Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Haters Want to Hate, Lovers Want to Love


When I started this blog I told my friend, Hamburgers, "I can't wait to get my first hate mail. It'll be so exciting."

Yesterday I received my very first one, left as an anonymous comment on book excerpt: Forever Sweet Sixteen (Part III of III). Here it is in its entirety:
TRASH...pure vulgar trash. Your parents should be severly punished for having a son like you...an maybe, just maybe, in the after-life, if there is such a thing, you will be publically, spiritually and MORE physically punished. If not for your morals, for your lack of ethics and priniciples...you have none. May the Devil have mercy on your soul, God doesn't want you.
To whoever wrote this, I might be able to hook you up with some Xanax to help chill you out. Better yet, if I dig hard enough I may find my old 3rd grade spelling book. I know how tricky words like "severely" and "and" can be.

8 comments:

Feisty Crone said...

I think there should be a rule about hateful comments: Don't hide behind the "anonymous" option. Write your name. I love your blog, and I'm sure your parents are very proud of you.

Beth

Anonymous said...

We are very proud of you. Everything you endured (more than many people I have seen treated for cancer), you endured with dignity, spirituality, and without ever losing sight of the needs of others--and without losing your sense of HUMOR. People who judges you should themselves be judged in their responses to years of physical and mental torture that you went through.

Mom

Anonymous said...

I failed to see exactly what this person was talking about in the Excerpt 3/3 entry. Surely even the most hardcore fundamentalist ass would not judge someone for being on painkillers while having a giant needle shoved into his pelvis. As for the rest of your blog, yeah, there are some parts I wouldn't recommend reading to a six year-old, but it has not even come close to being truly objectionable, especially given the context. Besides, one need only do a google search for porn to find 116,000,000 better things to give the ol' fire n' brimstone.
Anyhoo, my soon-to-be-well-honed psychological profiling skills tell me that this writer, based on his/her somewhat disjointed writing style and failure to make reasonable connections to what you actually wrote in your blog, has issues. If not suffering from outright psychotic delusions, he/she is at least heavily indulging in projection, a defense mechanism in which a person reduces anxiety over his/her own objectionable thoughts and feelings by attributing them to others. What this person saw is not actually in your blog but in him/herself.
To summarize, in purely clinical terms: No person with the least morsel of fucking sanity would have said that to a person writing about his tribulations with cancer.
~Sam Bruce

R Delect said...

I love people who think they can say things like "god doesn't want you"

idiots

Clare said...

What did I tell you about hate mail?

Take it from someone who knows...hate mail is a sure sign that people are noticing you.

And like I said, I don't see anything that would warrant it. It's a special type of shitty person to say "it's just not bad enough that he's battled cancer, let's tell him that God doesn't want him before we go protest Planned Parenthood.

And worse that they would do so anonymously.

My advice, wear your hate mail like a badge of honor, if you didn't matter, you wouldn't get it.

And to anonymous asshole: I'm not sure what's more upsetting. That you felt the need to pick on a person who's been through more than most people deal with in their whole lives, or that you are a big enough pussy to not sign your name to your work of art.

In short: If you want people to respect you and what you have to say, try not to be such a fucking Sally.

Rachel said...

I'll publically say, it's the priniciples of it all.

God doesn't want idiots.

Mary Witzl said...

Well, I'm stunned. Mr, or Ms, Anonymous strikes again.

I've just read a nasty -- and anonymous -- comment left on a friend's blog. I feel so naive: I've had my blog for eight months now and everybody's played along nicely.

I'm writing a memoir that will, most likely, end up being the one thing I leave to my children, probably in a shoe box, inexpertly printed on scrap paper. Perhaps because of this I have been keeping a eye out for others' memoirs, reading them critically. Most of them are awful and make me feel a little better about mine. Yours looks depressingly good.

Mary Witzl said...

Believe me, 'depressingly good' was meant as a compliment.
If your writing had been awful, I would have breathed a sigh of relief and said to myself that maybe your writing skills -- not your anonymity -- were keeping you from getting published. Since I pride myself on being a careful writer, whenever I meet sloppy writers who whine about their work's failure to attract attention, I feel a little reassured. But poor writing obviously isn't your problem, so I would tell you to just keep doing what you are doing.

Of course, I am in the same boat, so what do I know? On the other hand, you're young and have years to 'establish a presence,' and I'm betting you will do this.