"One of the more trenchant cartoons of the Internet era features a stick-figure man typing furiously at his keyboard. From somewhere beyond the panel floats the irritated voice of his wife.
“Are you coming to bed?”
“I can’t,” he replies. “This is important.”
“What?”
“Someone is wrong on the Internet.”'
The review that Ross Douthat wrote for the NY Times on Digital Barbarism : A Writer’s Manifesto by Mark Helprin cracks me up, mainly because I relate to it so thoroughly. When I first started marketing KOSHi back in 2004, I got involved with some message boards to network w/like-minded girly girls & quickly found it to be a pricklier proposition than braving the dark-n-choppy waters of a jr. high lunch room. "People" get pretty vicious and petty when shrouded in the anonymity of the wonderful worldwide web. Unfortunately, I was too big of a dumbass to shroud my identity at all, was out there bald for all of the virtual world to see, and took the slings and arrows personally. What's even more amazing is that I did not learn my lesson the first time and committed a nearly identical faux pas a couple of years later with Obedient Waves. One particular message board (that shall remain nameless) had me chewing my nails to the quick & fearing for my sanity. Those folks just loved to bicker, belittle, and fuck with each other's minds. I just wanted to talk about music, art, fashion, pop culture, and, ya know, bullshit bullshit, and it didn't take me long to high tail it out of there, limping & cursing my naive attempt to communicate, "Stoopid! Stoopid!" So now I just keep this blog, which is basically a conversation with myself. I still have not resorted to disguising my identity, but the comments are disabled. I love yakking about my various likes & dislikes, the latest headlines peaking my interest, and especially other artists & performers that inspire me, but I refuse (REFUSE!, I say) to be influenced by or start censoring myself for the haters. Bullies be damned.
