I‘d hoped not to have to address this here, but I must. Over the past two months, a reader has been peppering my guestbook with nasty, judgmental messages, critical of my relationship with Cyrus. This woman is clearly peeved with me, almost to the point of obsession, and up until this morning I have chosen to simply ignore her comments.
But in light of the snarky, condescending message she left in Cyrus’s guestbook overnight, she’s crossed a line. While, as you will see by his response, Cyrus can handle himself, I have to speak up about this.
I am furious.
This person—herself an online journaler of considerable talent, and a former online “friend” of mine—signaled her disapproval in a private message in my guestbook on March 27th, signed “Ex-Reader”. Here’s what she wrote, with a few personal details redacted (details she knew about me from previous, friendly emails I’d written):
I'm making this private so as not to embarrass you. It's good the kid has wise eyes. At eighteen, it's his head that remains naive. That's because his life experience is plenty limited. Oh right, he lost his cherry with you. Plenty limited would describe that. What 18 year old hasn't had many 35-40 year olds slobbering over him or her? It's flattering but it's fucked up too. What kind of eyes do you have and what are you "sighting?" With your crying, what crap are you inflicting on this person? What if this kid falls for you? It's such a manipulative power trip on your part, considering you can have any adult sexual fling in any locale you want. You've made sex your raison d'etre, your religion. That's fine. It's reads more like sexual addiction and fear of commitment than anything deep and profound about human relationships. The one-dimensionality speaks volumes. You've rationalized sexual promiscuity in your head as some path to enlightenment, when it's nothing of the kind. It's a circular path, a bottomless pit of endless repeats. It's like any other imbalance/obsession/compulsion driven by narcissism. This 18 year old is one more experience you can write reams of nothing about to impress yourself. But anything goes now and you'll get plenty of permission from hundreds of others to be a jerk. If the kid were younger, no one would bat an eyelash. But you call yourself a ***? What a fucking joke. Or maybe this is what *** do now, make every behaviour ok. You've mastered the math that adds up to zero. No amount of sexual experience is going to inform you any more than you're already informed. You'll just get older and lonelier and needier of younger people you can impress with the verbs and adjectives that come out of your dick. The ones people your own age aren't particularly impressed by. I know. I've met a hundred just like you. Gay or straight. They're all Creepy beneath the beaming positive analytical exterior. But kids never know they are kids, do they? And to think you asked his ok to post all this shit, when you should have known better and had the maturity to keep it private. You had no business even considering it. But then you'd have to be post-adolescent to know that. It’s appalling and I just can’t read you anymore.
I was upset by this, especially before tracing its authorship. There were one or two salient points, I suppose; I could have responded to them and ignored the snarkiness. But I chose not to. I was mostly relieved by her announcement of ex-readership. Because by this time I had stopped reading her journal, turned off by the frequent and vicious wars she wages with other journalers there, and increasingly uncomfortable with the tone and intensity of her ostensibly supportive entries in my guestbook. From what I’d seen of her interactions with other online journalers, I suspected that my status as “friend” would be short-lived, and I was right. She seems to enjoy huge, over-the-top battles, and my lack of response was an attempt not to go there.
Unfortunately, she’s not a woman of her word. Appalled as she said she was, she has continued to read, and to bait. Since March 27th, many of her guestbook entries have been nuttily provocative, like in my guestbook overnight, where she takes issue with me characterizing the seventeen year old gay Catholic student Marc Hall as "courageous". Here’s another example:
the writer who writes only about himself, and nothing outside of himself, doesn't make a good writer. but you would have an "in" on the gay market which might be your goal. if you want to write like an atwood or ondaatje, you'd have to write less like a therapist/psychologist. i mean, it can be interesting for awhile and then it becomes a "look at me" exercise. non-informative of a larger world, a world that involves and includes the reader. i notice you seem to regard every heterosexual male as hapless or unhappy. isn't that a stereotype? i notice this in your writing at times. the married guys are always sad or grouchy or something...must be the marriage, the sex, the committment, or maybe it's your wishful thinking? there's something about homosexuals i've been observing more and more. it's the narcissism, the self-obsession, and the whole pride thing blown up into a helium balloon. it's like perpetually loving a mirror. i think that's the only thing about homosexuality i've come to dislike...the narcissism. i might be way off with this, but it's something i've been intuiting of late. and it turns me off.
Whatever. I have no intention of entering into a dialogue with someone who takes this baiting tack. Her characterizations are insulting and unfair, but—as she loves to point out—I am a “grown-up”; as unpleasant as she is, I can deal with it.
I don’t get it, though. If she is so offended or outraged by my relationship with a younger man, or some other aspect of my writing or experience, the easy solution would be to make good on her threat to stop reading. But no. She is sticking around, trying to get a rise out of me.
With her insult to Cyrus, she has.
I shall continue refusing to respond directly to her. But man, it’s been a long time since I’ve so badly wanted to tell someone to fuck off.
