The Dead Bloggers' Society

Do you ever wonder what happened in real life to bloggers who have ceased to blog? Did these people develop real lives -- something I probably need to do -- which fill the voids in their lives formerly consumed by blogging? Did their blogs merely take different forms? Instagram is incredibly trendy at the moment. Or do they, the former bloggers,  occupy some mysterious and ethereal graveyard for exanimate  (at least as far as their on-line writing presence is concerned) bloggers?  For that matter, when a blogger finally does bite the dust, do we learn of it? If I met an untimely demise, I cannot imagine that it would occur to anyone in my immediate family (who no longer have passwords to my blog, anyway, so the most they could do would be to leave a notice in the comments section) to clue my my vast readership in to the fact that I am now residing in plot #11119 at Cadaveriew Meadows Cemetery. But I digress, as is my inclination, from my point of what happens to bloggers when they desert their blogs.

Out of curiosity and fueled by an extreme case of insomnia (Left-handers are more prone to insomnia than are our right-handed counterparts, I learned recently. Left-handers are prone to a whole lot of misfortune as compared to our right-handed counterparts. Extending the discussion two steps further, my own mother conducted research on the topic of left-handed red-haired males. She has found that they are rarely within the average range on any psychoeducational measures. They're more prone to learning disabilities and behavioral problems in particular, but they're also more prone to unusually high IQs and savant-like talents. Having a red-haired left-handed  male child is a bit of a roll of the dice. You could end up with a prodigy of some sort, or you could end up with a brat with a severe case of the uglies, as in Bobby-Flay-ugly. I personally would choose to hold onto the dice and roll them over something a bit safer than a red-haired left-handed male child.) In my sleeplessness and boredom,  I googled "sarcasm BYU-Idaho" hoping to read a bit of snark related to one of my least favorite places in the entire world. Reading Knotty's blog reminded me of just how much I detest BYU-Idaho and everything connected to it in any way.

My twitter search led me to the blog of a person who either is or calls herself HaileyBusath. The lack of space between the apparent given name and surname  is not a typographical error on my part. It may have been one on HaileyBusath's part, or perhaps she intended to smash her first and last names together, or even perhaps her parents did it for her and recorded her name on her birth certificate as such. Or, on the other hand, if HaileyBusath is LDS [UPDATE: I read further into her profile information, and HaileyBusath is indeed LDS], which almost everyone who has been enrolled in BYU-Idaho for more than twelve hours is,  perhaps the name was miswritten on LDS church records. It is tradition on the paternal side of my extended family, or at least it happened that way once, that if a child's name is misspelled on LDS church records,  the  parents have the child's birth certificate amended to reflect how it is spelled on LDS church records because the LDS church is always right. I must say by way of a disclaimer that I have no way of knowing if this is any sort of official LDS policy or if the relatives who changed their child's name when a ward clerk misspelled it on church records are merely raving lunatics. It is highly probable that both possibilities are true and correct.

Anyway, HaileyBusath is the author of a now-defunct blog (How We Do at BYU-Idaho) that is, if possible, even more random and senseless than is this one.  And I pride myself on being both random and senseless in this blog.  Outdoing me on these counts is a noteworthy accomplishment. In her most recent posting from September of 2012 at that blog site, HaileyBusath scorns those who play the game Monopoly while divulging the sort of games that are played at BYU-Idaho. What is played at BYU-Idaho, according to HaileyBusath, is mind games. She wrote this in all seriousness as if to imply that anyone enrolled at BYU-Idaho is honestly in possession of a functioning mind. A person -- even a high school student, and we all know what a phase of complete and utter brilliance in our lives our high school years were -- would have to be a little off-kilter even to contemplate filling out an application to the school. Once a person arrived in Rexburg and beheld both the sight and site that is BYU-Idaho, he or she, if  owning a brain that as much as registered waves on an EEG sensor, would have run screaming  -- for or away from the hills as though being pursued by a rabid mountain lion -- within the first half-hour of being there. Anyone who lasted a week at the place, even under the threat of dismemberment or disinheritance,  would have to be shy a few marbles.

I personally have nothing against the game of Monopoly. My mom preferred that we play The Game of Life with its pro-college indoctrination agenda (last summer my Uncle Michael, upon seeing The Game of Life in my mom's game closet, asked if anyone had updated the game to allow for the long-term financial prognosis of college students who went into heavy debt to pursue impractical degrees which were useless in the job market and were then saddled with the task of paying off massive student loans on telemarketers' or fast food workers' salaries) but I've always enjoyed the cuttthroat competitive capitalistic facets of Monopoly. It is my opinion that  today's kids would do well to put away their electronic devices and play a few board games once in awhile (because we know they're not going to do anything so radical as to pick up a book and read it in their spare time). I hate to sound like some old geezer such as my dad when he complains about how tough kids had it back in his day (and my father is actually speaking the truth when he says he had a difficult childhood and youth, though not because of the era in which he grew up but because he had a half-witted-at-best troglodyte for a father; I've already been disinherited from anything I might have gotten upon death from that source, so I can say anything I wish to say about him with absolute impunity), but when I was a kid, board games were what we were allowed to do after finishing homework and extra reading (though I've always liked to read, so that part of it I would have done whether I had been told to or not), not what we did on bad-weather days when our parents finally got tired of us doing nothing but watching TV and playing electronic games. I've said enough about Monopoly, though. The Parker Brothers will have to pay me if they expect more in the way of a proper commercial endorsement for their product. And it [Monopoly] is not going to be played at BYU-Idaho regardless of the endorsement given by me or by anyone else, as the students there are too busy playing mind games with their incredibly high-functioning minds to trifle with Monopoly or any other board or card game.

