Bopping around my usual haunts, I find this post from Heather over at Dooce, where she kindly takes the time to respond to hateful e-mail from her readers.

See, right here, I’m already amused. It’s as if their browsers are stuck at Dooce.com, and they aren’t allowed to head over to their usual porn or gambling sites or right-wing hate-filled bulletin boards until they’ve read her latest post and answered three multiple choice questions about that day’s content. Are these the same people that continue to watch television shows that offend or bore them, week after week?

It got me thinking that I’m kind of jealous, on one hand, that I don’t have the readership numbers to qualify for entry into the weekly hatemail sweepstakes. Some of us write blogs for ourselves more than others, sure — with an average daily visitor count hovering around 50, it would be summarily stupid of me to claim that I’m doing it for the attention. But on the flip side, no one puts this sort of thing out for public view without at least somewhat craving attention, readers, feedback — whatever. Yeah, I’d love to have thousands of visitors per day; not only would it give me hate mail to respond to (and you can ask Neely — my writing is infinitely less boring when I actually get to make fun of something someone else has written), but I could put ads up, and editors across the country would be knocking my door down to write a book, and maybe, just maybe, my girlfriend would stop calling me a worthless waste of skin.

I’m kidding, of course. No editor in his or her right mind wants another book by a blogger, and my girlfriend never calls me a waste of skin to my face.

But on the flip side, writing for that many people, knowing that my words and my life (or what passes for one) are under the scrutinous eyes of thousands or hundred of thousands of people that I don’t really care one way or the other about… imagine the pressure. I wonder: would it affect my writing, or the topics that I’m comfortable addressing? Would the hatemail cause me to question my behavior, my morals, my beliefs? Would I become impotent and flaccid without the adulation of my legions of fans and stat logs to back it up?

Nah. CL is way too hot for that last one to ever be a concern.

No shit. She’s a bellydancer. Viagra, I hear, sponsored four assassination attempts on her last month alone.

I should be happy, I suppose. I’ve got a small but devoted* number of readers, and even at this level I already get hateful comments. And those are from a guy that I’ve known for a quarter of a century. Imagine how much fun they’d be from people that can hide behind anonymity.

*If you ever hear a creative type use the phrase “small but devoted,” it’s exactly the same as hearing a woman say that “it’s not the size that matters.” It means we’re both terribly displeased with how little we have, but hey — why should anyone’s feelings get hurt along the way?