Something That Matters To Me

Between the people who tell me the grit I include on this blog is "extraordinary" and the people who tell me that I tend to wither under criticism, I confess this blogging thing gets on my nerves.  In linking to Chris at Hill Cantons' writing of this post on the weekend, I draw the gentle reader's attention to the 27th comment by Limpey ... particularly the line where he says, "It became clear to me that my detractors were very determined ..."

It isn't that the self-righteous little fuckers are wandering around anonymously in the background.  It isn't that they can pick and choose their battles from the literally tens of thousands of words I write on this blog monthly, focusing on this little sentence here or that little sentence there in the way it suits their fancy.  It isn't their pretense to expertise or critical analysis that seems to pop up on my comments list but is inexplicably invisible on their own personal blogs.

What really pisses me off is that I can speak and argue in reality much faster and much more clearly than I can write.  Face to face, I can rip apart their two-dimensional protests in the space of a minute or so.  I can enter into the discussion with a full-on Socratean court press, demanding an answer to this, and an answer to that, walking my pathetic little detractor into a corner of his own dumbfuck construction before eviscerating his position.

The blog just doesn't let me do that.  I can ask questions and demand answers, but as soon as these little peons sense their position is wavering a tiny bit they sidestep my questions and change the subject, smugly doing so with a meaningless diatribe full of disconnected, irrelevant examples.  I can't stand in front of them and demand that they answer the question I've asked.  I can't force them back onto the subject in question.  I can't beat them with the stick of their own fucking stupidity.

No, I have to sit here and fume and argue with myself about how deleting this comment will make me look to the people who actually do respect me.  Every one of these slippery bastards that don't respect me - or anyone else, as far as I know - holds me hostage.  I am on trial, daily, put there whenever some little fart has read some obscure book on the subject he bought at Borders, who presumes that book must be right because its a book, and I must be wrong because I'm, well, a person.  Books, of course, aren't written by people who get their facts wrong.  Books are never irrelevant because they weren't written with D&D in mind.  Books are gods.  I know that I have never read a book which I found to be a piece of unbelievable unmitigated poorly-researched crap.  Every book I have ever read was perfectly researched.

My greatest failing as an expert at anything is clearly that I haven't read, memorized and thoughtfully included a bibliography to every book ever written on every subject I dare to talk about on this blog.  It is my fault that back in the 80's and 90's that I didn't painstakingly copy out long paragraphs of description from the books I read in libraries about feudalism, the middle ages, culture, history and so on, for the day when I would need to quote them, verbatim, for this blog.  I am unforgiveably guilty of not spending every waking hour I have, now, at the library, fixing this regrettable lack of foresight by quoting chapter, verse and publishing house for every buttfuck critic who feels that I haven't read enough books written by actual medieval writers to please that particular critic.  Mea culpa.  Mea culpa.  Holy fucking mother of Christ, what in blazes was I - am I - thinking?

Let me explain something about defending oneself to readers who have disagreements about something you've written.  It is fucking exhausting.  The complaintants generally haven't read every word you've bothered to carefully write in each sentence you've carefully strung together, so you spend more than half your time repeating shit you've already said.  Most complaintants just don't get it.  They don't know what you're talking about.  And if you've committed the immortal sin of crapping on some sacred cow they've spent the last twenty years of their lives fucking and reading bedtime stories to, they simply WON'T get what you're talking about.

So it begins to wear a little thin.  It begins to beg the question, why bother?  It gathers in a little less pleasant gain.  The bloom comes off the rose.  And if you aren't the sort that thrives on this sort of thing ... if you aren't the kind of person who soaks in controversy with the osmosis-bent fury of an amoeba touched by Darwin, you will find the day that comes when you just won't want to do this anymore.  You will lift yourself from your computer and find out that there are happier, warmer places in the world, where there are people who considerately want to share their company with you, where they will not disdain your choices and interests, but serve them and do so with kindness and concern.  You will learn there is a warm sun, a gentle rain, a glistening pond, a bustle of laughing people on the street, quiet glades, calling birds and spectacular little things in stores that you can buy with money you earn.

And you'll wonder why you ever had a blog.

For me, having now finished delivering my opinion on something, having taken time out of patiently churning out product to express myself like a human being on something that interests ME as opposed to those readers who feel my blog is no place for me to give my opinion freely, I shall now take on the task of again answering those who find everything I've written today to be yet one more pile of excrement, brown and smelly and wholly dissatisfying.

Okay.  I'll just get a cup of coffee and we can get started.