I was banned from their Internet (very serious business)… The weirdest thing about blogs is how they completely settled in and gave birth to blogettes like Facebook and (God help us) Twitter, the last refuge for people who look in the mirror and see a distinguished posting career.  I don't know where you go from Twitter, maybe t-shirts that wirelessly display your current status on e-cloth.  The other weirdest thing is how completely normal it now is to be out of your mind crazy.

They don't come any crazier than the fellow who permanently banned me from his forums.  An expatriate ex-mormon who fled to Glorious Nippon to take a Japanese blide and escape personal debts, and who then fled to ching chong China to escape his Japanese blide, and who then went back to Japan to kidnap his gay son, and who then converted to Orthodox Christianity on the suggestion of an equally nutty Slav he met on the Internet, and who is now a neo-fascist Truther even more obsessed with Jews than Jews themselves are – well at some point your craziness becomes so expansive that it needs chapter breaks and a commentary track.  Oh by the way he hates his father.

There's nothing wrong with this picture if you ask him.  It's just, you know, how we do.  What I've found is that crazy people inevitably turn on me, and some time after I mentioned that he was out of his mind he took away all my posting privileges, then gave them all back, then took them all away again (I might have had something to do with that) and banned me permanently, so says the logon screen anyway.

It was fun while it lasted, and you've got to expect a little drama from someone matching the above description, and yes toward the end I did goad him on in his dementia, but it struck me that this was more than about some crazy e-Hitler kicking me out of his e-clubhouse.  (For starters it was about me.)  It was also the way the Internet has injected a steady stream of hormones into daily life, political discourse, and the serious business of serious business.  You can't watch cable news now without seeing tantrums, insane partisan speeches, and commentary that appears to come from Bizarro World.  Our politics is a shambles, our economy is run by lunatics, and our culture works like an installed art exhibit.  Instead of policy debate we have fat, blustery idiots crashing town hall meetings and screaming at the tops of their lungs until union bully boys shove them out.

It's a world of change from the sober, gray news media that once supported fat newsweeklies and earnest policy journals and talking heads set around a table for hour-long discussions about SALT II.  Now we have fat bloggers and smug e-zines and podcast recordings of hour-long discussions about pop culture trivia.  This zeitgeist of insanity, in which closeted news aggregators go to war against chief executives with father abandonment issues (there's that meme), has been fed by the impulsive, hormonal, childish world of the Internet.  I see a distinct reflection of it in the television show Mad Men, whose current season slogan is "the world's gone Mad"; the show depicts American life right before the great civil and social upheaval of the late 60s and early 70s.  (It reminds me of another great zeitgeist-defining program, The Sopranos, which Mad Men creator Matt Weiner wrote for.)  For the past twenty years we've been watching normalcy recede; Orthodox Christian neo-fascist Truthers are the new normal.

I'm still done with blogging.  I'm going to start my own forum for purposes of entertainment and intelligent discussion, a place where crazy will only get you cruelly mocked.  Maybe only five people will visit, and three of them will be dysfunctional nerds, but at least two of us will be reasonably amused.  Watch this space for details.