Today's New York contained one of the most self-indulgent articles ever written. It was by James Cramer and it was, of course, about James Cramer. Could Gawker do better? We naturally turn to look inward. It was editor Alex Balk who came up with some answers.

At some point in the past few months, I became a polarizing figure. True, I've never led what you'd call a quiet life. You could say I was born to write posts. After a quick stint at blogspot in the early-aughts, I struck it poor posting for myself and started my own self-obsessed blog in 2003, which was just truly an emotional roller-coaster for anyone who tried to read it. I retired from my site at some point in 2004 and sat on my ass for a while, until I started it up again six months later. But in July 2006, things started to get crazy.

I'd decided I wanted to leave my day job to do a different kind of job—one where I could sit on my ass in my underwear drinking bourbon all day while expressing my innate insanity, in all its glory, to more than just frightened buffalo wing deliverymen. Over the objections of just about everyone at Gawker, Lockhart Steele green-lighted the idea after deciding, what the fuck, he was leaving in a year, who gave a shit if I brought the whole thing crashing down. I debuted that month. On the blog, I say stupid things; in the office, I yell at my co-workers with alarming frequency, and occasionally come to the office in a diaper or jump into a pile of magazines to illustrate the how ridiculous blogging is.

God knows why, but there seems to be a market for this kind of idiocy. Let's call it a niche market: Statistics show that for every person who likes what I do, there are a dozen who simply do not. I believe that they hate me for it, instead of simply not being interested. Balk posts have spawned legions of haters, people who write about the posts and my character in really negative, sometimes pretty nasty ways. These people accuse me of being a clown or an idiot. Usually, I agree with them. When people ask to be Facebook friends, I instantly hate myself. Half the time I don't believe I even deserve to be allowed to blog, and the other half I spend believing that I really don't deserve a blog. People also accuse me of being irresponsible or giving bad advice. I agree with that. Some of them have even questioned my integrity recently. That I find absurd.

As a 34-year-old alcoholic gone to seed, and a guy whose only big interests are alcohol and blowjobs, I find it incredible that I could be employed at all, let alone controversial to the few people who read me. It is a mystery to me that I am so hated by anyone outside myself and my immediate family, and that hate consumes my imagination—although I'm pretty sure writing an entire post focused on myself, like I'm doing right now, can only push more people into the hate column. When I wrote my first book, Confessions of a Drink Addict, a disgruntled former co-worker came out with his own book about me at roughly the same time. I can't remember who, but one of the funniest reviewers asked why the heck there was even one book out about Alex Balk, let alone two! I'm not usually one to go in for humility, but this is the kind of question I find myself asking a lot lately. Don't get me wrong: I hate doing my blog and consider it a success, but that's basically because Joshua David Stein does all the heavy lifting. And yet it feels like there are as mean comments written about me as there are about a woman like Emily Gould, who is much more controversial than I am, talks about more important things, and has much more expressive eyebrows. Maybe it just feels this way to me because so many of the comments written about me are negative (and I'm the one noticing), but it seems as if I get a disproportionate amount of comment coverage.

No one with a blog who attacks people and magazines as relentlessly as I do has any right to complain about this, but don't you think the whole thing is a little strange? Why do people care so much about this Balk bozo? Why do so many people seem to enjoy watching me post like a lunatic on the internets, and what the heck are so many young people doing reading a 34-year-old man parody retarded magazine self-justifications? I'm not cool or charismatic, but those old men at the end of the bar all yell "motherfucker" and mutter incomprehensibly when I make my big entrance. This cannot be just because I make Nick Denton infinitesimal amounts of money, or because I show babies getting kicked in Time Square on the blog sometimes. Something bigger is going on.

Here's the deal: I'm fearless. Or wait, more likely, full of fear. One of those two. One way or the other, I think people appreciate the fact that every morning I go out and put my head right back in the bowl of Adderall and string together a series of barely-coherent sentences that may or may not (but usually do) contain the word "douchebag." A lot of bloggers shy away from making definitive pronouncements concerning things they know nothing about because it's inherently risky. They're afraid of writing something and then being really, demonstrably wrong. When you write something in the public eye, especially when you do it five days a week like I do, getting some of them wrong is not a risk, it's a certainty. Being wrong occasionally is simply the price of ever being right. You just have to be tough or foolish enough to tolerate the public humiliation. Or, you know, not give a shit. Another thing I do that no one else does is admit my mistakes. Every Thursday, I reserve a segment of personal time for owning up to the posts I get wrong and trying to learn from my errors. Sure, you may not see it, but I do it. When I blow a call, I joke that such a bad correction rate drives me to sipping cheap blended Scotch on my dirty linoleum floor at home; but that's plain false. It's cheap bourbon.

For the people who still can't stand me, anything I do, or what I claim to stand for, I can offer only one thing. Despite the fact that this is a dead-end job and I have no prospect for future employment and I spent an hour simply reading the absurd James Cramer article upon which this thing is based, I remain completely and utterly repulsive to myself. Which is to say I'm still here at Gawker, one month shy of a goddamned year. Please, please, please, someone do something.

Cramer vs. Cramer [NYM]