Some people tell me that I should just take down the guestbook. It’s “an attractive nuisance,” so to speak. It’s just an invitation for the many jerks too afraid to post under their real name to get some cheap laughs by posting puerile twaddle. In the past I’ve gotten two separate instances of “I wish you had died in your house fire,” multiple verbal sexual assaults against my wife, and two death threats against my kids on the guestbook. And until tonight, they were all still up, because I had a policy of not removing anything.
Why? Because frankly, words are words, they don’t mean very much. It was always clear that the people posting all that junk on the site were socially inept anyway, incapable of actually forming a decent argument or expressing their feelings coherently. At best they were amusing, and at worst, just pathetic. Of course, there was the time they impersonated me on some poor girl’s website and posted rather heinous messages under my name there. That crossed a line, because it dragged bystanders into whatever bizarre vendetta these nutsos have against me. But by and large, I left it all up because it was a good way to emphasize that I didn’t really consider those posts worth worrying about.
Tonight, however, I removed 11,600 lines of spam garbage from the guestbook. It was all posted in the last few hours by someone with a bit too much free time. Oh, it was supposed to be sexually insulting, in some quaint ASCII way, I suppose. It was mostly just a waste of hard drive space. And once I got done deleting it (which took a lot less time that it probably took to paste in) I went ahead and deleted some of the most egregious posts from the past too. It just seemed like giving these idiots any sort of air time was, well, pointless. The reason why I left their posts up in the first place was probably too subtle for them to grasp.
So if the guestbook seems shorter, now you know why. I left up posts that disagreed, insulted, argued, and even flamed me. I just got rid of a parade of babbling by people whose vocabulary seems limited to four letter words. Next time, guys, if you want to bug me, at least make it worth reading. Semi-coherent would be good. If you can manage it. Thanks.
