Here’s the Short Version of how I turned off comments for my blog:

Here’s the Long Version:

At the beginning I would blog a-plenty then react with great interest as the comments came in.  After these first posts, the ratio of readers:commenters was around 10 and the comments said things like “Thank God someone finally said this!” and “I am losing continence while reading!” and “I just made hubby pull the car over so he could read your exquisite writing for himself!”  I carefully responded to each comment with a consummately demure reply, gently deflecting the deluge of praise while simultaneously revealing the depth of my gratitude.  “These people are extremely insightful,” I thought to myself, silently thanking the nameless programmer at WordPress who had made it all possible, “What a useful feature that provides valuable feedback!  Blogging should always be a two-way street.”

Once my readers:commenters ratio hit about 100, I started to receive comments that were less useful to me as a writer.  I wrote about breast-feeding and one reader clutched her pearls and shrieked “In a civilized society we do not wave our boobs around” (that’s a real quote, folks) and some dickhead wrote that “You may be able to blog, but you sure can’t write … You sound like a talentless teenager with an attitude problem.” (another real quote).  I thought about these comments carefully.  “These people should shut the f*ck up,” I thought to myself, silently cursing the nameless programmer at WordPress who had made it all possible, “This will distract my readers from the true value of the post.  A two-way street often causes needless traffic compared to an efficient high-speed train that no one dares to criticize.”  I politely explained to these commenters how very wrong they were and then didn’t hear back, not even to thank me for all the enlightenment I had provided completely gratis.

I posted some more and saw my readers:commenters ratio edging towards 1,000.  I looked at the previous numbers and spotted a trend.  “I don’t like where this is heading,” I observed to myself.  This proved to be an important premonition, but I didn’t recognize it at the time.  A little while later I got a comment that basically told me that if I actually had any brains at all I would have an extra large size of Impostor Syndrome because I was obviously shit.  I was truly concerned about this commenter’s computer, since the asshole clearly wasn’t using it correctly to look up my f*cking c.v.  I simply responded to his post by stating that I found his comment to be positively stupefying and sat around stupefied for about a day.

Then that very same dickhead killed my comment policy and ruined it for everyone, so get mad at him and not at me.  You know what he did?  He posted a bunch of hateful caveman shit about The Jews and The Women and The Blacks and linked his “argument” to some batshit nutter websites that show actual f*cking math (badly) employed to back up the argument that The Thes above are not as intelligent as White Men, and a lot of other stuff that’s even more offensive than that.  “This guy has some real f*cking problems,” I thought to myself, silently wishing that the nameless programmer at WordPress hadn’t come to work on the day that he coded the comment feature, “My blog is my living room and I feel like someone just broke into my house and took a dump on the piano keyboard.”

So comments are now closed and won’t reopen until Hell freezes over, which would be a real possibility if I still lived in Minnesota but I don’t anymore.  If you want to contact me and tell me how shitty I am you can tweet me but I’ll tell you right now that you’re going to the back of a mighty long line, mister.  You can even tweet me a few times on the same subject, but I really have to advise that if you have a lot more than ~500 characters to say about something you’d be much better off writing your own blog post.  Send me the link and I will read it carefully, I promise.