[*] general grief

Sounds like a supervillain, right? General Grief -- commander of the forces of Unfunnia. I even have a picture of General Grief (to the right), although I was going to save him until I could call him "Doctor Detroit" and make all kinds of people pop off.

Here's the General Grief for today: Listen -- I like you people who read my blog, ok? I do. I like it when you e-mail me for whatever reason. That's fine -- that's what e-mail is for. Whatever reason.

Let's all do me a favor -- and this is a personal favor on-par with giving me money or buying me lunch, so pay attention. Let's all not start calling me or my business to talk about the blog or things we have discussed in e-mail. Honest to pete, I don't have that kind of time. I'm not saying, "don't call the bookstore to place an order or get help finding resources for your church," because that's what the bookstore is there for: call the bookstore (not me personally) to place an order or get help finding resources for you or your church.

And please pay close attention, because this point is crucial: if you cannot resist calling the bookstore and asking for me, don't leave easily-misunderstood messages for me like, "just tell him this is the brunette with the lisp". You know who you are, and I know who you are, and all the readers of the blog may know who you are, but my employees and my wife do not know who you are. Think about it: if your spouse got that kind of message at work and you saw it, what would you think? OK: now frame it in the context that your spouse got this message at work from someone who knows him/her from the internet.

Yeah. Everyone with me so far? There's no need for anyone to apologize, or to make a bigger thing out of this than I am making of it right now, or to call to apologize or anything like that. The new Rule 40 at this blog is that nobody calls me unless I specifically ask them to, and no hard feelings about anything that has happened to date.

Last thing, and then back to regularly-scheduled snark: if we cannot obey this rule and its corollary, it will be the end of my blog. My wife won't ask me to do that, but we don't run our family like an episode of Three's Company. Bawdy malaprops and salty comedies of error are not standard fare, and I respect my wife too much to force her, on top of all the other things she has to do, to sort out the intentions of people she has never met who know me through a medium that is, at best, full of people with somewhat-questionable intentions.

Be fair. Be fair to me. Deal?