"BLOGGING SAVED MY LIFE" - not

One of the more infamous Blogfathers once declared "BLOGGING SAVED MY LIFE."

It allowed him to post infantile dirty jokes, write death threats, and have a head as inflated as his belly thanks to "nice comments" he got for "sharing" Beach Boys albums.

And even as the World Trade Center fell, his mother died, his make-believe Internet "friends" deserted him with hatred and disgust, he built more and more blogs, feuded more viciously, invented bizarre illnesses and death rumors about himself and others, and seemed to spend every waking hour on-line, wasting his time and doing nothing but damage.

The mantra never changed:

"BLOGGING SAVED MY LIFE."

I'd mention his name, but for fuck's sake, this IS the Internet. Who knows. It might actually have been Cal E. Fornia. Or Martin Manley.

WHO? Martin Manley: take a look at that sappy face.

Martin was one sick motherfucker. But he denied it, right up to the time he pulled the trigger. He left his blogs and website behind, but, he envisioned, he thought he created a legend, one that might produce years worth of "nice comments" to come.

Abridged, the CNN report:

Martin Manley hated waking up early, but on his 60th birthday he did -- or more likely, never went to sleep the night before. At 5 a.m. he entered a police station parking lot in a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas, walked to a spot beneath a tree on its far south end and dialed 911.He said ""I want to report a suicide at the south end of the parking lot of the Overland Park Police Station at 123rd and Metcalf." Then, the blogger and former sports reporter for the Kansas City Star pulled out his Saturday Night Special, a .380 pistol, and shot himself in the head.

The statistics -- Manley loved statistics; his "efficiency index" is still used by the NBA to rate players -- tell us that about 150 other Americans committed suicide that day, that somewhere around 38,000 of them will do so this year. But chances are none of those people provided the world such a detailed picture of the event, the when, where, why and how of it. Because for more than a year, Manley had been secretly building a sweeping, intricate website that meticulously explained just that. He set it to publish later on the day he died.

"Let me ask you a question," Manley wrote on his website, which he divided into 34 categories and 44 subcategories. "After you die, you can be remembered by a few-line obituary for one day in a newspaper when you're too old to matter to anyone anyway ... OR you can be remembered for years by a site such as this. That was my choice and I chose the obvious."

Sharing death on the Web is not new. In the early days of the Internet, reports sprung up of "Internet suicide clubs," built around websites and chat rooms. Manley wrote that he studied the pros and cons of various methods of suicide online.

Lawrence Calhoun, a professor of psychology, said the reasons people want to share their deaths on the Web appear to be, in some ways, common sense. "First, young people have grown up using social media, so for them that is just a natural way of communicating with other people," he told CNN. "Second, it is likely to reach a lot more people than simply leaving one hard copy note.The Web seems to have been perfectly tailored for someone like Manley. He reveled in spending long hours alone at the computer, poring over data and sharing his findings with folks in far-flung places who were similarly interested in the esoteric minutia of crunching sports numbers.

"I have communicated with hundreds of readers over the years and I've made a lot of internet friends," Manley wrote in his final blog post. "I'm impressed that there really are intelligent people still left out there considering the decline in our educational standards." He claimed to be in good health and happy. He was financially sound, with an investment in gold worth $200,000. He said he wasn't depressed -- "anyone who says I was is either ignorant or a liar" -- and sang in his church choir, enjoyed hobbies like his monthly poker game and claimed to not be lonely. He feared the infirmity of old age and simply wanted to go out at a time and in a manner of his own choosing. "I didn't want to die," he wrote. "Do I want to live as long as humanly possible OR do I want to control the time and manner and circumstances of my death?"

In the days afterward, some observers saw other factors. Manley was twice divorced. He had no children. His parents had both died: his mother in 2002, then his father in 2007. He had one sister and one brother and neither lived nearby or visited much. "Well maybe he needed help, but he would never have admitted it or accepted it," his sister, Barbie Flick, wrote on a memorial site set up for him by a friend. "As far as lonely -- I believe that everyone who knew Martin, very much enjoyed his company. He just really enjoyed being alone and working on his blog or researching this or that."

A unique and quirky man, he ate one meal a day, sometimes nothing at all, and had "consistently inconsistent" sleep habits. At one point, he experimented with staying awake 36 hours at a time, then sleeping for 12. He had a collection of 25 fedora hats, and boasted about wearing the same pair of $12 Wal-Mart shoes for 12 years. He had a collection of more than 1,000 movies on VHS tape, along with a computer database that would sort them by title, rating, year and genre. (He had his own rating system for them, too. He only handed out 21 perfect "10" scores over the years and his absolute favorite film was the 1986 adaptation of "Little Shop of Horrors."

I think the original "Little Shop of Horrors" is much better than the musical version, but some things are hardly worth blogging about. They're not gonna save your life.