Starving Trolls

     The hope of New Year's, especially in this convoluted day and age, tends to be like Charlie Brown in his existential quest to kick the football. Naturally, Lucy snatches it from him and Charlie winds up flat on his back, wondering for the umpteenth time why he'd fallen for Lucy's ever more complex assurances that she would not snatch the football away.
     Well, our hopes for a better year here at Casa del Pottersville lasted less than 24 hours when our new year started going to shit on January 1st. I won't tell you what that was but let's just say that, just over 100 hours into 2017 it seems the whole world is going to be gunning for us in one way or another.
     Of course, this will make at least two stalkers happy and that's the thrust of this post. For the foreseeable future, comments will be turned off except to yours truly. Either Chadwick's come back with a vengeance under a nom de plume or I've acquired another stalker who's too cowardly to make his real identity known. This isn't censorship. As John Aravosis of AmericaBlog once put it to me, this is "content management."
     And I've got better things to do with my life than to delete up to five comments a day from some malcontent who leads such a miserable life that he's only happy when he makes strangers as miserable as him. I really pity this loser who tries to trick me into reading his comments by changing his handle. And it's no big deal to delete them without reading them.
     But as I'd just said, I've got better things to do, like trying to keep the chaos and the darkness at bay for as long as I can. With money troubles, a failing, 19 year-old car that won't pass inspection this March but will soon need more work and a whole host of other problems, I don't need trollage piled on my plate. It's one thing not to feed trolls- But I've found over the years that starving them is much more efficacious.
     I know this is unfair to those of you who do leave legitimate, thoughtful comments and several of you have my phone number and email address if you wish to contact me directly. But it's time to start purging bullshit and bullshitters from our lives so Mrs. JP and I can live in whatever peace the world is still willing to grant us.