Back in the ancient days, when Zenith computer monitors
displayed little more than orange type on a black screen, and email was a new
toy mainly confined to academia, my programming professor, recently transferred
from the abandoned “communications” department, warned all us young’uns to be
careful not to send out emails in the heat of the moment. Emails are written in private, allowing one
to escalate an entire rant to unfortunate heights without the stabilizing factor
of the recipient present, or at least listening in real time by telephone. Emails do not allow for the nuances of
timber, pitch, facial expression, etc.
Emails are there for the recipient to save and use, every word captured
exactly. And, unlike snail mail, emails are so darn easy to send immediately,
without the need to stuff into an envelope, address, stamp, and walk down to
the corner mailbox, affording less time to awaken your better judgment to just
rip the silly thing to pieces.
Luckily for me, although not to my credit, I am so in love
with the flow of my own words in print, that I will often re-read my email letters
many times to perfect before I hit that Send button. (This is yet another example of a
commonality between myself and the Wasband that one might point to as a reason
why we belong together…what can I answer?...) So I felt relatively safe that my computer-disseminated
thoughts were not coming back to bite me.
Yet, someone has been trolling this blog, probably as well
as my FaceBook comments. Now I know I had said previously that, as this is a
public site where I ENCOURAGE strangers to read my essays, it doesn’t make
sense to accuse a reader of “trolling”.
I guess I didn’t consider the possibility that someone would attempt to
use what I had written here against me in court. Whoops! Silly me.
So let me share some of the things I learned today:
·
You really never know who is reading.
·
You really never know to what unimaginable
levels some people may be driven by anger.
·
You will have a hard time using a post from a
semi-anonymous, hobby-type blog as admissible evidence in an American court of
law.
·
Should you attempt to enter into a protracted
legal battle, it is wise to find counsel who is able to convince you when your
case is frivolous.
I might have thought one would not need to be even an
ex-lawyer, to understand those last two points. Again, silly me.
For all the rest of you followers, perhaps I should be
clear: You should not take anything written here as unaltered truth. Although all these blog posts start in my
head, triggered to some extent by occurrences in my life, I let them flow into
an artistically judged essay. This is a
semi-anonymous, hobby-type, clearly-public forum = I can write whatever the
hell I want, and who is to say what is fact or fantasy. Unless you are Ms. Useful or Little Miss
Inside, if they even exist, or a select handful of other people who actually
know me enough to reasonably see these essays for what they are, it is absurd
to assume you have any idea what is true, what is a metaphoric stroll or
dizzying hyperbole, and what is pure fairy tale.
But really it’s all completely true, except for the stuff
that isn’t, that is anyway, even though it isn’t…
Okay? Anyway, hi
there troll!!! It’s so satisfying to know you are took the time to read
me. And although no one else would
understand your humor, The Flopster Society had me rolling with laughter.
