As I mentioned before, I’m not writing much these days. I’m just tired, is all, and a little down in the dumps, and I can’t think of anything to say that doesn’t involve either food or taking the bus. I still think about writing all of the time, and I occasionally feel guilty about not doing it anymore, but every time I seriously consider sitting down and saying stuff on this pretend paper, I feel a little queasy and decide that nothing in my head is all that important.

I don’t get traffic anymore. I mean, I get some, but it’s a barely there sliver of what it was before. This bothered me at first but it doesn’t so much now. I feel like blogs in general aren’t really a thing these days, and although I’m not yet ready to give up this platform entirely, I’m more pleased about getting more Twitter interactions than blog visitors.

Speaking of blog visitors, though, there are still some people who check in every now and then – the old regulars and occasionally some new people, likely linked to this by some Google search or another and ending up (I guessing) disappointed. At least that’s what I assume from the visit lengths and, sometimes, comments, which, when they happen, turn out to be somehow both shitty and also the funniest part of my day.

The thing is, I’ve spent a lot of time on the Internet, both in the reading and writing aspects. I’ve read a lot of people’s stuff and found it to be appropriately hilarious, uplifting, enraging, and awful. I sometimes comment on people’s stuff but usually only when I know them in some way, or, if I don’t know them, I limit my comments to something like praise. I can honestly say that I don’t remember ever posting something mean or negative as a comment on something someone wrote – I mean, I might write about it later on my own platform, but I don’t even link back to it (because if I hated it so much, why would I give that person the satisfaction of views?). I just don’t see the point. I’ve never seen the point. Maybe I just have weird priorities, but to me, posting a shitty comment on a stranger’s blog is like pissing into the wind. It doesn’t really affect anyone but you, and I’m betting that unless you’re into some seriously gross German pornography, it doesn’t make you feel all that much better inside when you’re done.

Of course, not everyone feels this way. Much like the customers who seemed to come out to have a bad time during my bartending days, there are lots of people who get on the Internet to dislike what they see. Which just baffles me. It really does. We have the Internet, this unbelievably vast and intelligent communication tool connecting the entire world to all of the information and media we could ever desire, and for some people, the best use of it is to type “cunt” at someone they don’t even know. It’s not even insulting at that point, it’s just strange.

What’s really weird is that out of all of the blog comments I’ve ever received, the one constant is that the shitty ones almost always get posted on really old stuff. There are topics I wrote about years ago that still attract morons from all corners of the Internet who can see that the last time I covered the issue was in June of 2012 but, because they are so brilliant, they still think their opinion of my opinion is relevant more than two years later. And so they tell me this in what appears to be a limited vocabulary from an anonymous source.

Although these comments are supposed to make me furious (I think), instead, they make me laugh. For example, yesterday I received an e-mail from WordPress alerting me of a blog comment. I haven’t written regularly in at least a couple of months, so I don’t receive these very often anymore. I expected a SPAM comment, honestly, something undetected by WordPress’ now out-of-practice filter.

But it was not a SPAM comment. It was an actual comment. A comment on something I wrote months ago, that I had, until yesterday, completely forgotten and neither thought nor wrote anything about since the original post. What the comment said was this:

This is shit. shut up

And for some reason, this comment made me laugh. It made me laugh hard, to the point where I kind of snorted and felt my eyes get wet. I mean, obviously it was meant to make me feel bad about myself, but something about its brevity, its lazy structure, and its blunt anger just cracked me the fuck up and I could not handle it.

Like all of the shitty comments I receive, I deleted this one. I didn’t respond to it, either, unless you consider this to be sort of an oblique response in which I don’t address the commenter directly but sort of dance around the absurdity of their relationship to me and what I wrote. But above all, I laughed, and I’m still laughing, and I would like “Olive” whose IP address is in upstate New York to up her comment game so I can continue laughing well into the future.