unbearable whiteness
My energy must be closed, for the past decade or so. I used to be the go-to for freaky stories because I would always attract the loonies. Perhaps I was just desperately drawing treacle from an ancient tree. Now I'm one of those people who can blend in the background easily without being noticed. I should start a thievery campaign I suppose.
I just finished checking in on a blog of a friend-of-a-friend I check in on once every few years, and it looks like it stopped three years ago. No amount of sleuthing turns up something new, so maybe he's become corporate, or boring, or both. But the blog has such crazy stories of his day-to-day existence that he must either be lying, or it's a big, forced performance art piece. It may literally be the latter, actually.
So of course I went down that route, of Facebook sleuthing, just because the mind wanders. And here's the hilarious part: One of the last entries catalogues an internet meet-up that turned into an intrastate semi-relationship that took the course of a few months to dissolve. Not many details on the person, but the person is in a profession that shouldn't be letting random people poke around, and the blogger got to poke around a lot. I actually thought it was all made up, and the internet hook-up was just another classmate or something posing.
So I start clicking around, see that the hook-up likes to visits a bunch of places I live near, and that at one point someone probably just legal started making an appearance in photos, shrouded in a messy afro. Just two photos amongst hundreds, looks like they were committed to each other even if just for a few short months, because family members would comment on the afro dude like he was family.
Wait a minute. I've interacted with afro dude before. Years ago. Right after he graduated high school. And I know details about him that would probably enrage the 2nd degree hook-up person for the same reason the aforementioned blogger was upsetting, in his character, to the stoic masculinity of the hook-up, and the reason for the first break up.
I don't really want this career, but most likely if I were tested for best fits in a high school counselor's office, the beeping machine would spit out ticker tape that I should be an investigator for Cheaters, or a show about finding a long-lost crush. I'm too good at finding connections between people on the internet, and I have an elephantine memory for 15-year-old selfies taken for AOL and Friendster and crap. To this day I don't think random passersby understand my grin when I make the connection, "Oh, I've seen your anus, and your face, separately posted on the internet, by you." People shouldn't post those combinations, even if separated by several degrees and years, but they do, and I always figure it out.
So friend-of-friend blogger has a short-lived internet hook-up in a profession that requires discretion and years later hooks-up with a fresh-out-of-high-school person I spoke with once in my life, and here I am grinning that I made the connection, and nobody will ever understand. Meanwhile, they're cataloguing their otherwise-boring adventures that create that distance of permanent record and summary that makes it seem like their whole lives must be adventure after adventure, and their energy must be turned on to attract such things, and nobody from my past is reading this thinking I'm having a grand old time.
Which is why the internet is a nightmare for mental archivists.
I suppose they all figured it out in the end.
I just finished checking in on a blog of a friend-of-a-friend I check in on once every few years, and it looks like it stopped three years ago. No amount of sleuthing turns up something new, so maybe he's become corporate, or boring, or both. But the blog has such crazy stories of his day-to-day existence that he must either be lying, or it's a big, forced performance art piece. It may literally be the latter, actually.
So of course I went down that route, of Facebook sleuthing, just because the mind wanders. And here's the hilarious part: One of the last entries catalogues an internet meet-up that turned into an intrastate semi-relationship that took the course of a few months to dissolve. Not many details on the person, but the person is in a profession that shouldn't be letting random people poke around, and the blogger got to poke around a lot. I actually thought it was all made up, and the internet hook-up was just another classmate or something posing.
So I start clicking around, see that the hook-up likes to visits a bunch of places I live near, and that at one point someone probably just legal started making an appearance in photos, shrouded in a messy afro. Just two photos amongst hundreds, looks like they were committed to each other even if just for a few short months, because family members would comment on the afro dude like he was family.
Wait a minute. I've interacted with afro dude before. Years ago. Right after he graduated high school. And I know details about him that would probably enrage the 2nd degree hook-up person for the same reason the aforementioned blogger was upsetting, in his character, to the stoic masculinity of the hook-up, and the reason for the first break up.
I don't really want this career, but most likely if I were tested for best fits in a high school counselor's office, the beeping machine would spit out ticker tape that I should be an investigator for Cheaters, or a show about finding a long-lost crush. I'm too good at finding connections between people on the internet, and I have an elephantine memory for 15-year-old selfies taken for AOL and Friendster and crap. To this day I don't think random passersby understand my grin when I make the connection, "Oh, I've seen your anus, and your face, separately posted on the internet, by you." People shouldn't post those combinations, even if separated by several degrees and years, but they do, and I always figure it out.
So friend-of-friend blogger has a short-lived internet hook-up in a profession that requires discretion and years later hooks-up with a fresh-out-of-high-school person I spoke with once in my life, and here I am grinning that I made the connection, and nobody will ever understand. Meanwhile, they're cataloguing their otherwise-boring adventures that create that distance of permanent record and summary that makes it seem like their whole lives must be adventure after adventure, and their energy must be turned on to attract such things, and nobody from my past is reading this thinking I'm having a grand old time.
Which is why the internet is a nightmare for mental archivists.
I suppose they all figured it out in the end.