This is an intervention.
I know I don't know you very well, and I don't want to tell you how to live your life, but equally I can't just sit here and watch you make the same mistakes as me. I can't watch someone else turn down that dark path because I know where it leads. I have to say something.
Rewind a few months. I made a post. It was a post about a fictional man called Martin. Martin was a man with an unhealthy interest in flannels.
It was meant to be a laugh. A stupid joke. Not even a joke, just a bit of nonsense. That's how it started. I was bored. A bit lonely. Perhaps I wanted a little attention.
So I wrote the post. And it was stupid. But it awoke something in me. A little fire was lit, deep inside me, and once it was lit I couldn't help but feed it.
Martin was not alone. He had a friend, of sorts. A fictional woman called Judith who may or may not have been his lover at some point in the distant past. Judith had assigned herself the role of Martin's challenger. She was Cambell's mentor, calling Martin to adventure, driving him across the threshold toward the abyss. It was just possible she might be his salvation.
I kept posting. Soon people began to notice and respond. They wanted to know what would happen next. It seemed that everyone could relate, on some level, to this saga of flannelry and fanaticism. I began to stir the pot. I dropped hints that all was not as it seemed. People began to take sides. Readers declared themselves "Team Martin" or "Team Judith" and a troubling, divisive tribalism began to infect the endless posts on the subjects. Arguments were started. Threads were locked. People were dissecting each drip-fed paragraph of narrative, looking for justifications for their preferences, any hint that their affiliation was the morally correct one.
The story, which we remember had begun as a simple tale of one man's love for his flannel, grew into a beast of a story that I couldn't control. It was a true epic of love and loss, of possession and jealously, of fabric and fabrication, and ultimately of good and evil.
In my mind Martin and Judith had become real people. It was if they had taken a flannel to my own memory and wiped everything clean that didn't pertain to their domestic drama. When I awoke in the morning, my first thoughts were not of tending to the needs of my family but of tending the needs of Martin and Judith's narrative.
At night I dreamed only of flannels. One night I woke up to find an actual flannel, damply draped across my forehead. It had been placed there out of love by my partner, concerned at my febrile convulsions and sweat-drenched brow but to me, in that moment, it seemed that my nightmares had followed me into the waking world and I'm too ashamed to describe the behaviour that followed. But it involved me hurling the flannel out of the window, where it fell onto the head of a passing vicar.
My obsession had begun to harm the ones I love most.
Meanwhile, my audience's demand for more were just getting louder. My PM inbox was a daily dread, rammed as it was for requests to know what would happen next, demands that Martin and Judith should rekindle their romance and finally a message from the moderating team. The server was being overwhelmed. It simply hadn't been designed to cope with the levels of interest in Martin and Judith's story. I was asked to bring the saga to a swift and definitive end.
It was only the actions of the moderators that saved me. Under such restrictions I had to end the story and stop prattling on about flannels for once and for all. I owe them an enormous debt of gratitude.
But those people who had invested so much of themselves in Martin and Judith's flannel fiction were not so happy. Since I vowed to never speak of flannels again, I've been subject to the most vitriolic and hateful backlash. For two weeks I cowered as a hard rain of invective and insult fell on my personal messages inbox.
And then came the ignoring.
Suddenly I was persona non grata. No one wanted a bar of me and I don't blame them. Not a single post of mine has garnered a response since then. People act as if I were not here. A place I once thought might be my home has rejected me as wholeheartedly as every other place I've ever experienced.
And it's all because I started talking about flannels.
Don't be like me.
Don't blather on about flannels. People don't like it. Not really. They might at first, but when you can no longer satisfy their cravings for washcloth-based fantasy they will turn on you.
Flannels are just little squares of terry-towelling. They have no function beyond wiping the crusted egg and biscuit crumbs off your face, ready for the next day. There's nothing else there. I promise you.
Understand that this comes from a place of love and stop. Before it's too late.
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06 May 2024, 8:33 am
