BLOCKED LITE

To Be Topless or Not to be Topless

My life as an uptight square

When I first started getting over a thousand claps, I met the haters. They show up as soon as you start making more than .01. They are kept in a small windowless room until you have a popular story.

When you hit pay dirt — 10 dollars or more — they let them out. They’re kind of like gremlins but only online. Outside of the internet, they look like perfectly normal people. People!

I don’t know who lets them out of that halogen-infused room. I saw the room a few times. It looks like the room I used to wait in when I swam at bigger meets. It’s like that heat room.

The unsatisfied ones wait in uncomfortable folding chairs until their group is called. No circulating air. By the time they let them out, they’re hot, and their hands and feet are swollen. Nobody cares about how thirsty they are. All over the floor are crumpled empty water bottles that someone else drank before they got there. It’s a tough role to play in the universe.

I don’t know who lets them out. Cerebus? Mitch McConnell? Could be anyone. Could be an out-of-work troll. Maybe it’s the mailman, the evil mailman. Nobody knows because nobody cares. Sad.

Whenever you get a comment without claps, you know there is a possibility someone’s gonna let those gremlins out. It’s my own fault I checked my comments during yoga. There were only five minutes left and I’m bad at yoga. On the flip side, silverlining gal that I am, I very good at being distracted. God made us all special. She’s cool like that.

Anywho, my comment minus claps today was responding to one of my breast stories. I write a lot of breast stories. It’s my jam. Some people write true crime, erotica, fiction, poetry, tech, injustices — I write about boobs. I’m deep.

Anyone who has written about boobs knows it’s hard to filter out the riff-raff. This might surprise you, but some people read the internet as porn. And I’m not talking about the millions of erotica articles online.

I’m talking about a blog about baseball that has the word tit in it. Some people don’t need anything more than a suggestion. I get it. We’re lonely. Life sucks. Look maw, the word boob. That makes you hot. Congratulations. Anywho, this was not one of those comments. Quite the opposite.

This reader told me I was square and uptight. I think it was because I was conflicted about whether to take my top off at Barton Springs in Austin where you are allowed to take your top off. I’m a Midwestern girl who wasn’t raised near any nude beaches, so mais oui, I am uptight. Is that an insult or a point of fact? Je ne said quoi.

I don’t think a lot of men get the topless/not topless decision because when men take off their shirts no one gives a shit. It’s a different issue. The only thing men can do to shock people is take off their pants and saunter around. Of course, when they do that, people don’t ogle — they run for cover.

I’ve never been called square before because I wasn’t raised in the 50s. It didn’t upset me as it confounded me. It was such a meek comment, I wondered why he bothered. It was as benign as my walking up to someone in a coffee shop and saying, “I wouldn’t have bought those socks.”

Monica Lewinsky said her favorite thing to do is block people. She says she wished she could have done that during the Clinton fiasco but it didn’t exist yet.

I used to wait until people tore me down or threatened me to block them, but these days I’m only interested in people who are awesome. Life’s nuts. I’m only interested in sunshine and daydreamers. If you’re not one of those, consider yourself blocked. If it’s good enough for Monica Lewinsky, it’s good enough for Amy Sea.

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