Maaya Rive asks whether we’ve ever been trolled on Medium.
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I’m the 4th goat in the children’s story “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” My biggest brother threw the bad guy off the bridge, freeing me to walk across in safety.
Thousands of comments over three years of stories, and not a single troll sighted.
Well, someone once wrote something that caused me to delete them, but I can’t remember what it was. I think it was more crazy than mean.
And, sometime in my first year on Medium, still naive of its folkways, I made a snarky comment to a writer I liked and read, but who had never reciprocated. He promptly, firmly, and gently tutored me on his Medium world, which made it impossible for him to read everyone who read him.
Point taken. He was a veteran schooling a rookie. I was older even than the wonder-wielding, swinging-for-the-fences 47-year-old Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs in The Natural.
*
Maaya’s prompt about harassment on Medium nudged me to think about the rarity of other bad stuff in my life.
Today is number 27,761. In years, that’s 76. I live in a small town in the United States. Over the years, however, I’ve spent hundreds of days in large cities around my country and the world. To my recollection, I’ve been robbed one time, and it wasn’t by a bad guy coming up from under a bridge.
It was a friendly man in a funny hat behind a food truck counter in one of those big cities, Washington, D.C. It was a learning experience.
Scammed Under the Washington Monument by an Ice Cream Man
And what I learned
Sometimes, it’s easy to take for granted the friction-lit world we live in.
Later today, I’ll walk around Palisades Park, about a mile from our house. It’ll take me about an hour to hike the paved trail.
Occasionally, I’ll meet someone. Or catch a glance of a dog walker or mountain biker. Or smell a campfire. Or hear music. Or see a parked car with its door open like I did yesterday. And my imagination will take off. After all, I’m no spring chicken and, especially at the top, the park is isolated.
For it’s true, even in our little corner of Iowa, trolls do exist.
We know them by their energy drinks.
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