Something…unsettling happened this week. Y’all know I have comments go to moderation before they’re posted and that’s a holdover from the before times when I’d get a LOT of comments and not all of them civil or even real. These days, it’s considerably slower and it can be weeks between anyone piping up. So to my surprise, I logged on the other day to oodles of pending comments.
Dozens of vaguely threatening, definitely personal comments centering on a theme: stay away from other people’s boyfriends.
Y’all, the snort I snorted. I mean, at first. At first it was funny. Being told that “old whore is not a cute look, sis.” is silly, because I mean, first of all, it’s sex worker and second of all MIDDLE AGED, thank you so much. But there were just so many of them and the IP address associated with them local. Like, really local. Within a few miles.
I have exactly 1 local, male, unmarried friend. One. Who has a girlfriend. I haven’t met her (I met her predecessor; she was fine) but I assume she’s a lovely person because he’s a stand up dude. And because I keep my side of the street clean, I knew I’d never violated that space. But I reached out anyway, explained the situation and offered an apology. If I had ever given any impression of impropriety or said anything inappropriate I apologized. To them both. This is not the kind of energy I want to invite into my life. He said it wasn’t from his circle, I believed him, we moved on.
Yesterday, there were more comments. Sigh.
I mean, the very idea that I could be a threat to anyone’s happiness makes me chuckle. Imagine hating me and I’ve just over here crying about bald eagles. I may be an old whore, but in the retired sense. I do yoga, volunteer at school, write about food and hike in the snow. I am a wee bit obsessed with birds of prey, and I take the neighbors chili and cookies and cry over animal videos. Stealing someone else’s boyfriend seems like…a lot of work. Plus, Gen X men, as a whole, are…unhealed.
So to whomever this may concern: as delightful as I’m certain it would be to pick out safe words with your boo, I just don’t have the energy for that shit on the whole. Also, the funny thing about being an old anything (whore or otherwise), is we’re so comfortable with ourselves, we don’t require passive-aggressive silliness to resolve our feelings. We’re into aggressive-aggressive.
(bless your heart. That’s not how the algorithm works)
