This is a difficult post to write. Difficult because I now know that if I tip my hand, the trolls will jump on the bandwagon again. But I have to get this out of my system. Even if I have to be a bit cryptic in my delivery so as not to invite the uninvited.

I am so disgusted with people right now. I am just mortified at the levels to which people will sink. We lost someone recently, and we dealt with that loss as best as we could — virtual hugs, shared tears. We paid tribute to a person that we’d never met face-to-face but yet had touched our lives.

But in our attempt to get through it all — an undertaking that pales in comparison to what the family must be going through — we spoke. We spoke to each other in e-mails, in blogs, in forums.

And from the underbelly, from the darkest depths, they came. The trolls. They questioned. And they took the death of another human being lightly. It was bad enough when they did it at our sites, or in the forums. But they went to his site. What’s worse, they called his goddamn home. And his family, a family that was trying to cope with an untimely death, had to answer the phone. They had to delete the comments. They had to take the time away from the important things – the things that mattered – to deal with crap like this. Like them.

I feel somewhat responsible. I feel that by putting it out there, we perpetuated it. And I’m so sorry for that. It was just our way of dealing with the loss of someone we had come to know. But if I had know what it would do, I’d probably just have kept it a little more private.

Because for all the livin’ this old body has done, I guess I didn’t know just how low people could go.