It has become a cliche that the artist suffers for his art. He'll endure pain, sadness and revulsion, all in the name of his one true calling. Sometimes I feel like there's an art to blogging, a certain set of nuanced skills one can apply to this virtual industry that goes beyond simple method. But then that fateful day comes when all would-be artists are challenged by the very nature of what they do. For those of us who work on the Internet, the limit always has been and always will be porn. Readers, I cannot call myself a blogging artist because I have discovered the edge of my will to cover Internet content and I refuse to go over it.

In Net Insanity's Degradation Station feature, the intent is to analyze the finer points of niche porn, those websites that cater to a very small portion of the overall human population, ostensibly to tickle whatever sick fancy they're incapable of or ashamed to pursue in the real world. It's pointless to either judge or attempt to understand why any of this stuff turns people on. Human sexuality is an inexplicable mess of crossed wires and unlikely associations. Instead, it's better just to firmly draw the line between enthusiasts and, well, everyone else. In most cases I can do that. Today, I went in search of some truly repellent stuff and found that I just couldn't go deep enough to have anything substantive to say about it.

Being in the middle of a fight with a wretched virus myself, I decided to see what the sickness fetishists out there had to offer in terms of Internet content. I'm certainly not naive enough to believe that there just might not be disease porn out there. It was simply a matter of how to find it, not whether or not it exists. After tooling around for a little while in fruitlessness, I discovered that the gateway to gross-out porn is indeed regurgitation.

I went in with good intentions. Truly I did, readers. I thought I could find some silly site featuring scantily clad women blowing their noses and doing uncouth things with thermometers. In the woefully misinformed fantasy version of the Internet I let myself imagine, there would be at least a few silly, mildly off-putting sites just ripe for ridicule. I would discover only too late that these wrong ideas are the equivalent of softcore to the disease fetish scene, and the Internet abhors the softcore. In just a few ill-advised clicks I would find myself awash in a full ring of sites that left no bodily fluid in the realm of the mysterious or sacred. In proportions larger than any realistic concept, the ugliness flowed.

Yet my comprehension grew no fuller. Experience ought to yield knowledge, but such was not the case for me today. My own unwillingness to delve deeper into these fetishes left me in my current state; a square, a traditionalist, an outsider of the Internet. So, I can't call myself a blog artist, at least not in good conscience. I come away from this experience with the slight consolation that so much time in this field hasn't yet changed me.