Sad to say, but he's a jackass, that old friend of mine.
Still, out of a paleolithic sense of loyalty, I agreed to create a MySpace account when he asked me to. "So you can see my page" he said.
Sure jackass, sure.
I'm not perfect, far from it. Like you, I'm beset by lemon scented fears and bitter tasting loathings. Were I a better person, more like Siddartha or Christ or Angelina Jolie (who, in centuries to come, will be remembered as a combination saint and monster. "Be good" parents will warn their children "or Angelina will holographically appear and spirit you away. She'll change your name to something Latin or French or French Latin or Elvish as is the way of her people, the celebmutants...") I would look upon MySpace with compassion, with equipoise, with loving kindness.
But I don't. No Buttons, I do not.
"Janeth wants to be your friend!" the email's subject happily read.
Janeth? Was she a time traveling Elizabethean? Or Amish? Janeth wants to be my friend. These messages - friend requests - show up in the inbox from time to time. If my neglected MySpace page was crisp - if, instead of featuring only a jpeg of "Napoleon Crossing the Alps" and something borrowed from Kafka's diary ("..today I told Milena I could no longer bear to see her..."), it sported images of leggy Jersey girls spilling tall glassed, red colored drinks on their t-shirts and me at all of yesterday's parties, partying, or I was in a band, or talked about music...the requests would be mostly genuine.
But when your MySpace page is as magnificently desolate as the Martian dust sea of Mare Tyrrhenum, you tend to attract a less sincerely intended sort of "friend".
I logged on and browsed to 'Janeth's' page. Florida-based Janeth (so much of this comes from Florida, it seems), loves to travel and loves collecting "fuckbuddies". Well okay, those sound like alright hobbies; certainly cheaper and less frustrating than trying to train house cats to mow the lawn or pilot cat sized fighter jets. Still, I think Janeth is pursuing something else besides frequent flyer mile enabled fun-sex. I detect an effective marketing technique, one I've seen before:
Step One. Find the desert islanders (in Net terms) Step Two. Hint. Innuendo. Suggestion. Step Three. Profit!
Lord knows I may be wrong - I'm wrong almost every minute of every day about something...fortunately, Earth is filled with people who're eager to point out this wrongtasticness with nearly orgasmic glee - but I think what Janeth is targeting is loneliness/horniness/gullibility and in that order.
Here's a segue....
When people - or Americans anyway - write about sex workers and allied tradespeople, they usually talk about abuses, evils, 'gazes', morals and desire, healthy and otherwise. But almost no one, I think, talks about loneliness which is surely one of the prime movers unmoved.
Oh look, I've grown bored so now this ends.
Here's some music, a reinterpretation of a postmodern classic:
I feel stupid, and contagious...here we are now, entertain us!
<http://monroelab.net/audio/Rethink_Teen_Spirit.mp3>
Yours in Scientismic Service
.d.