Scourge of the Internet

The first boyfriend I ever had got married the other week.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not being overcome by feelings of sorrow or jealousy or a case of 'oh if only it were me's - he got married wearing a black shirt and a pink silk tie, with a pink silk handkerchief in his breast pocket - I am not sorry that I passed on that particular relationship.

What I am miffed about here is the fact that I know about it at all.
Because he found me and 'friended' me on facebook just in time to post a whole bunch of awful pictures of people I don't know doing the macarena as he and his elvis hair-do cut a cake with his new wife.
I know I am partially to blame, I could have just clicked the 'ignore' button and wandered away but there's something about all these damn sites that wakes the secret masochist/stalker in all of us.
We all want to know what happened to people we used to know, depending on the reason we don't know them any more we may be dancing up and down with our fingers crossed to find out that they're doing really badly, but I think overall we're better off not knowing.

Now anyone you have ever met who can remember your name can search for you and try to reintroduce themselves into your lives, you can do the same and the next thing you know you may be carefully sifting through their online profiles on a regular basis. Healthy!

The safest option would be to just opt out of whole deal but it's so addictive!
Even if you really did just join because it was the easiest way to keep up with people you'd met travelling yadda yadda yadda odds are you will either turn into twitchy-internet-stalker-person or you will be buried under an avalanche of special applications.

Add the 'werewolf' application, add the 'vampire' application, add the 'vampire vs werewolves vs robot monkey ninja pirates' application, join an interest group which hosts support conversations for people with issues about the schizophrenic nature of being both a vampire and a werewolf involved in a factional battle...

The simple and easy fun is suddenly getting more and more complicated and more and more of a hassle and I'm getting paranoid about what other forgotten shreds of my past are going to come searching for me.
Luckily I have a terrible memory and have been saved from the occasional drunken urge to do a broad spectrum search by the fact I sometimes think a person's name started with an R when it actually started with a T and so on and so forth.

The underlying problem is that we all want to know what is going on with other people but we don't necessarily want them to know what's going on with us. And whilst hearing a snippet of gossip from someone who knows someone who knows someone might kick off an interesting conversation, trawling the interwub all by yourself in the glow of your monitor just kicks off a whole raft of problems you really don't need.

One day I may manage to kick the facebook habit but until then I think I'll just go and draw some big curly villain mustaches on all the wedding photos with MS Paint.*



*Oh I know I sound all bitter but that's because we parted spectacularly in a fit of teenage passion and now a good eight years later he's come giggling up via the electronic medium and made me think about him again! I had other plans for those memory sectors of my brain dammit!

Your Internet Horoscope #4

It is not yet the season! For God's sake it is not yet the season to be jolly! Knock it off and come back when it is seemly!

Aries
If you try to swim in your loose change like Scrooge McDuck you'll just hurt yourself. Trust me.

Taurus
Feeling screwed up? Watch Jerry Springer. It'll make you feel better.

Gemini
You will be overcome by an overwhelming sense of dread and not know why until you realise that they're playing Christmas carols in the shops already.

Cancer
Acting like you know what you're doing is fine until someone asks you for advice. Bluff!

Leo
Trying to reconcile your horoscope and Chinese zodiac can give you a headache. As can combining aromatherapy and acupuncture.

Virgo
Put some time aside each day to relax. Preferably between the start of the work day and quitting time.

Libra
Your starsign isn't talking to your right now. You said something mean about it last time and it isn't in the mood to give you advice. Or warn you about the thing with the apples.

Scorpio
Never go out with someone with the same starsign as you. You think the same. They'll know what you're up to.

Sagittarius
Low GI is the new anti-oxidant. Vague nutritional concepts have never been so fashionable.

Capricorn
Has anyone ever told you that you have beautiful eyes?

Aquarius
Buying a high-powered telescope is NOT in keeping with the spirit of your restraining order.

Pisces
Never try to expect the unexpected. You feel like a complete tool when it catches you by surprise.

Behold My Secret Glory!

When you start to see the same handful of people popping up in different streets, different towns, different states, you start to understand how paranoids can believe they're living in their own Truman Show.
When they pop up in different countries you start worrying that you might be becoming a bit 'conspiracy theory' yourself.

It also plays wonderfully to your sense of self-importance. There's no apparent reason why these people should be following you so there must be something extraordinary about you that you just don't know about.

One wrong step later and you've got yourself convinced that you're the next Jesus Christ/Harry Potter/poor-goat-herd-turned-royalty, have attracted a devoted following in California and are able to live off the donations of the faithful before they become distracted by something shiny and scatter like startled chickens.

Broke, listless, alienated from former acquaintances due to their refusal to believe you the Messiah/a wizard/their liege, living in a cardboard box, you will at least be able to comfort yourself with the assurance that something is bound to happen sooner or later because this is your story and you are special and, like John Connor, you will rise from the rubble!

Sweet Temptation

He had practiced it, the way he moved his head, the slow easy smile, the way he brushed his fringe aside with feigned nervousness.

He was delicious and men and women alike flocked to him and he enticed them closer, like a predator playing lame.

He knew that they wanted him and he eased their reluctance, their misgivings, drew them in. And even as he dropped his eyes or staged a self-conscious laugh, his teeth flashed white in the darkness and his lips curved in a secret smile.

He gently herded their reactions, nudging and tugging until he had them. And even when they were ensnared, he let them maintain the illusion that they were leading as he controlled their every move.

