After a restless night of trying to sleep (I sprained a neck muscle a few weeks back and it has resulted in chaos all down my left arm and shoulder) I awoke fairly early this morning and noticed that WordPress had dutifully sent me an alert noting that my latest post had published. This is the last chapter of “Fight, Swear, Loathe” so I took to my phone and commenced to reading. I had barely gotten started when my beloved rolled over partially to look at me through half-asleep eyes to say, “What are you doing? Are you looking at porn?”

There was a time in my life that browsing porn would certainly have been a possibility. Those days are now well behind me, though. I made a commitment to being a better person and to tune in more to people around me and that meant giving up some of my more selfish impulses. So I was a little hurt that this was the first thing I should be greeted with as my day had only been active a few moments before it had been hijacked into this new direction of suckery. I replied, “No, I am reading my blog. The last chapter of my current book just posted.” To emphasize this I even turned my phone so that she could see the truth in what I was presenting.

She gazed at my phone for a moment and then asked, “It’s porn, isn’t it?”

My initial reaction to this repeated accusation was to point out that there aren’t even any pictures on the page I was looking at, but I didn’t go there. Instead it hit me that the insinuation was being made that my writing is so shoddy and unreadable that even I wouldn’t have any interest whatsoever in reading what I had written. Therefore the only thing I could possibly be doing at this godawful early hour in bed with my smartphone was looking at porn. She might as well have sat bolt upright in bed, glared at me, and said, “Bullshit. You aren’t reading your blog. Nobody reads your blog. You are looking at porn because you hate me.”

So that’s where I am at now. My own writing has fallen so far down on the plausibility meter as to be rendered as a non-option for polite company. Everyone will just assume the absolute worst rather than believe that I am reading my own blog or contributing to it somehow because let’s face it, the stuff this guy churns out doesn’t even hold his own interest. He’s looking at porn. Or worse. That is not the high-flying morale boost you might think it is, by the way. My only consolation is that somewhere a person is actually looking at porn and a horrified onlooker is accusing them of browsing “Slothjemian Tales” because clearly between the two options we all know which is the worst.

Damn it all so much.