who emails me should be well aware that they have no expectation of privacy.

In my perusal this afternoon, I came across a comment from a blogger I use to read regularly. The blogger (blogger A) in question has started going through medically created menopause and as such the direction of her blog,understandably, has gone somewhere I find of little interest. This is a natural evolution of blog reading and I accept this. Upon seeing her name, I clicked through, just to see if things had drastically changed. While I found more of the same, I came upon a post where the woman’s partner references another blog (blogger B) of which I was a regular reader but have since moved on as is the reality of things. There was no real reason, I suppose I had read enough to get the gist of the story and while there were some memorable posts, having read the entirity of the archives, I could see that there wasn’t going to be a great change of direction to make the blog any more interesting.

The entry about this other blog essentially said that a long time ago blogger A wrote a short post about how blogger B had such a specific take on life and her lifestyle. Blogger A questioned the ability of a person to maintain the lifestyle choices. Blogger B responded with a very aggressive attack, which I can understand as I would probably do the same if someone were to call into question my life and my choices. Blogger B is kind of infamous in certain Internet circles for acts of Internet aggression, to the point where people in forums will just drop out rather than face her wrath.

Intrigued, and nosy, I went to blogger B’s blog to find a confession. She had lied about everything. Her battle with cancer, the death of her son in a drunk driving accident, her husband’s heart attack.

The confession, is in three parts, the first: nothing here is true…the second: I am an alcoholic and addicted to the Internet…the third: I am trying to help other people to make amends and not everything was false.

The confession came as she was outed by the forum she terrorized for years. The back and forth is too hard to really follow, but essentially, blogger B wrote a detailed homage to her slain son, noting that the man who took his life was a convicted murderer. A woman interested in writing a story began to research deaths by drunk drivers in the general vicinity of the woman in a specific time period and facts started to not match the tails she was telling. As the truths came out and her lies began to unravel (she is unmarried, has no children) blogger B has made comments that she will continue to post because so many of her readers said that they didn’t care if she was telling the truth, the readers felt that they had gained some sort of life lessons from her blog (of course the not insignificant number of individuals attacked by blogger B in any number of places were all very vocal on the insidious nature of blogger B and her personal and vicious attacks). So, blogger B has posted a comment that her blog is fiction and that she will carry on in the great tradition of many of America’s great writers.

The fact that this total sociopath (she often commented and posted as her husband on her blogs and in forums) is continuing to spread her ideas on the Internet because people feel like her made up stories of her perfect life (seriously, she should have been awarded super mom/wife/employee of the century) were inspirational. Fucking read the bible or better yet, the poetry of recovering heroine addicts if you need inspiration, encouraging a pathological liar (and self-confessed Internet addict) to continue posting on the Internet is the most irresponsible thing I have ever heard.

Mood rating: Leave me alone.