Gentle Readers, I am stumped today. The topic of the day is to bless your body, as that is your temple, your sanctuary, your without it you are nothing. There is a recommendation to take a cue from Rastafarianism, which sadly, I could google all day but really don’t know much about. Apparently it is also the birthday of Bob Marley. Him I know a little about.

So today, I am deviating from the norm a little, and going to talk about something slightly related. I am a member of several facebook groups for authors, readers and such. I enjoy the antics and fodder these groups provide in observing the great social experiment we call life. I have always been a people watcher, a bystander if you will. I find that when you stop and observe the goings on around you, you learn about people. Just sit down in a coffee shop and enjoy your coffee slowly, maybe a bagel as well. Go to a mall and savor that sandwich and soda in the food court. People watching can be highly entertaining.

But I digress. In one of the groups I am in recently we had a little spat between two “writers”. I sat back and watched these two grown women, both a bit older than me and one would hope wiser, go at each other like a couple of teenage girls fighting over prom dates. All because of a third member of the group who is the classic case of creepy internet troll. He posts ranting videos (claiming he is mentally ill) all over people’s on topic posts. He makes personal attacks and threats against anyone he can find in his blast zone. The guy may or may not be mentally ill, clinically speaking, but he is clearly a lunatic and a sociopath. So Woman B says that she doesn’t believe Woman A about Lunatic needing professional psychiatric help. This degenerates into Woman A bashing free verse poetry posted by Woman B, and Woman B calling Woman A derogatory names. The internet is like a giant mall where you can sit in the food court and be entertained for hours. How these two function in normal life I would like to see. If they are like this in their real life, they must be quite sad offline.

Anyway, the moral of my little laughter this morning is to just let it roll off your shoulders. Whether it is an online bully calling you names from the safety of their keyboard, or some real life asshat who needs an attitude adjustment, if you feed the trolls in your life, they will scare off the good things.