Bad Day

It was about 11pm and I was really excited to be done with the auction listing for the 100AP. I got the art put in the portfolio. I got photos of the book. I wrote up the listing. The next day I listed it on Fark Classifieds. I took some advice and put all the images on Flickr and linked the auction to that set. I told all the message boards I could and I sent emails to everyone who had expressed interest in the project.

It's been almost 24 hours and here's what's happened.

3 snarky comments on Fark.
My gmail account shut down because I sent 500 emails.
Folks who didn't contribute art suggesting a better way to run the project.
No more than three people writing about it or apparently giving a moment's notice.

I'm a bit down on myself right now. I spent a lot of time on this and was really thinking that the actual auction listing would be a big event. It wasn't. It wasn't even close.

Not even the two charity organizations said anything.

So I'm going to predict what will happen. The auction will run for 10 days. At the end of the 10 days there will be no bids. I'll relist and lower the price and it'll run for a few days and 1 person will bid on it. They will receive 100 pieces of artwork for $200. I will live securely in the knowledge that I spent 10 months wasting my time devaluing artists' work and in the end I could have just written a check for the lowered amount and called it a day.

A friend said that it's not the amount it gets, but the fact that we all made the effort.

If the project died a month later, maybe. But I'm a bit bummed now. It'll wear off and I'll push on like always. I've nothing against anyone in particular, just the anticlimactic way this all went down.

And then I got home tonight.

Readers of my little corner of the world should by this time understand the relationship Ms. A and I have. All our families know, all our friends, most of my coworkers and various anonymous people online know. It's not a shocker. It's been 18 months in the making and it shouldn't be a point of contention for anyone anymore.

Ms. A's friend recently received several hateful comments direted at Ms. A on her Flickr page. Any photo that had one of our kids or Ms. A had some slimy monologue or comment about how, basically, Ms. A is a bad person.

I tried to console Ms. A but this is really hurting her. Our lives are hard enough without the, again, anonymous assholes who love to do nothing more than waste time making other people feel bad. We have no idea who did it. We can't even guess as to who it was. I don't know anyone who has anything but respect for our situation and would at least have the tact not to say anything even if they thought otherwise.

But in the end, I'm glad whoever it was lost sleep over it. They did it at 4am and my guess is they were drunk and alone and probably just got done playing with themselves and thought it'd be a good idea to stoop to the level of primate and fling some shit at someone behind the secure cover of the internet.

Why do people do this? This isn't a plea, this is genuine curiosity. I don't understand. Are your lives so empty that you have to cause emotional havoc in other people without making yourself known? Ms. A and I are having this problem, not you, Mr. or Mrs. Whoever. If for some reason you feel you need to be invovled (ie we owe you money or property) then by all means call us. You obviously know us well enough to have our phone number. Give us a call, we'll chat.

If you're just a random douchebag, and would LIKE to be involved, shoot me an email. I'll find someone your lady or man will dump you for and then we can be miserable together.

I hate the internet. No one can be nice on it. They have to voice their opinion. They have to be smarter. They have to be heard last. They have to look cool. It's like a locker room for the cognitively threatened. I'm in fact getting pretty tired of it. If it weren't for the fact that my parents like seeing pictures of their grandkids and reading about the family, I'd pull the whole operation down tonight.

You people make me sad for the human race.