"What can be done to stop it?",you ask, the alarm clearly palpable on your face.

"Don't look at me with that innocent expression. I know you have a blog, too!"

"But so does Despair!, you retort, your voice faltering.

"The difference is that people actually READ ours!" I deftly counter.

And, of course, when confronted with that most painful of truths, tears well up in your eyes. You feel the familiar burning cheeks, those very same cheeks that have for years betrayed your vulnerability as others less gentle than I tormented you. The tyrannical bully who gave you atomic wedgies in junior high. The fetching green-eyed linebacker or cheerleader in your Home Economics class. The indifferent boss who yawns every time you start talking about the novel you plan to one day finish.

Only the stoniest of hearts wouldn't be moved at the heart-rending spectacle you make of yourself in this moment of desperate frailty.

As I look at the sobbing sack of shoulders you become, the words well up in me, "Quiet you pencil-necked, Home EC taking wannabee novelist! Like I don't have my own problems to deal with!"

But I swallow those words before they are spoken. And instead, moved by a force larger than myself, I offer you a cloth with which to wipe your tears. At first, you shrink away, knowing me too well, expecting the final blow to be delivered and somehow knowing deeply within yourself that you probably deserve it. But there is no such blow, no back-handed smackdown. I only shrug and offer the kind of pitying look that you fantasize millions might offer you if they would only read your blog and got to know that most secret side of you that you... can't... stop...posting...onto...the Internet.

As you wipe the tears away, you feel something unfamiliar and alien on the cloth. A rubbery texture. You pull it away- seeing for the first time a screen-printed word.

You unfold it, the word becomes a phrase- the phrase becomes a joke, and the joke is on YOU!