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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Friday, August 15, 2014

Personal Attax!


Open relationships and sweaty man sex. Constructive Criticism (sort of). It's all about personal hate this week.

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer each Friday.  I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous.  My comment policy also may mean one of your comments ends up in the mailbox. Most personal attacks will be ignored unless I'm feeling like a masochist.] 

Amr writes:   

You're deplorable. You know it's really not that burdensome to deduce your personal situation involves being in some "open relationship" with a married woman–your parenting blog bio isn't that problematic to find. You are a profligate. Your licentious sexual exploits are contemptible. You are indubitably so supportive of gay marriage because you secretly dream of copulating with other sweaty men.

My reply: 

Seriously, I couldn't make this stuff up. I mean I could. I'm pretty imaginative, but if I were writing a self-loathing gay character, I would think that adding "sweaty" was WAY over the line of ham handed characterization.

Amr, I'm guessing we just discovered Thesaurus.com, yes? Or did you honestly think your vocabulary would somehow make me take your comical levels of bigotry seriously?

Source: weirdnutdaily.com
I'm consistently amazed by people who say they are repulsed by my morality and then dig around my blog and even other blogs I write for looking for details of my personal life. Why not just go live your life all moral and shit and quit minding other people's business? Why troll a tiny two bit half bit blog that drops the fucking f-bomb every other word? With all the problems in the world from poverty to war to famine to water shortages, why would you choose to take time and effort out of your day to worry about who I fuck?

Aren't there better ways to spend your clearly overabundant free time?

Or do you have some fantasy I am going to open my inbox, read your tripe, clutch my pearls, and say "Sweet buttlicking Jesus, I never realized how upset my life choices were making Amr. This calls into question....well everything. I must turn over a new leaf!"

Regardless, Amr, you've obviously thought a lot about me and other men. A lot. You can confront your recent preoccupying thoughts of me having sweaty gay sex with a "that's-not-a-moon" sense of growing realization. Or not. Up to you. Personally I would have to subscribe to the exegesis of doctrine or interpolate my own predilection towards non-heteronormative congress in order to concur with your dissection or capitulate to its proscriptions.

And don't go blind looking at that GIF up there.

Amy writes:

Chris Brecheen, in case you're running low on hate, here is a coworker who likes me way more than he should given how much I've told him he sucks. His first name is [redacted]. No, really. 

"Constructival crit for that Brecheen blog you linked me to: So like he dispearages Nano but doesn't do it? Sounds lazzy to me. No reals Aimsters, is this your own blog and you're trying to cause the Twitterati to bunch its pantaloons into an ante diem bunch? I'd fuck you happy silly if you say yes. Or no. Either way..." [sic–like the whole thing]

My reply:

There are a couple of reasons I don't do a lot more hate mail here on Writing About Writing, and I promise that it's not because I don't get enough. I've got e-mail here from people who literally compare me to the Antichrist and Hitler (combined) because I think prescriptive grammar is elitist, not to mention the death threats I've gotten for having the temerity to stop someone from harassing a woman who was begging to be left alone.

Hate mail even does very well compared to other topics I tackle here on The Mailbox.

The first reason I don't do more of it is that even though replying to most hate mail is delicious and strangely sadistic, it takes the focus off of writing. I want to talk about how setting works with theme or how characterization moves plot. I want to talk about the creative process and the passion and fire that moves us all to write even if we can't be rich bestsellers. I don't want to get quagmired in snarkfests with people who couldn't be bothered to read the whole thing the first time round.

The second reason is that most of it looks like this.

I'm not sure if Mr. Name Redacted ate a bunch of Scrabble tiles and decided to write an e-mail consisting solely of arguments he shat out the next day (and, if so, you have to admire the chutzpah of someone willing to shamelessly add all those extraneous letters to various words just to use up all the tiles), but this sort of inarticulate tripe is usually what I'm up against when the hate mail hits.

This is what I got from Googling "Constructival."
So maybe this guy rolled a 20 to strike and
that's what "Constructival Crit" means:
decapitation by New Years Eve paper plate!
You see, I'm not sure in what world this might be considered constructive criticism (or "constructival crit" in this case). Most of this seems to be trying to get Amy (or Aimsters as she's referred to by those she dislikes) to admit that my blog is really her own blog, surreptitiously designed to get something known as the Twitterati–which I'm guessing from context is sort of like the secret cabal of people who really run the world....on Twitter–to bunch up its pants because it doesn't like the day. It is possible that anti-diem is a filk on carpe diem even though the carpe is the grabbing part. In which case, I'm guessing the meaning here is that Aimsters is secretly blogging under the name Chris Brecheen in order to convince the secret masters of the universe on Twitter to take no risks.

I think.

And apparently whether that is or isn't her intended goal, our friend here will fuck her "happy silly." Happy silly is much better than sad silly when you're getting fucked (and don't even start me on angry silly), so she's got that going for her, at least. Still, I can't help but get the sneaking suspicion that the game might be rigged since the last half of this e-mail basically has nothing to do with constructival crit and is instead saying that Aimsters is getting fucked whether she was machiavellian in her stratagems or not.

Really the only claim of substance in this whole constructival crit is that I "dispearagers" Nano but don't do it, and that this makes me lazzy.

Well, first of all, who doesn't feel lazzy from time to time? Amirite?

Dispearage! Get it?
Mostly though, I doubt our fine redacted friend here, or the general throngs of people who send me this sort of shat-Scrabble tile hate mail, really even have the reading skill to keep up with the counterpoint if I took the time and energy to make it. It would literally be a waste of the calories it takes to press down on the laptop keys.

But since I'm indulging all kinds of mindlessness for Blogust...I shall preserve.

Redacted, I'm a lot of things–a writer of questionable quality, horribly redundant, terrible at not procrastinating, in desperate need of an editor–but lazy isn't really one of them. I have 844 articles in a little less than two and a half years. Hopefully you're better at math than you are at writing, but if not, that breaks down to about 900 days. Basically I average less than one day off a week. I work 60+ hours when I'm not teaching, and that usually adds 8-25 hours to my schedule depending on how many classes I have.

Further, if you'd bothered to read the article you took one look at the headline of before deciding that I was "lazzy," you would know that I have done NaNoWriMo. In fact, I've done it several times. (Four times as of this writing.) It's not that I don't see the benefit; it's that I see, all too often, the downsides. My attempt to bring nuance and perspective to an event when its fans have become rabid and reactionary to the slightest criticism is hard enough when I'm not trying to deal with someone who has difficulty with things like sentences and words.
Soon.

6 comments:

  1. <3 !!! *applauds*

    - E

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  2. This is my favorite: "that's-not-a-moon sense of growing realization"

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  3. I love that he's so proud of having deduced something that you state all over the place :-)

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  4. People, people, people. This is a blog about writing interjected with some occasional humor and spotty f-bombs. The writing tips are well thought out and useful, at least for me. Why are some of you spending so much time and energy hating on this guy? If he offends you hit the back button, or like they said in the old days, turn the channel.

    If you all want something a little more legitimate to rail against think about the poor polar bears drowning in a sea of water that should be ice. Think about the fucked up state of our country for the next four years at least, no matter who wins this election. Think about anybody under thirteen years old in any third world country. At least try to direct your crap attitude into constructive situations, otherwise it's just corrosive bullshit that nobody cares about. Let Chris be Chris.

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  5. Why does 'sweaty man sex' always get dragged out and displayed as a negative? I kinda like that stuff myself.

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