I don’t regret Babble at all and still see it as a fairly major “place” in my life with people I feel close to, even if it’s a graveyard now. This is a holdover from my first stint. If you remember I was a bit much; I had had to drop out of school newly diagnosed with bipolar, on all the wrong medications at all the wrong doses and drinking and getting high on whatever I could get my hands on, socially isolated with all my friends having gone back to school, leaving me at home alone, with a computer, unable to work or attend school, and Babble heard all about it. You say “some of us” were invited to Chemtrails but in reality it was the entire board minus me, Derrick, Jamie, and poor Herman. You can kind of understand why we stole the password and made havoc. With my social state at the time, it was a major slight, although I fully appreciate now why I wasn’t invited. I wouldn’t say I went full hikkikomori, I had no problem going out to buy beer and cigarettes, but I preferred watching the news and being parked in front of my computer and stereo.

But that’s cool, because I was a pathetic shut-in from what, late 2005 to mid 2007? That’s a blip in life, I had a normal life before and I’ve had a normal life since, I didn’t get chronically like that and worship Eliot Rodger or Andrew Tate, and I came back here after a bit as a more ordinary guy, to the extent that that’s possible for me, with some life experience and without everything but caffeine, nicotine, and weed. I know I’ve typed myself out of a presidential or probably even congressional run (Weigel would have gotten into serious trouble on Twitter if he had been five years younger) so Babble is just part of my history. It’s ab awkward one so I keep it from other people, but it’s healthier than Facebook. I waste time on there but mostly just comment on retrogaming, wrestling, and bad-album-covers groups. I unfriended about a hundred people last year and I’m down to 59. Minimal is the new maximal. Musicbabble.net is the equivalent of Hall and Oates building a home studio and then only ever recording two more albums that were critically panned and didn’t sell. It’s a lifetime achievement award for ourselves, like those luxury retirement communities you see advertised on television. I’m never leaving. I think the people who are left are lifers, too