Breedergate is over, it ended in a flurry of gaseous indignation, and sort of ran out of steam, like a punctured air balloon. I’m sorry if I took anybody away from Pose on Netflix.

I’ve been writing online since right after the first Imac came out, and have engaged in countless hostilities over time. Nasty people were woven into the infrastructure of the Internet when it was first invented,  they have flourished there ever since.

I could put a nice spin on it, but I have a knack for speaking my mind and pissing people off, and I do not mind a good brawl from time to time.

One of the great lessons of the Internet conflict for me has been to learn that when it feels to me like I’m back in Middle School tangling with the Mean Boys and Mean Girls, exchanging nasty names,  it’s time to stop.

Nobody ever wins these fights, nobody looks good when they are over.

That Middle School moment came for me today while squabbling with someone name Anne – she wrote to my breeder urging her to “think long and hard” before selling me a puppy. It came late this afternoon.

It’s almost been a crusade of mine to challenge the Mean People – I’ve witnessed them turn the Internet into a cesspool.

Perhaps this feeling of mine is a legacy of my unhappy life in Middle School.

Sometimes I think the whole reason I became a writer was to have the last word, which is the great and only real perk of the writer.

Anne and I – she told me I was not using her real name – exchanged views about this. Every online fight with the Nasties seems to follow the same ritual. Insults, name-calling, and then feeble and ludicrous Huffing and Puffing.

Then more indignation and name-calling. The Middle School language.

Then, finally somebody blinks, most often me, realizing that there are people who live to be nasty and argue with other people, and never tire of it, and people like me who are too dumb to skip it but don’t want to do it.

Anne never did say – to me or my breeder – why she questioned my getting a puppy without bothering to talk to me. Since it was sort of the whole point of the fight, the day seemed kind of empty.

In an aggrieved tone, Anne told me she did not like what I wrote about her. Nothing in her message to the breeder was slanderous or defamatory, “I was merely stating an opinion which is protected under Freedom of Speech, 1st Amendment.”

My apologies to James Madison, who is surely spinning in his grave. They say he loved dogs.

Anne not only did nothing wrong,  she was just being patriotic.

I wish I had a dollar for each time someone online invoked the First Amendment while simultaneously offering a good argument for repealing it.

And I did have a brief fantasy imagining getting Anne on the witness stand under oath and compelling her to offer up some evidence about her protected “opinion.” I worshipped Clarence Darrow when I was a kid. Sometimes I try to channel him.

I take my dog reputation seriously, it was hard-won and is surely protected by one amendment or another.

It seemed to me that Anne had not yet talked to her squad of lawyers – this is the huffing and puffing part. In an effort to frighten me off, she wrote that I had slandered her by suggesting she was a low form of human life and cowardly. (I didn’t think to ask her why my comments were not protected by the First Amendment)

Maybe Anne doesn’t know me well after all.

She said she was literally surrounded by lawyers, living and dead – her ex-husband was one, her daughter is one, she lives near or with another excellent one.

That’s a lot of lawyers to consult about my getting a puppy. Not quite the Scopes Monkey Trial. Perhaps Anne could stop writing nasty innuendoes about me and go unleash her lawyers and get President Trump’s tax returns.

I supposed I should have apologized and turned to mush, but mostly I started to feel sorry for her, and then for me.

What kind of a life is so empty that there is time to send strangers letters like this about other strangers and puppies? My own sense of humanity caught up with my ego. And what sort of person can’t just brush it off and move along?

For all this bloviation, Anne still would not say why she wrote the message or what it was based on, which was kind of the point of the whole discussion.

She ended her very indignant and aggrieved letter – the author of nasty messages is always the victim, especially when they are called out – this way:

“I am glad you and Lenore (my breeder) are on the same page, and I wish you good luck with the puppy you will no doubt get.” That was a sort of jaw-dropper.

What a distance we came from warning my breeder not to sell me a puppy to wishing me good luck with it. When did we stop caring about the poor dog, who she had been trying to save from me just a few hours earlier?

I was going to point out that I lived in a dorm at the Harvard Law School, and at least 100 vicious, aggressive and hungry young lawyers were close relatives and friends of mine and eager to rush to protect me.

But even our overwhelmed and troubled court system has not fallen to this.

This Harvard lawyer fantasy is where the Middle School Bell rang in my head. I was tired of this, it was not worth more time.

Good Lord, Jon, don’t you have anything better to do than glorify and enable this person, who probably deserves some mercy, not contempt? And who probably loves angering people? Was I in therapy for 30 years for nothing?

Go in peace Anne, but do go.

I wish Anne had a better understanding of what she did. Mostly, what I wanted, I realized, was for her to know that writing that message was wrong. That’s what it was all about for me.

I was  haunted by the realization that it could so easily have worked.

Since Middle School, name-calling has never worked for me.

But there was something bigger on the table, at least for me.

Anne wasn’t just quarreling with me or sniping at something I wrote.

She reached out to another person and tried to do me real harm, and cause me real loss. She threatened my reputation, which is precious to me.  And tried to keep me from getting a dog I wanted very much and who I hoped would be important to me.

This dog is intended to be a well-trained therapy dog, Anne would have deprived many people of seeing a dog like that if she could have.

And for absolutely no reason that she is decent enough to disclose or honest enough to concede was fabricated or just plain wrong.

It is quite clear to me by now that there was no reason at all for this to happen.

I shudder to think of how many times she has probably done this, and how many times it might have worked.

That is the very definition of smarmy, Anne, and I am glad I used the term. Nothing in your message to me would cause me to doubt the use of that word. I don’t need to hide behind the First Amendment.

At the end of the day, I don’t feel righteous or vindicated, or even good. I feel foolish and used, I feel like taking a shower and reading my Laura Lippman mystery, which is what I will do.

My last message to Anne was this: “Anne, or whatever your name is,  my wish for you is that you never do this to anyone again. It is so very wrong.”

I wish her something better than this. I wish the same for me.

Time for recess to end before somebody gets beat up again.

Usually, it was me.