I clicked on HaileyBusath's profile and found two additional blogs connected with her. One was "All the Hailey You Could Ever Want." Its most recent posting was dated November of 2011. The other linked blog was "Life Of a Student At BYU-Idaho." I received this message upon clicking on the link: Sorry, the blog you were looking for does not exist. However, the name lifeofastudentatbyui is available to register.

This is your golden opportunity! You could be the proud owner of your own site lifeofastudentatbyuI!
You could do whatever your heart desires with the site. You could turn it into an expose on how bare shoulders equate with nudity in the mind of at least one professor at BYUIdaho.  http://www.sltrib.com/home/4664710-155/bare-shoulders-earn-failing-grade-for  You could use the site as an artfully camouflaged home base to sell your contraband of choice. Unless the feds are a whole lot smarter than most of us give them credit for being, they probably would never think to look at a site with a name like LifeofaStudentAtByu-I when scouting for sites hawking illicit or otherwise unauthorized goods such as bootleg Vicodin or lactation porn artifacts (I didn't know such a thing as lactation porn existed until I just now googled "demented forms of porn." We all would do well to speak and write less and to google more. There's an entire world out there that most of us don't even know exists.), or, entirely hypothetically, Donald Trump's used condoms.  I said "hypothetically." The feds in the form of  the Secret Service or the FBI or the CIA or the IRS or whatever agencies over which Donald Trump will soon exercise some degree of  control do not need to hunt me down to interrogate me under bright lights and conditions of deprivation that fly in the face of the Geneva Convention. I know nothing about Donald Trump's used condoms or from what venue he sells them other than that, with his love of money, if there is anyone  who is sufficiently deranged to be willing to part with his or her dollars in exchange for the president elect's used condoms, Donald Trump would most likely be willing to accommodate the person.

With HaileyBusath's most recent blog sighting having been in September of 2012, she very likely has moved on to bigger and better things.  Most young people begin college at around the age of 18 give or take a year depending upon his or her state's kindergarten entrance date or whether or not he or she finished school early or late, I'm 22, so if HaileyBusath was attending BYU Idaho in the fall of 2011, she's probably at least my age. 22 is almost into official spinsterhood territory where Mormons are concerned. For those bothered by my obsession with marriage, please allow me to remind you than I am only half Mormon, and, as such, am referring to Mormons and their predilection for early marriage as opposed to alluding to any uneasiness about my own relationship and/or marriage  status or lack thereof.  Chances are that she is no longer HaileyBusath but HaileySomethingelse, likely bound to Mr. Somethingelse for time and all eternity [as opposed to the more mundane " 'til death do us part'," though, forboding as it sounds, seems these days to be no more binding than a few quick words uttered in front of a judge or magistrate] and quite possibly already having gotten a start on her Mormon prerequisite crop of crotch gnomes.

Then again, when the LDS church changed the minimum age for female missionaries from 21 to 19, HaileyBusath may have taken the bait. She may have served a mission in east LA and may have picked up enough Spanish that when she returned to university (assuming my nose doesn't grow half a foot for referring to BYU-Idaho as a university), she may have changed her degree emphasis from English Education to Spanish Education. Or perhaps she didn't serve a mission and chose instead to concentrate on finishing her education.  She may have become what the Mormon hierarchy fears most -- an empowered woman who can take care of herself and is not dependent upon any man for self-validation, though she will consider a relationship if and when both the time and the man are right for her.

The possibilities are endless, though. She may have discovered extreme Catholicism and perhaps became a cloistered nun who hits herself with leather cords while pleading for God's forgiveness in Latin. (If you've never seen the movie The Nun's Story, you really should.) Then again, perhaps she was the one person in ten thousand who opened the door when the Jehovah's Witnesses came knocking, and maybe she is now herself knocking on doors and handing out Watchtower pamphlets and using her newly-discovered religion to avoid jury duty. She may have become a pole dancer. Mormonism is what most of us who are not Mormons would consider to be an extreme religion. Extremists in religion (even when people are born into it) tend to go from one extreme to another. Not always is such the case, though. She may be a kindergarten teacher who volunteers at the SPCA during her free time. She may have married a Presbyterian who likes wine with dinner, and she may have discovered that she, too, likes to drink a bit of wine on occasion. She may be the Zumba instructor at your gym or at mine.

HaileyBusath, if you google yourself and come across this post, I would be very happy if you were to give a shout or leave a comment even if what you have to say to me after reading this may be ever so slightly on the hostile side.