“Whispery posts” are de rigueur, but I’m gonna call this a “real talk post” because — real talk now — it bothers me that a blogger, of all people, thinks it’s OK to call another blogger that he’s never met a “touchy self-centered prick” over a post that was not nearly as touchy and self-centered and pricky as the response it received. It was like, “Hey, Pot. What do you think of Kettle?”

You’ll notice I’m not posting links to any of the offending posts, and that’s deliberate. I didn’t really sit down to write about a Tumblr feud that doesn’t even involve me because these isolated things blow over and they’re totally unimportant in the Big Picture™. It’s just that reading Pot’s digs at Kettle gave me some pangs of discomfort over the way we talk to each other on the Internet — depersonalizing one another with the artificial separation between “online” and “IRL” — and as someone who has spent most of his adult life trying to write as a means to connect with other human beings, it makes me sad to think that some so-called writers are trying to disconnect and then burn every bridge around them.

It reminded me of that time in 1993, when I was a nineteen-year-old kid with a fanzine, and I decided to trash a band I didn’t really know as a means of entertaining myself. I thought I was being “clever” — which, I guess, is what we called “snark” in the early ’90s. Anyway, the issue had barely come back from the printers before I regretted it. Unlike Pot, it didn’t take long before I realized that my response was way overdetermined, not as clever as I thought it was, and arguably unnecessary. My own Kettles didn’t deserve it.

So I learned my lesson seventeen years ago, and even though I’m admittedly into being the center of attention — you pretty much have to be to do anything in my lines of work — I try to achieve that regularly without being a dick. In his rebuttal post, of course, Pot accuses Kettle of wanting attention, and charitably adds, “I am completely willing to give you attention; I lose nothing by it except the followers who hate long posts.” But this is not totally true: I was a follower who loves long posts — obviously! — but he lost me for entirely different reasons. He lost me because it’s sadly banal to call someone out for “being a dick” by being an even bigger dick, and maybe also because I’m tired of listening to detached kids in Saucony sneakers trying to debase sincerity as maudlin whimpering. Even Lil Wayne can’t stand that shit.