"Indecision is a bore!"

So sings Gaston in Gigi.

Or, expressing the same sentiment a bit more crudely, my father had a colorful saying he used to employ when teaching me how to drive and I'd suffer a moment of indecision at a particularly bad moment -- say, being in the middle of an intersection trying to turn left when my light turned red. I'd pump the gas and hem and haw a bit, a motorist behind me would honk their horn, and he'd suddenly yell, "Shit, or get off the pot!"

That's what I'm thinking reading SDB's first post in nearly a month. He's thinking about packing in the whole thing because he's tired of getting lots of e-mail. Did he not see this coming? It's really quite the pickle. He's almost like the guy who busts his hump to become a big-league ballplayer, only to discover that Holy crap, the kids all want his autograph and the commentators have opinions on his game.

But what catches my eye is that he's apparently still all hung up on the immense amounts of ridicule he has received from Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias. Now, as near as I can tell, Kevin hasn't linked SDB since April and hasn't even mentioned him since June (and, in fact, Kevin's only mentioned SDB three times in the last twelve months). Matthew's a little harder to check, since his old site went belly-up a couple of months back and thus his searchable archives only go back as far as June 28 of this year. But in just that little span, Matthew has, according to Google's search function, mentioned SDB in the main body of a post only twice (here and here), with neither instance seeming to offer a setting much higher than "pretty tame" on the "ridicule-o-meter".

SDB seems to genuinely be pining for "silent admiration from afar" on the part of his readers, which seems to me to be a pretty unrealistic hope on the Internet.