Overachieving the pursuits of nihilism

To John Kleinschmidt of Oxford Michigan,

Please stop.  Go away, and leave me alone.  This has gone on too long.

Please take this as my formal request to please go away, stop reading my blog and stop reading my Twitter feed.  Please stop reading my wife’s blog and please stop reading her Twitter feed as well.

I canceled my Twitter account and shut down my old blog in the hopes that you would not find me.  Instead you came looking for me.  Why?  Is there some sane reason why you must keep yourself up to-date on me?

Yes we were once co-workers.  But that ended five years ago, when we let you go.  Afterwards you attempted to get sympathy from me by saying you had to resort to charity to get your children Christmas gifts.  Granted it was two or three days before Christmas, but why did you ever wait that long to start your Christmas shopping?  In 2006 when I moved to the Detroit area after separating from my first wife I did not want your help, sympathy, or support.  I was trying to start my life over then and establishing friendships with former co-workers is not what I wanted.

I’ve thought that through the years I have made it very clear, I simply want you to go away and leave me alone.  But you won’t for some reason.  You are on some unending quest to find out why it is that I don’t want to be friends with you.  Simply put, because.  I do not need to give you any more reason that that.

With the site www.imawhinyblogger.com you have proven without a doubt that you will go to any length to follow me around the globe.

A couple of things about this web site.

1. All bloggers are whiny.  And I will give you credit for thinking of a clever URL.
2. By registering it yesterday strictly for the reason of syndicating this site’s feed, you have firmly established yourself as an online stalker whose actions are now bordering on harassment.

You once knew me, but you don’t know me now.  You are not someone that I would like to associate with, and your actions have done little to make me want to change my mind.  Please tell your wife to stop trying to dig for more information.  I want to be left alone by the Kleinschmidt family.  I do not spend any of my time trying to find things out about you.  It irritates me that you must do it to me.

John, move on with your life.  I have left Michigan.  I am not going to be your friend.

Go away.

I used to have a completely different online persona.  That is till about two weeks ago.  Two weeks ago I was forced to commit web 2.0 suicide.  I had reached a level of complete and utter frustration with an online stalker that the only possible way I could force him to stop, was to myself stop using all my former accounts and close them.

I know who my stalker is.  He is a former co-worker.  We let him go over four years ago yet he continued to try and stay in touch with us.  Through the use of Statcounter and other analytic tools it was pretty easy to tell that he was pulling up my blog every time I posted.  I even did experiments by posting articles and watching him consistently pulling them up in under five minuets.

When I opened my Facebook and MySpace accounts he tried to friend me.  I denied and blocked him.

When I first opened my Twitter account he started following me less than two days later.  I immediately blocked him.

Things started to get really strange when I started seeing his IP address link from the RSS feed of my Twitter feed pulling up the links to my blog posts.  It was at this point I knew he was going to great lengths to keep up on my every move.

Then I met my wife¹.  One day she started asking me about strange activities on her blog’s logs.  I asked her for the IP address.  I really shouldn’t have been that surprised when the IP address turned out to be his.  Soon she was seeing the same pattern of posting and a guaranteed hit in under five minutes.  He tried following her Twitter account, and was denied.

For a while we found it sad and down right humorous.  We even dedicated a site to it.

Then about two weeks ago I got a Facebook message from his “wife” that was oddly timed within moments of a comment I happened to make on a mutual acquaintance’s Facebook page.  She wanted to get the rundown on why I didn’t want to talk with him any more, and that I “didn’t have to worry” because she was “keeping this message a secret” and that “he would be really angry if he were to find out about the message.”  I showed it to my wife and mentioned something along the lines of “this is getting kind of sick.”

The next day I had the strangest urge to write a blog post.  I hadn’t written to my blog in nearly five months.  Partially because I’ve been overworked and tired, and partially because now that I had moved to Austin I really didn’t want him knowing all the ins and outs of my life down here.  But I decided to write a post anyway.  Two minutes.  Two minutes was all it took for him to pull up the post off my Twitter’s RSS feed.  I was furious.

I have moved on to a new part of my life and he is obsessed with mine.  So, I decided to kill of the part of me that he is obsessed with.  I closed my Twitter account.  I tried to delete my Facebook account²  And my old blog is dead.

Extreme?  Maybe, but he can’t stalk what isn’t posted.  And if he finds this blog, I’ll close it down as well.

How did I get here?¹  How did I find myself looking at 7:30am on a Saturday morning as a wonderful thing?²  I’m not entirely sure. Currently my life is filled with a dizzying array of seventy hour work weeks bookended by two days that I try to re-introduce myself to my wife whom I leave to fend off the onset of mental disorders associated with the hobby of conversing with our cats.

Like many males in my demographic³ my hobbies include mass consumptions of malted yeast infused beverages⁴ and the playing of video games.  I am, by nature, not an outdoors type of person seeing as I need a constant stream of decongestants planted in my blood in order counteract the pollen count.  My sloth like life style has left many to wonder about my mental stability at times.⁵  Truthfully, I am a workaholic.  I cannot find the inner strength to turn and walk away from my work when I know that there is little reason to push my body to the point of both physical and mental exhaustion.  But I do it anyway.⁶

While I write this very post⁷⁸my wife is fending off the zombie hoards from her vegetable garden.  I have already picked up on at least one hint that she would like to leave the house at some point today and even lured me with the possibility of beer tasting down town⁹  And so with that, I think that I will send this post off to the ether¹⁰ and leave the work that must be done before Monday till tomorrow.¹¹