There’s more than one reason why your mad admin doesn’t permit comments here.

Primarily it’s because I don’t want to police comments for spam, rude comments, death threats, etc.

It’s also, I must admit, because it would be extremely depressing to never ever get any comments. I learned early in life to never throw a party if there’s a chance that no one will show up. Yes, I’m sure that’s very pathetic and something a loser would do, and all those other insulting comments. (See, I don’t need other people to insult me, I can do so myself.)

But there’s even a worse reason than that.

I need a place to retreat to after I screw up somewhere else.

I’ve been “online” since before there really was an online. I would dial up to local BBS systems with my Apple ][e back in the mid 1980s. I had a Compu$erve account for a few years, until I couldn’t afford it anymore. After internet access became available to us unwashed masses, I was fairly active in USENET. I was even a newsgroup’s FAQ maintainer for a while. (That’s when I learned to not make it simple for people to connect your online presence to your actual person. Fights over FAQ info were unbelievably vitriolic.) Then the web started, and web forums, blah blah blah.

I’ve participated in more than a few forums in my day. Some of them small and niche, some of them very well known. At all of them, there would come a day when I would let my frustration bubble over, and I would blow up on the forum. Sometimes for something that actually happened on the forum, sometimes for something that happened elsewhere in my life, and sometimes for something that was mostly in my head. Whichever, it would mark the end of my time on that forum.

And now I’ve done it again.

I could regale you with the details, but I’m not sure I understand it myself. In the heat of the back and forth, I kind of lost track of what the fuck I was trying to say in the first place. It’s rather embarrassing to realize you’ve become a babbling moron in public, so to speak. So, regardless, I don’t think I can go back there.

I told you I was mad.

The real trouble is, I don’t think I have any place left to go. Perhaps that is only what I deserve. I just wish I knew why the hell I keep doing this.

I wish a lot of things.