Archive for June, 2009

On Friday I got involved in a flame war over Michael Jackson’s death.

It was small, to me anyway. On a popular celebrity gossip blog, there were many condolences to his death. I really don’t feel anything over this. Yes, I have some sympathy for his family, but I didn’t know Michael as a person. I wasn’t one of his fans. I liked some of his older music, but I didn’t really listen to it anymore. The last thing I bought of his was nearly 15 years ago: HIStory. I have nothing of his on my iTunes. It annoyed me that so many people were commenting how he was their favourite musician and their lives were pulled to a screeching halt when it was announced that he had died. When Left Eye died in 2002, I seen an equal posting on blogs about how their favourite singer had died. Ok. That would be fine. Except these people never blogged about these singers! I posted a comment reflecting that on the gossip blog:

“I’m glad so many people are touched by the death of Michael Jackson. He was a child predator and still managed to wound the internet the day he died. I suspect it was more than that, but the idea that news stations reported that it was ‘rumored’ that Jackson had died and people ran to the internet for research purposes. I’ve read the profiles of some of you posting here, particularly the ones who claim he was your all-time favourite artist. These blogs have archives. Numerous blogs go back to 2003. In the past six years, all of you have only blogged about Michael Jackson, your ‘all time favourite artist’ once: Today. *snerk*”

Ok. It was mean-spirited, but I didn’t know these people, and I was sick of seeing all these blogs with the same content: Jacko dead. We get it. It only needs to be blogged about once. One of the people in that thread took the liberty of going to my site and digging around in my content. She found a picture of me and decided I was “fat” and being “fat” my comments and thoughts have no business online. It goes a little further than that. She didn’t reply back at the thread, but in my blog, on nearly every single one of my entries for the month of June, and on a few of my May entries. None of these 70+ comments were published, though I was very proud of her to comment 73 times on my blog, which was nearly twice as many comments that were there before she showed up, she made it a point to dissect and examine everything I wrote.

Of course, because I dared challenge her point of view, she set out “looking for a fraud” on my site, and because she did all of the research herself, based on her disposition of me, and she never left her computer to conduct this research, she found her fraud. No solid proof. No phone calls to my school. She didn’t even Google Chris’ name or my professor’s name. She blatently commented that it was all lies and how she came to this conclusion: she says so. Googling Chris’ name brings up his obituary. In that obituary is my name because I submitted it. It doesn’t bother me that my life was a lie to some stranger on an internet forum which serves as a magnet for brain dead sheepies. It bothered me, however, that in amongst her comments of dissecting my life in her prejudiced way, she took glee in my daughter’s death. She said she deserved to die. She said it was “karma” for me being apathetic towards Jacko’s death.

Last time I checked, Pogo died nearly a month before Jacko, so if anything, it wasn’t ‘karma’ for being apathetic towards the death of someone I never personally knew. Reeling, I checked with the email address she provided in all of her comments. It matched one in the thread on the gossip blog, in a profile that listed a birth year of 1972. I was being trolled by a thirty-seven year old. So I emailed her. Asked if she was leaving me the comments or was someone else doing it. In email, she denied it–it had to be someone else who hated her. Why, she’d never been to my site before, never heard of me before this, rarely visited the gossip blog, didn’t care for Jacko, and felt that I was only emailing her so I’d get more hits to my “shite” site. Alright. Fair enough. I checked the header of the email, and low and behold, the IP that sent me the email was the same IP that had left all those comments. I replied to her with my findings and guess what? She sent me an reply calling me a “stalker”, had banned my email address from sending her anymore email, reported me to my host, reported me to my ISP, called the cops, called the FBI, made a “PSA” announcement on her blog warning the internet population about me, and basically went nuts. I had a good chuckle, blocked her IP and went on. I find it amusing that since then, my blog has been hit by several proxies. I assume they’re proxies; either that or I’ve suddenly gotten a massive over-seas fan-base. Of course I doubt that. The countries that are visiting from these IPs visit every twenty minutes or so, and they’re from countries that don’t generally speak American English. I guess said person wants attention and goes to great lengths to get it.

Why do the crazies come to me? Am I a crazies magnet?

This got me thinking about things online. I’m no stranger to liars in the blog world. I seem to find them. Beccah is the latest in the blog-o-sphere to be a lying thief.

I could spend hours scanning receipts, medical receipts, medicine bottles, digging through my archive of CDs from when I took my digital camera to the hospital, post pictures of my daughter’s tombstone, scan the funeral leaflet, scan the funeral guestbook, have her pediatrician post a page about how she really existed with links to my sites on it, make my Flickr public (showing all the pictures of us dated from 2004 through last month via the camera’s date setting and the comments there), the thing is, I shouldn’t have to, but because people like Beccah Beushausen will spend years defrauding and misrepresenting themselves, I feel like I have to prove my own continuity and my own life and my own truth, just so I can vent or voice my opinion on forums.

My greatest sorrow in all of this is for so many good, kind people whose belief was broken, whose hearts were broken, and whose trust was shaken. Though it was a fiction, it was a beautiful fiction, and there’s no shame in believing the best of people. I still have hope and faith, and it helps me to think that there are people out there who will always strive to find the truth, or ask me to question what I believe.

I’ve been through this before. This too, will pass.