…salted lithium.

“High School Confidential”; ‘Avoid Freud‘, Rough Trade (1981)
she makes me cream my jeans when she comes my way.

I am totally ripping this idea off from Anita Marie, who mostly blogs at Irregular Bones. I’m going no frills — no fricking html formatting* and no mind-tearing truths** for a whole day. Ah, No Post Day… bliss.

I just have two questions for anyone willing to answer. Last night I left a long comment on a blog I don’t read as often as I’d like. When I comment on a blog where I don’t know the blogger I get nervous… like I’m about to walk into a job interview nervous. Like I’m about to ask a woman over for coffee and heavy petting nervous. I’m not sure it’s a “fight or flight” thing, but I know when I’m on the Lithium my reactions to certain situations seem different. Like adrenalin kind of triggers some weirdness in the stability of my body. As I was writing the response on the blog last night, for example, my neck was seizing and my left hand was shaking a little more than usual. The response itself was, kind of, a defence of the blogger. They had been unreasonably — in my opinion — attacked so I was being a little… ‘forceful’ in my response, so maybe there was a “fight or flight” response in there. But the nerves, the stomach stuff and the really, really heavy self-doubt about the quality of my response hits every time I post a comment for the first time…

There’s also a blog I comment on fairly frequently, but I never get responses back… which kind of bugs me. But the dude never erases them, so I figure I’m doing alright and continue to post responses. In 11.5 months of blogging on WordPress I’ve only ever erased one response… a good friend of mine left a 2100+ word response to someone else’s comment. ‘Good Friend’ has bouts of paranoia and an irrational hatred of all things American (and French Canadian), and his comment was just utter fucking nonsense and insulting to many blogger friends of mine. So I axed it… I gave him the option to rewrite, but his response was “you can’t handle my truths”, then he went and smoked his three grams of weed — seriously, he smokes three grams a day. He’s actually a government licensed weed dealer… it’s not too late to move to Canada.

I’ve never considered any of the comments on any of my blogs to be personal attacks. Even during that weird Ic@rus moment a few months ago the swearing took place on their site. So across my three blogs I’ve received 2,053 non-spam responses, and only burned one. I know I’ve been extremely fortunate because I’ve read attacks on other blogs. Trolls, morons, idiots, passive aggressive pieces of dog waste… but I’ve noticed a lot of people will leave the negative and insulting comments on their blogs. Sometimes, of course, the blogger has a witty, funny and devastating response that only makes sense with the dumbass comment still there. I’ve even seen one blog where the blogger takes all the vowels out of the offending comment. But a lot of the time it seems to me it would just be easier to erase the message and move on.

So my two questions are:

1) what would it take for you to erase a non-spam response, and;

2) What do you go through the first time you respond to a blog you’ve enjoyed for awhile?

*there was some html… but only because the default text size for this theme is silly.

**that stuff about “fight or flight” was kind of personal.

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