“I love a few, like a few more, but hate many. I am not your best friend just because I relate. I am good at relating, but I am not so good at accepting everything I read. It’s just not me. Is it you, really?”
~ Angel ~

“While weblogs are essentially a good thing, I feel like it put a lot more people, maybe too many people, on common ground. I think this is the first time that’s ever really happened on the ‘Net… I just cannot say I don’t miss the old days, when things were simpler because the scope was smaller, because I do miss them very much. “
~ Angel (again) ~

I’d love nothing more right now to accuse Angel of flat-out PLAGIARISM for these two posts. They’re word-for-word straight out of my thoughts. Stuff that’s been in my heart for months, maybe years… only, they ARE her words. She managed to articulate this better than I ever could, and got it out first.

You have to understand first, that the Web that Angel and I (and quite a few of you) knew is a different one FROM the one we’re in now. Back then, you had larger-than-life “Web Celebs”: Zeldman, Powazek, Kottke, Miz Kitty, Halcyon, Heather Champ, Lance Arthur, Glenn Davis… you aspired to be like them. You stole bits and pieces of their source code to learn “how they did it”.

And here’s where I piss everyone off.
(Let me say in advance, “Fuck you” if you can’t take my brutal honesty.)
Then weblogs came and fucked it all up.
Then, when you thought it couldn’t get worse… Slashdot and MetaFilter fucked it even more.

Before that, it took balls of steel to rock the boat. To flame an “upstanding member of the community” was more like a suicide mission. You risked being shunned by polite society…

Now, it seems any bored housewife/kid/geek can get free/cheap hosting and call you a “prick”, “bitch” or an “asshole” in the safety and comfort of their homes. People can fling accusations and flat out LIES, and find a couple of idiots to agree with them without even taking the time to get to know you. Knowing all the while they’d NEVER have the courage to say it to your face. We send gifts and cry over the deaths of ficticious people. We’ll discuss the same topics over and over, to death. We have to read what they had for dinner, what they bought at IKEA, and look at their paypal button and think “What? You wanna get PAID for that drivel???”.

Blogs weren’t meant to be “gospel truth”. It’s a person telling their side of the story. A very one-sided story, where you know ONLY what that person wants you to know. Truth be told, maybe 1/10th of what really happened to us ever made it to a computer screen. It was too personal, and way too painful. I can easily bring out someone else’s story in an easy-to-understand summary. But not my own… and since it’s the nature of a blogger to go “how does this relate to ME”, it seems no one else ever bothered to try to do it for me.

There’s just too many voices out there now.
I wonder if I just silence just *one* voice… mine, maybe the web would be just a little bit of a better place for everyone. HAVING the freedom of speech doesn’t mean you have to excercise it every chance you get. Just as HAVING a drivers license doesn’t give you the right to run over any one you want with your SUV.

Well, let me finally get to the point. This was supposed to be my “goodbye” post.
I wanted to get it out now, with the exact date I was closing this all… just so no one can beat their chest and claim to be the one who “ran me off the web”.

Give me a break. A court ORDER didn’t keep me off the web for long, did it? You think your pathetic ass can stop me?

I wanted to hold off closing down to give the public a “happy ending” to my 2 1/2 year ordeal.

But I don’t owe the public that… do I?

I’ve taken down names, I know who’s been my friend, and who’s taken the worst opportunites to kick me when I was down. I know where to find the first GROUP and tell them the good news. The second GROUP can bow down and kiss my ass on Macy’s homepage screen.

I started blogging to express my rage at an unstoppable juggernaut. An unthinkable scenario that could happen to any one of you out there. To some of you, it already did. Judge me anyway you want. Hero, monster, victim, or a damn fool… your opinion just doesn’t matter to me. Either way, the price was just too high to continue. But I can assure you, I was a bitter & angry sonofabitch long before there was even an internet… for reasons I would never expect you to understand.

When I cried out for help. I was infuriated when the best some can do was offer “{{{hugs}}}”.

I was wrong there. No one owed me even *that* much. I know that now.

If there is one thing I learned FROM this whole terrifying nightmare… it is this:

In a trial by fire, you are meant to go through it ALONE.
We all go through it… and it’s meant to be this way for a reason.
You’re not meant to feel the comfort and support of your friends. The judgement and scorn of the clueless and unsympathetic don’t matter.

You’re forged in a fire to become stronger, for the next battle…
Your scars are meant to make your skin that much closer to bulletproof.

It’s that crazy thing we did before the internet that we used to call “Real Life”.
Our choices shape us INTO who we are, and who we become.
… and it comes for all of us eventually. Whether we want it to or not.