11:22 a.m. I spent several long hours last night going through my August journal entries online. With a jaundiced eye and the proverbial fine-toothed comb, I was looking for errors, missteps, things that might offend because of unintentional slapdashed sloppiness. There was a mistake in each and every one of my days. Some egregious, some insignificant, all noticeable. You really end up hanging out there sometimes, without the friendly help of an editor or the editorial help of a friend. You can often look like a morone. Your jocks fall flat. And the layout varies from browser to monitor and so what looks nice when you shoot it out there can often go splat when it hits the opposing screen.

So, in advance of sending this piece out four your daily perusal, I apologize in advance. There will be a sliding scale of errors, depending on how close to the date on the headline you are actually reading this. Maybe a year from now this web page will be perfect. Maybe a year from now I will be perfect, or you will be. Until then, we must be try to be humble and kind to one another.

You have to develop priorities. I want to make sure my writing is accurate first, or somewhere near what I was thinking, and then I check later when there's less web traffic to see if the layout has come across, and then finally I check to make sure the links are still working. I am a born nit-picker, and I usually find a whole lot of nits.

But in civilized society you're only allowed to pick the nits off your own shabby carcass or that of your children or pets or spouse, if you have any. Even then, you have to be somewhat ginger or you will get nipped or smacked. You have to pick your battles as carefully as you pick your nits.

Which is why I am so fascinated, in something of a train-wreck unhealthy gawking way, as the journal writers who are also participants of the various mailings lists go at one another. All known laws of civility, established in good faith to keep the piece and to keep people from tearing each other to pieces, are thrown to the winds when people are hiding behind their modems.

Tempers flare and nerves are raw. People have axes to grind and fish to fry in their real lives, I suppose, and maybe they feel impotent out there among the flesh and bloods. So they take their mousy paws and pad over to their keyboards and pound the living daylights out of whatever poor sap happens to be passing by asking for directions.

I've seen people excoriated for their spelling errors, their choice of chicken wings over green beans, their journal subject matter and tone of voice, their choice of profession and politician and of course, their taste in all things relating to CDs. You wonder about the critics who are so sure and so strict in all things relating to lives other than their own. What do they really look like and how do they sound when they emerge from their darkened computer nooks and crannies?

Are they ugly beyond comprehension? Do they smell so bad that ordinary people catch their breath and wipe away tears? Do they sound like shells being scratched across the blackboard? You wonder. Do they sit in the background at parties and grind nasty things into the carpet? Do they look down when you talk to them and look away if you try to shake hands? Do they pick at unpleasant parts of themselves and do unmentionable things with the residue until you turn away?

You have to wonder.

I will never understand why people spew misery as they go through life, leaving a slimy trail of woe as their sole record of existence. Sure, sure. I've read the books. I know the long view -- that these poor souls are in such emotional pain they just can't help it. Give us all a break. I've even been to the funerals of a few of them, looked at the blessedly closed caskets and basked in the blissful silence of their stilled anger and wondered if they've -- finally -- reached a place where the light dawns and they figure out their petty problems and they have -- finally -- for heaven's sake, just shut the hell up.

Heaven and hell. Every single solitary story of life-after-death that people bring from the brink involves looking back on their lives and being brought to task for making other people feel bad. One lady talks about seeing herself at five, grabbing an Easter basket away from a sibling. A man is suddenly face to face with the person he'd belittled and mocked just for fun. Soul-killing, it's called, in the literature.

It's another version of cowardly glass-sealed road-rage. Behind the keyboard of a computer, you get to feeling anonymous and somewhat untouchable. You are an avatar of righteousness wearing spike heels and somewhere out there is a weasly squirming mouse that needs to be crushed. When you don't feel alive, you want everyone around you dead.

I appreciate that. I feel your pain. Hell, I feel my pain ... especially when you're standing on my tale.

Tomorrow? Hang around.