Every now and then, people ask why I’m still on Elfwood.

It’s slow, it’s clunky, the upload approval process takes a thousand years, it’s so huge that it long ago passed the point of easy access. And this is all true.

I could say that despite the clunk, it’s free advertising. I could say that being in Gallery One (which may tell you the excessive length of time I’ve been on Elfwood!) I am fortunate enough to still get a lot of foot traffic. I could say that I’ve been there so long, and Thomas the founder has never been anything but the heart and soul of kindness to me, and that seeing other early Elfwoodites go on to success gives me at best a warm fuzzy glow of kinship, and at worst a kick in the teeth to get my ass in gear and start working harder. And this would also all be true.

But this is not the reason. I will not lie to you, oh readership. There’s one major reason that I stick around Elfwood.

Nobody, but nobody, brings the crazy like they do.

+—————————————- –
| At Fri Aug 4 21:17:42 2006
| christian of the yorktown baptists church
| ()
| IP#:64.5.146.13
| Referring to: ursula.html
| “I dont know what these dumb people are talking about you
| are a nudist discracing the angel a babylon i will slay you
| with my cross blade spirnkled with a dash of holy powder”
+—————————————- –

I never get this quality of comment over at DeviantArt.

Now, let us analyze this trolling. It is not enough to say “It’s a troll!” in much the same way that one says “it’s an egg!” What KIND of egg? What strange bird laid this little package in my nest? Was it the incoherent-plumaged beast it appears to be, or a sneaky cuckoo, leaving some kind of Trojan Egg?

I’m goin’ for the latter, and I’ll tell you why. It’s trying too hard. Sure, there are stupid and incoherent Christians, as much as there are stupid and incoherent anybody else. No religion is exempt from those trying to escape the tyranny of punctuation. More’s the pity.

Generally, however, they didn’t identify themselves by church. That’s a new one on me. And holy powder? Is that like baking powder? Does one get a priest in to bless the little canister (“And lo! I say unto you, this powder shall rise up! Can I get an Amen!?”)

So I’m chalking this bit ‘o crazy up to one of those peculiar kinds of internet protective mimickery, wherein our troll is trying to look like an insane fundamentalist, probably hoping to kick up trouble (having, one must guess, witnessed the rather more coherent assaults by actual Christians contained within the same pages) but perhaps for some other, more cryptic purpose.

But this is only speculation. It may, for all I know, be the annual Running of the Trolls, when these awkward and sometimes endearing beasts go plowing through the twisty little passages* of the internet, bellowing insults at all in their path, trampling those fragile creatures, grammar and punctuation, underfoot, but fleeing in terror from such pointed questions as “Huh?” and “The what, now?”

It’s a miracle of nature, I tell ya, and Elfwood’s the only place I get it regularly.

*All alike.

Edit: I must mention that not long after posting this, I got a call from my mother, which started out with “So…how often DO you recieve death threats?”

There is really no good place a conversation with your mother can go after that, but in retrospect, “Errr…well…not THAT often…I mean, now and then…I guess…” perhaps was not the ideal way to assuage maternal concerns.

“Tell him that your mother thinks he is not a nice person!”

My troll-baiting existence flashed briefly before my eyes. “…ahhh…No.”

Mom’s cool, but…y’know…still fundamentally my Mom.

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