Awesome! A blogging milestone: my first hate mail. I’m a little tardy on this as I don’t check the e-mail address behind the blog all that often, but 17 April 2008 I prompted enough ire in a stranger to intrude on their schedule:

To: “Donald Taylor II”
From: [REDACTED]
Date: Thu, April 17, 2008 5:51 pm
Subject: Re: The Destruction of Barack Obama, Part III

I want to hear more about your cat, Mogli. Mostly because your views about Obama are sad.

Sad. You make me want to cry. Its unsatisfying to believe that America is screwed. Not that Obama is a the messiah or the savior, but that the system is broken beyond repair and America’s future is the same as that of an overgrown, syphilitic determined to drink themselves to death and all the while justifying their recklessness and self-destruction with cowardly simplifications.

Is that the future of America? An overburden social insurance system that demonizes those it means to uplift, a prison system that robs the youth and vigor from huge swathes of the population, a government that is purposefully inept, a political system that has no sense of the national interest, an economy built for and maintained by a global moneyed elite and a population so consumed by the immediate needs for survival that engaging in the necessarily ugly process for national rebirth (short of revolution) is met with irrelevance and cynicism?

Is that your America?

Tell us more about your cat and your crockpot. The rest is too sad.

Is that you, Chris Crocker?

This guy fell out of the chiché tree and hit every trope on the way down. It ought to go without saying in a fragmented, saturated media market — and one entirely public — that requests to desist are unnecessary and will not be respected. Simply turn your attention elsewhere.

This is some pretty weak tea, but I guess thankfully so. I need to toughen my hide for the real trolls.