VIOLENT FLAMES!

I recently stumbled across a blog which has held my attention for more than 5 minutes. I find myself mostly so bored by what people write on their blogs. There are exceptions - UndercoverBlackman, ClizBiz, ShyOneLung, but these are people I know and I am endlessly interested in what they have to say on or off the net. The other people though? The one's that everyone else loves to read? I don't love so much.

There is SalamiTsunami who makes me laugh, but after reading him for the last couple years I don't feel that I know him much better now than when I started and I like for my relationships to go somewhere, even the one sided, voyeuristic ones that I have with complete strangers on the internet. Like Plain Layne - God I loved her. A lesbian living in Minnesota, working for some big corporation doing some kind of programming work. Turns out she was a figment of some guys imagination. He had a heart problem and couldn't get out much so he made up this person and gave her a blog and shared all of her drama and problems with the whole wide web and I was fascinated.

It actually figures that Plain Layne was not real because real people are for the most part kind of boring. I guess this makes sense because the people I find the most interesting are out in the world living their interestingness and do not have time to write about it everyday on the internet.

Except for the "MommyBloggers" a group of women that seem to have come under fire lately. I was reading Dooce back when she was pregnant and I really like the way she writes and her stories about growing up Mormon. The Mormons have always been a mystifying group of people to me. Kind of scary in that hillbilly way with all their strange beliefs and multi-wife households. Donny Osmond was a Mormon and so was Elliot this kid in my elementary school and from that limited exposure I gathered that along with having mysterious swimming pools in their church the Mormons also bred people with thick heads of hair and toothsome grins.

Anyway, back to the MommyBloggers. It was while reading a some article online, I think about Kathy somebody who didn't go to a speaking engagement because of threats that she'd received from other bloggers and they intereviewed Dooce, one of the most famous mommybloggers and she mentioned that someone was doing a parody of her website and how it upset her but she decided not to put energy into it and if I could fucking remember how to link stuff on here I would do so now.... but suffice to say that her mention of such a site piqued my interest and I did a search for Dooce parody and found....

ViolentAcres.com

Written by an anonymous young woman in her early 30s who was pretty pointedly pissing on the monthly newsletter that La dooce writes to her daughter Leta I was intrigued to the point where I spent probably an hour reading the site from the beginning. I get why people would be affronted by what V as she refers to herself (I pondered whether her name might be Veronica or Vanessa and then realized that it probably referenced V in Violent) writes. She doesn't hold back and she doesn't worry about being PC or whether or not people get their feelings hurt.

She is often hysterically funny as she wields her caustic keyboard. And she is often raising points that are true even if it makes me uncomfortable to read them. Her most salient point about the mommy bloggers, the idea that putting photos of your small child, and chronicles of their activities, out into the wild world of whackjobs known as the internet is pretty much abuse, strikes a chord with me because I am naturally paranoid and will not go into chat rooms because my assumption is that the person I am chatting with is not really Lance71, but actually some fat hairy naked guy named Bruce living in his mother's basement along with the bodies of hapless internet friends. It's not a far leap for me to imagine Bruce developing big, insane love for one of these juicy, adorable children and/or their mommies and come out of his cave to get them.... okay, end of tangent. What V objects to most, or at least this is what I get from her rants is that it's not fair to objectify your child for financial gain when they have no control over how this content will affect their lives in the future. I had never actually thought about that before - I mean it's one thing to post pictures on a photosharing site that's private so only people who know you can see - sort of a high tech photo album that Bubby Rina can look at across the country. It's another thing completely to throw your life open to just anyone who's cruising by.

The internet makes me nervous and I have never wanted to get feedback from this site for that reason. I don't write here so that people will read it and like me and give me positive affirmation that my life has meaning. I write here because I'm fucking lazy and I can type faster than I write with a pen on the page and this is basically a place to journal. I don't check stats because I don't know how and I think that's a good thing. I have no idea what Technorati is. My friends come here to find out what I'm doing because I've become so ADD or maybe it's just lazy, that talking on the phone and staying focused on a conversation is just too much effort.

The more I read V the more insight I got into why she has such strong feelings that she was motivated to write scathingly - I am talking major flames - about the mommies. She's had an interesting life with more than her share of the shit end of the stick. I think the reason I like her and continue to read her is that she doesn't define her present by her past experiences where one could say that she was a victim. Because any abused, neglected child is indeed a victim, and so many of these children continue to be victims throughout their lives. I know a lot of these people because my dad worked in social services and I saw the adult lives wrought from that kind of trauma and the cycle of abuse.

It takes a certain kind of strength and a dark sense of humor to survive and go on to thrive and create good things for yourself. Her post today addresses the mind of the abused child and boy did she hit that nail on the head. It is mind boggling how a horribly abused child will still go back to the their abuser and beg him or her to love them. I had no idea until I started working with the kids in the LA foster system as a volunteer. No one has any idea until they're looking at a kid covered in cigarette burns who runs into the arms of the mother that burned her when has come for a visit - a big fat woman in polyester stretch pants covered in food stains with a cigarette dangling from her lips.

So, although V makes me cringe with some of the things she writes, for example this sample from her entry titled Retard Genocide:

A group of friends and I were at a baseball game one afternoon. A Mother and her retarded kid squeezed into the bleacher we were sitting on and parked next to my friend. The retarded kid starting going through my friend’s purse and opening all her little make-up compacts while my friend hysterically tried to snatch them back. The Mother of the tard just blithely watched the game…apparently unaware of the havoc that was taking place.
“Oh my God, my lipstick!” she pleaded.
“She’s going to get boogers in your blush,” I warned.
“Oh God, that foundation cost me $140,” She cried.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I screamed into the crisp, cold afternoon air, “LADY! CONTROL YOUR TARD!”

I will continue to look forward to what she's got to say because agree with it or not she certainly expresses her opinion with flair and flames. I just really hope that she's not someone's fictional conceit, or some fat naked hairy guy named Bruce living in his mother's basement.