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“Hi,” the woman said to me brightly with a smile. “How are you?”

I looked at her and my eyes met hers. I didn’t recognize this beautiful stranger. I had been lost in my own thoughts as I walked through the store, so I hadn’t even noticed her. I smiled back and returned a friendly greeting and that was it.

There was nothing important about the exchange, but it made me feel good as I realized once again what was going on.

I’ve recently shed 70 pounds. I’m not yet down to the weight I’d like to be, but I look much different from how I looked four or five months ago. I’ve struggled with my weight for years, so I’ve seen this pattern enough to understand what had just happened with the woman in the store, even though she almost certainly didn’t understand it herself.

When I’m as overweight as I was last spring, I become invisible to attractive young women in public. I don’t mean I’m treated badly. I just mean that unless I have reason to initiate contact — and she has reason to respond — I might as well not be there. I’m not someone she wants to talk with.

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Ever since I started this site five and a half years ago, I’ve struggled with the issue of what to do about public comments. I used to allow them — because it seemed like the obvious thing which almost every website does — but I was frustrated with the level of discourse.

I’ve had many interesting and useful comments from people — not all of which I even agree with, but which I found useful to the discussion — but a ridiculous percentage of comments have come from angry people who are simply anonymous cowards causing trouble by screaming at people on the Internet.

Some of the worst offenders have been people I’ve generally liked and even agreed with, but something about anonymous online commenting leads a lot of people to become nasty in ways they’d never be in real life.

For a long time, I put up with that, thinking it was a tradeoff I was willing to make. I slowly became more and more uncomfortable with that tradeoff, though.

Since I’m rarely writing about politics these days, my articles don’t attract the fairly regular vitriol they once did, but I’ve simply reached the point I’m not willing to tolerate any of it. (And, of course, I have also spent a ridiculous amount of time deleting spam comments which you guys have never even seen.)

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Autumn is about death and dying. It’s about clearing away things which are finished — before a period of dormancy and healing can give way to rebirth.

See those yellow leaves which are slowly developing brown spots and shriveling? I’ve been watching those leaves and the ones around them for about seven or eight months.

A limb of a huge tree has a tiny offshoot which hangs near my front porch. Every time I leave the house, I see those leaves. I watched them grow from nothing last spring. As the weather started turning warm and everything in nature started coming alive again, I saw tiny shoots of green that turned into beautiful shade for my yard.

By summer, they were beautifully lush and green. They joined with thousands and thousands of other leaves to form an amazing canopy — seemingly just for me — and they were a delight to see each time I stepped outside and started down my steps.

But this is what they look like Sunday afternoon. Are they already dead? Are they still alive but slowly dying? I don’t know. All I know is that nature dictates that what was once bright green new life has once again gone through a cycle of amazing vibrancy and is now heading toward death.

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