First off, let me begin by saying that I'm not a huge fan of diaries like the one I'm posting here, because they generally consist of some combination of attention-whoring and poutrage (a word that I'm also not a huge fan of) about the site, or the community, or some narrow aspect of either, or god-knows-what-else. Now, this doesn't mean that I'm above either attention-whoring or poutrage. Or both at the same time. Nor does that mean that this diary will be free of either. Let's face it, I'm as capable of being hypocritical and inconsistent as anyone here, to an extent probably greater than I'm willing to admit to myself most of the time.
But this diary isn't really about my need for attention, although I do occasionally crave it and probably hope to receive some here (otherwise I doubt I would have posted this diary). Nor is it really about anything that's wrong with Daily Kos or the community here, although both have their problems and those problems do play a role in what I'm attempting to address. Rather, what this is about is my need to begin breaking out of a cycle of behavior that has proven to be corrosive to my emotional and physical health. Part of this process involves acknowledging the fact that my relationship with the community here and involvement therein has increasingly come to consist of little more than pointless, idiotic arguing over meta and other utterly trivial matters, at the expense of participating in any sort of meaningful dialogue or contributing anything of real value to the community here.
My peripheral involvement in the massive group clusterfuck surrounding the Zombie Formerly Known as RainbowGirl had a hand in my reaching this realization; like many here, I got taken in by this asshole and defended her on at least a few occasions. I agreed with some of the things she said, but I don't think that really played a major role in my defense of her as I really didn't read her "contributions" here closely enough to give them the sort of scrutiny that might have set off a few more alarm bells in my head and perhaps saved me from the embarrassment of having been among those who defended her. What really mattered, it seems in retrospect, is that she appeared to be on the "right" side of a piefight I've chosen to participate in, a petty war of personalities that has raged on this site for months now between a vocal camp of Obama supporters and a vocal camp of Obama critics to the great detriment of the site as a whole. Like some of the others who nonetheless rushed to her defense, I did have reason to be suspicious about RainbowGirl's credibility; for me, it was a remark that she made in response to a comment someone posted alluding to one of my previous diaries, which was posted well before the emergence of her character and which she shouldn't have known anything about. Ultimately, I found a way to rationalize away my misgivings at least enough to take umbrage at the comments of several people who accused her of sockpuppetry, even HRing a couple of them on the night that she was ultimately banned. Bob Johnson pops to mind, and I'm sure there were a few others, all of whom deserve the same apology that I gave to Bob (and I am sorry, for those of you to whom this applies).
Anyway, this happened relatively early in the evening on Christmas Eve, after which guests began arriving here at the house for fun and festivities and I managed to pry myself away from the computer long enough to consume quite a bit of alcohol. I staggered back to the computer later, after things had died down a bit and I had really gotten a nice, happy drunk on, to follow up on some of the stuff I had posted earlier. And so I perused the comments in RainbowGirl's last diary, and a diary that had been posted in response, and saw what an awful mess things had become, even in relation to how they were earlier in the evening. And as I waded through this pond of excrement trying to follow what had happened in my absence, I had a brief moment of clarity in the midst of my drunkenness, and it occurred to me to ask myself something that I really should have been asking a long, long time ago: why in the blue fuck do I care about any of this shit? It was Christmas Eve, and here I was trying to sift through the comments of a bunch of people who were arguing over the hypothetical identity of a commenter on a blog and rehashing a bunch of old, trivial grievances, led on by the idea that there was something I needed to see in the middle of all this. I'm not sure if I would exactly categorize it as a road to Damascus moment, but I have nonetheless noticed that my desire to participate in stuff like this has diminished considerably.
I woke up on Christmas Day faced with two unpleasant realizations: first, that I have absolutely no business attempting to type when I've had more than about three beers or so; and second, that I need to seriously re-evaluate my participation in this community and determine how I can continue to participate here in a way that allows me to both take away and give back something meaningful, and minimize the likelihood that I will get sucked back into the meta sinkhole that has consumed so much of my time here and so much of what originally attracted me to this site. One of the reasons that I've left the Democratic Party and declared myself an independent again is because of my disgust at seeing so many people in both parties, and here, who subordinate their own political and philosophical beliefs to the success of the political camp that they've chosen to affiliate with. It's no small irony, then, that I should extricate myself from the Republican/Democratic piefight only to immerse myself in a far more trivial piefight between the pro- and anti-Obama cliques here. Over the last few days, I've taken the opportunity to review some of the stuff I've posted here in the last several months, and can only say that I saw very little to be proud of (unless there's a reason to be proud at wasting time arguing with people about earlier arguments that were themselves about even earlier arguments).
So for the benefit of the handful of you who care, I've decided that I'm going to leave for a while. This is not a GBCW, and I do intend to come back at some point in the future, after I've reached some sort of personal understanding about how I intend to participate in this community going forward. I have no idea how long I'll be gone, though I've already decided that I'm not coming back until at least after the new year begins -- perhaps a few weeks, with the outside possibility of a longer absence and a very remote chance that I won't come back at all. However long it takes to get to that point, I won't be back until I'm relatively certain that I'm here for the right reasons, and that my participation here won't be a complete waste of time. To those of you who I consider friends, many of whom I interact with outside of the web site, I won't be disappearing completely -- I'll still be around on Facebook, and I may even get off my ass and start tweeting again, for what little that's worth. I'm not disappearing, just leaving here for a while. And I seriously doubt that my political perspective will be all that different if/when I return. I'll probably still be vocal in my criticism of Obama and the Democratic Party, but hopefully by then I'll have figured out a way to throw cold water on my natural tendency to allow myself to get sidetracked into piefights, and use the time I save to contribute more constructively to the dialogue here.
My hiatus will begin immediately, so I won't be responding to comments here, though I'm sure I'll read them. And I can't guarantee that I won't be lurking from time to time, so you may see the occasional upvote or rec here and there. In any event, I hope everyone has had a Merry Christmas and happy holiday season thus far, and I hope you all have a happy New Year.