Got a lot done today, despite continued sore throat. And my buddy Slash sent me these big clawed tiger-paw slippers for Christmas, so I get to wander around the house traumatizing the cats and yelling “Fear my slippers!” Put up a new comic too. So life’s not bad, although I had a mild irritation occur last night, which I will now bitch about.

I could go into an elaborate backstory, but there’s absolutely no point, and you’d be bored stiff. Hell, I’d be bored stiff. So suffice it to say that a small and idiotic internet drama was briefly kicked up, which I won’t dignify with details and am resolutely ignoring, but in which I was a long-absent but still central dramatis personae.

It’s not that I am particularly upset about it, (although I do feel badly for the very nice people who unwittingly took the brunt of such silliness) but I am bemused at the sheer lameness of such little dramas. I just don’t get into these internet soap operas. It’s like the whole You-stole-my-art! thing, or the You-copied-my-style! things that galvanize people, whom I must assume are not normally complete loons, to engage in shockingly juvenile behavior in such ridiculous forums as…well…forums, I suppose. Or comments. And not once, usually, but time and again! But I mean, sheesh, if I wanted that kind of complicated he-said-she-said-he-copied-me-she’s-mean stress, I’d go pick up one of those indecipherably complicated serial romance mangas or watch Springer or something. I want to yell “I am exempt from this sort of thing!” I have opted out! I don’t think anything useful will ever be resolved by internet sniping! If I can’t play nicely with someone, I avoid them, because I am long past the teenage days when I got high on drama! I have hobbies with which to amuse myself! I AM EXEMPT!

Or at least I oughta be, damnit.

Except, of course, that nobody’s ever really exempt–even if you refuse to take part, the drama goes on around you, like a bit character in a Tennessee Williams play, and about all you can do is say your lines and flee into the wings thinking “Why did I go into acting? Why didn’t I stay home and become a plumber like Mom wanted?” (Warning: Runaway simile Alert.) It’s all so wretchedly banal. If I’m gonna have a crisis, I want a cool crisis. I want a plague of intelligent raccoons building a missile silo in the basement and holding my cats hostage. I want to buy a knick-knack at a garage sale that turns out to hold the map to the Secret Lost Treasure of Spungo Madre, and y’know, dramatic car chases in my elderly Honda and so forth. I’d settle for some obscure disease that had me rising from the grave at night to feast on the spleens on the living. Something that would make a really cool anecdote. Something swashbuckling. Not “lameass internet sniping” without a swash in sight. How’m I supposed to get a good story outta that?

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