As you can see, I do not write much lately.
There are several reasons for this:
1. Lunatic haters. I am really getting tired of all the human garbage I have to deal with on the Internet. There is more foul scum on this Net than anywhere else on Earth. Normally, you do not run into too much in the way of subhumans. For instance, I meet few to no subhumans in my day to day life. Most people are at least decent. I come home and go on the Net and feel like I have descended into Hell.
What I am trying to say is that the level of vitriol and sheer hate that I have to deal with is vastly worse than what I deal with in my day to day life. As I said, my life is calm. I go about my daily chores out in in town, and everyone is decent, polite or at least not trying to start a fight. I almost never get into it with anyone around for any reason because I am not that type of person.
I do not look for fights and I want to at least get along with everyone I meet. I will fight back if attacked, of course, but I do not see the point in picking fights. My enemies say that the reason I attract so much hatred is that I am a horrible human being. But that is apparently not true because my life in meatspace is calm, pleasant, stress-free and free of almost all serious conflict. I would think if I were an awful person I would be provoking hatred everywhere I go.
So you see, I have a choice. I can live in meatspace, which is a calm, cool, pleasant place where there is zero hatred, no attacks, no contempt, no rage, and everyone is at least pleasant or polite or if not that, they are not trying to start shit.
Or I can go here on the Net and deal with psychotic lunatics, freaks, nutcases, man-children, perpetual adolescents, adults who never grew up, bullies of all shapes, sizes, and types, weirdos, mentally ill people, dangerous people, dangerous mentally ill people, sociopaths, sadists, criminals, psychos, and all around pain in the ass type subhuman garbage.
And every day it’s like this. Off and on all day long. I am really getting tired of it and I do not see why I have to live in a world full of dangerously mentally ill people when I can just as easily live in a world full of peace, friendliness and zero conflict.
I can also do other things. For instance, recently I have spent a lot of time working on a paper which will become a chapter for a book. I will make very little money off of it, but that is how the biz goes. In the course of doing this, I regularly deal with colleagues, who are generally academics with PhD’s. The level of discourse required to participate in this world is very elevated and controlled. Let’s just say that 97% of the nutcases over at Randy’s blog would not last a single day in academia.
You can’t blow up, you can’t freak out, you can’t even use swear words, you need superb social skills, you have to be as pleasant as possible all the time to everyone, you can’t even use smileys in email, and you have to be extremely careful about everything you say, how you word things, etc.When you get an email, you respond, “Thank you, colleague.” Even if you disagree with someone, you probably ought to word your critique pretty carefully. The higher your position in the field, the more brutal your critiques can be, but still, criticism is supposed to be measured even towards the most infuriating scholars.
You have to act “professional.” It’s a requirement. You start acting unprofessional even for a bit and you are pretty much gone. You will not be able to publish at that journal anymore. People will shun you at conferences. They will refuse to answer your emails. They will refuse to collaborate with you.
In short, if you cannot act professional in this field as close to 100% of the time as possible, you are simply gone, just like that, and your whole career is presumably over.
So anyway, in the course of this work, I talk to a lot of folks, including some linguists who have Wikipedia pages. In fact, some of these famous linguists have even collaborated extensively with me on my work.
So this is one world I can choose to live in. A world of adults who actually act their age, who must be psychologically stable, who must control their emotions at all times and in general who are warm, friendly and collegial.
As you can see, lately I have been preferring to live in that world.
2. Work. As you can see, scholarly stuff is one line of work I can engage in. I can also do therapy. I do not do a lot of this, but it is fun when I do it. It is very painful to admit this, but even my most mentally ill clients act 100 times more decent than your average Bigfooter. And these are people with actual mental diagnoses.
Therapy is stressful but pleasant. The clients do not fight, scream, yell or rage. We just talk and get along. They like me and I like them. Except for the occasional severely ill client, I do not have to deal with any Internet style nuts.
3. Futility. I really do not want to do this unless I can be paid. I started this site to make money. It has not made a lot of money. If I had other work options, I would almost never post here at all. If I do write here, I would like to be paid for it. I see it as compensation for my work. Reading here is like reading a newspaper or a magazine (and the writing is just as good if not better). So people reading for free are like folks who read newspapers for sale at the coffee shop without buying them or read magazines without buying them.
Considering how many hours I have put into this site, how is it that I am panhandling? This is one of the most insane charges leveled at me, and of course it comes from Randy’s blog. I have put in hundreds if not thousands of hours of very hard work on this site. The donate button means I wish to be paid for all of that hard work. Panhandling is asking for money for not doing any work. I am doing the opposite. I am working very hard for maybe 10 cents an hour.
Don’t you think people who work should be paid? If someone does some sort of work, don’t you think they would wish to be compensated for their labor time.
Now I realize that I cannot force anyone to donate here, and that is quite all right. I am not demanding anything. But I would like to be compensated. And if I do not get paid for the excellent articles I write and research I do, I honestly do not even feel like doing it.
Critics will roar and laugh that my traffic will fall off. Why should I care? What good is all my traffic. This site makes very little money. High traffic or low traffic, it makes little money. So I could care less how much or how little traffic this site gets. What does it matter to me? If this site gets 100 visitors a day or 6,000 (as it does now) what difference does it make. How do I suffer from having only 100 visitors a day? How does this injure me? Someone explain.
4. Frustration: It just seems like the world is completely hopeless. In particular, Americans are about the most hopeless people on Earth. This site is about changing Americans’ minds more than anything else, and it feels like more and more of a failure every day. Apparently Americans are destined to be apathetic, selfish dolts for all of time.
5. Romantic messes: I am in the midst of lots of chaos and drama involving women I was involved with. As in plural. As in blocked emails, blocked phone numbers, Facebook blocks and every other kind of block I can think of. Despite all of that, the hate and abuse flows in about every day. At first I was flippant about it, but now it is starting to get to me. I am also sort of mourning that these wild, joyous love affairs are history and have turned Hellish. The whole thing makes me pissed off and I hate to admit it, but it also makes me unbearably sad.
6. Friendships canceled: A couple of friends left me. One guy had a reason, but it wasn’t a very good reason. He hasn’t talked to me since. He has had the nerve to continue to come to the website, and I cannot tolerate that, so he is banned. Another friend made wild promises to me, offered to pay for trips for me, gave me lots of money, and then suddenly vanished off the face of the earth.
Phone calls were never returned, and now my number may be blocked. Emails go unanswered. There has been no word from this person why they have done this, so I am utterly mystified. The friendship was friendly, warm and pleasant and there was not the slightest hint of anger, fighting, or rage. There were not even any arguments or disagreements. I have no idea what I did, if anything to piss this person off.
