Seasons change and so does Chuckling

Chuckling was created in the early days of the popular internets, when web browsers first became sophisticated enough for regular people to surf and a few pioneering Internet Service Providers were offering affordable access with custom content. As an experiment, my original ISP provided forums and encouraged people to discuss and debate the day’s news. This noble experiment began well with educated people having interesting nuanced discussions but quickly came to be dominated by the insane, stupid mean right wing nutcases. As we know, it’s been that way ever since.

Chuck was born to torture these nutcases and was very good at it. He was not one to beat them into submission with logical argument. He would toy with them, draw them into traps, show them for the total fools they are, often with great élan.

Perhaps Chuck’s greatest accomplishment was carrying on a political argument with a particularly vitriolic nutcase using George Eliot as his screen name and using nothing but quotations from George Eliot, the female English novelist. And to make it interesting, I began the project with the express goal of getting him to call George Eliot a fag.

Our exchange followed the classic right wing nutcase pattern. When they are confronted with someone who politely questions their beliefs and is seemingly sincere, they trip over themselves to be nice and sincere in return. But going from quotes like “Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand,” to “We hand men over to God’s mercy and then show none ourselves,” and on to the likes of “Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact,” quickly causes them to crank up the vitriol. Unfortunately, the real quotations I used and the true nature of the exchange is lost in the misty html of the past, but it only took about six rounds before he called her a fag. When someone had mercy on the poor soul and pointed out that George Eliot had been dead for some time and I revealed myself as Chuckling, it resulted in a thinly veiled threat against my fictional person, which I counted as bonus points.

Ah, but that all took place in the heyday. Chuckling, alas, stumbled from his lofty perch of detachment and was forced to call it quits. Constant interaction with mean stupid people is unhealthy even for the best of fictional characters, and Chuck was never among the best of characters. And when that interaction with genuinely nasty idiots is no more sporting than poking the brain damaged in the eye with a stick, it takes a moral and karmic toll, which I paid in full. So except for rare appearances, that Chuckling is gone.

But Chuck is just like anyone else. Take away so much of his raison d'être and he develops an identity crisis. If he cannot torture right wing losers as he was born to do, what else is there?

Well, you may say, writing about politics is a big part of torturing right wing nutcases. That’s true, and I have some experience writing about politics under another guise so the interest and ability are there. When Chuck came out of retirement and began haunting the comments section at Alicublog, that was mostly what he did.

But now that he is serious about his own on-line magazine, it is not so simple. Many fine people are writing about politics these days, saying the things that Chuckling would say, so I find it difficult to take that road. Responding to someone else’s writing in someone else’s comments is something else – something easy. As time goes by I will share more photos and video work, but haven’t been much in the mood lately. Creating original literary content that anyone is interested in reading is much more of a challenge.

We’ll see. As noted in other posts, I enjoy finding and showcasing good writing from obscure blogs, writing that somehow illustrates some kind of emotional depth in the human condition, but that doesn’t seem like something I can maintain on a daily basis. And I’ve been enjoying doing art and lit reviews, but that’s never been my forté and, again, there’s no way I can keep it up on a daily basis. So if any of the ten or so people currently reading this on-line publication have any suggestions on content or style, please let me know. Chuckling takes requests. And if there is anyone out there who would like to contribute to Chuckling, get in touch and we’ll talk about it. I’m open to having people contribute, either under their own name, or if the vibe is right, as Chuckling.

Anway, I guess I’m feeling a bit introspective today because I’ve taken a new job and it is something of a break from the past, to say the least. I will be managing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) projects for customers from all across the business and public sectors. I will work with these entities to collect and aggregate every conceivable bit of data about their customers and their competition in order to help them better understand the needs of the marketplace and their place in it, and ultimately, to sell their product. Of course there are some cases in which there is no product involved, at least not in the common sense of the term, but I won’t go into that now.

I have a lot to learn and maybe I will share it with you as long as I am comfortable that I can keep my anonymity. So names will be changed and situations I describe slightly altered so as to be unidentifiable should someone from the company happen across this little publication. The possibility of any of my colleagues or clients coming across this site is next to zero Still, I will have to take precautions. As long as I keep it to terms that won’t show up in a Google search, I should be okay.