He never played in the same place twice, though sometimes he would pass through to see the confused and worried glances his previous toys would throw him, wondering whether it was him or them, convinced that he had revealed to them something dark and raw inside themselves. And he would laugh silently and demurely look away before moving on to find a new haunt, a fresh toy, to open them up and take them apart and leave them to put themselves back together again as best as they could, and to radiate out into the world like ripples from his epicentre, shaking all they touched.

So, If A Pigeon Drops An Egg Onto A Hard Surface... Is That Avian Abortion?

There are two pigeons who live on my balcony and crap all over everything.
Being too kind-hearted to let my old Greek landlord do away with them, as he once offered to in his matter-of-fact way, I have as a side effect committed myself to an ever renewable cycle of crap cleaning.

Resigned to their presence I have even named them - Vanilla Ice of the snow white feathers and Speckled Jim, the dappled bird of mystery - but I will never feed them, there's quite enough crap already.

Pigeons aren't supposed to be overburdened with brains in the first place but these two... it's a miracle they manage to fly let alone anything else.
They've tried to lay four eggs to date that I know of: two on the hard unaccommodating surface of my bar *smash smash*, one on a slanted seat *roll + smash* and one - finally - in a nest that they cobbled together under the bar *disappeared*. Either something managed to make off with the egg or - considering a suspicious scattering of white feathers recently - one of the downstairs cats waited for the fresh meal to hatch.

So stupid they can't even breed and even bogans and hillbillies manage that.
Nevertheless, for some undefinable reason, I've got a soft spot for them. The pigeons that is, not the bogans or the hillbillies.
They aren't the typical grey and petrol-on-wet-asphalt examples of their kind, the ones who immediately make you think 'rats-with-wings' or 'oil slick'.
They are smooth-feathered and healthy. In flight they are graceful.

They may be too dumb to successfully reproduce but at least they're optimistic enough to try.
And I suppose it's good that someone is having wild, abandoned sex on my balcony, even if they do crap on it afterwards.
Each to their own.

Spin Cycle

I'm down at the local laundromat hoping that no one notices that I'm not wearing a bra. What with one thing and another I completely ran out by the time I made it down here.

There's a shaggy-haired man with a gold ring on each finger of his right hand which is so distracting that you almost completely miss his atrophied left hand, folded delicately back against the wrist. He hauls his clothes out of the drier, whistling and hoicks the washing basket up onto his hip with an easy movement. A gold tooth glints as he smiles at me.

A gentle giant of a boy is reading Robert Rankin and sneaking furtive, bespectacled glances about himself as the small woman who must be his mother keeps up a constant muttered stream about the quality of the machines, the state of the facilities and what dinner is likely to contain.

People wander in and out.

An upper middle class couple who have fallen on hard times sip their McCappuccinos as he reads the paper and she pats her garish neon-red dye-job.

A girl returns to claim her orphaned washing and rants to anyone who will listen about whoever dared to take her things out of a machine and dump them on top of it.

My machines finish.
One of my socks has gone missing - a sacrifice to the God of communal laundry.

Three By Three

This story was written to meet Erin Palette’s challenge to create something inspired by the sentence Witch children fallow the elder's footsteps which is just all sorts of awesome all by itself.

Just to clear up any confusion, in Australia biscuits can mean 'crackers' or 'cookies' and has nothing to do with those bready things Americans are talking about when they say 'biscuits and gravy'. Don't tell me it's confusing. How do you tell the difference between gas for the car and gas for the oven? Well there you go.

***

Three has always been a number of power; from the pagan religions and cults through to today's modern incarnations, even the larger more orthodox 'cults'.
The three aspects of the goddess: maiden, mother and crone.
The three faces of God: Yaweh, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
The neat way that 1 + 2 = 3, which is also the number that follows 2... Not quite as dogmatically significant but still kinda neat...

When the three women fell pregnant around the same time, no one thought very much about it.
There were a few jokes about the friskifying powers of spring and the good old fashioned tradition of 'making your own entertainment' but nothing was thought to be out of the ordinary.

When they began to swell at a surprising rate - pale haired Meg, dark skinned Sarah and fiery Janet - there was some comment but usually to the tune of badly judged jokes by their spouses which led to some fairly heated verbal smackdown but little else until the ultrasounds showed that one of... two of... all three of the women were carrying triplets.
Then talk began to flow.

"Just seems a little odd, doesn't it?"
"Not really. The government is putting fertility drugs in the water supplies,"
"Oh don't be silly,"
"They are! Birth rates have been dropping for years and this is the easiest way to make sure we replenish our own population without actually paying people to have more babies, which would just encourage the wrong sort anyway,"
"Are you going to get onto your damn immigration conspiracy theories again?"
"They're not conspiracy theories!"
"Oh for the love of God!"

Everyone liked to think of themselves as living in a small town - despite the fact that in a few years the edges of the city would reach out to gather them up and make them into an outlying suburb - and Father Mark was happy to play the part of the small town priest.
He rode a bicycle because people liked to see him wobbling along on it with his neatly ironed shirt and slacks and the somehow incongruous safety helmet.
He kept a neat front garden and a vegie patch out the back and spent a lot of time pottering around in them so that people could stop and have a chat over the fence.
He could even drop by and pay visits to parishioners and non-church goers alike for a chat and a cup of tea without ever making anyone feel as if he was sizing them up or trying to save their soul against their will.
He was a gentleman of the old school, he was of an older school than he seemed.
Meg, Sarah and Janet were all grateful for his pragmatic, measured words and the simple, bachelor-grade biscuits he would bring round as a gift. The recipe was basic but by virtue of many years of experimentation, Father Mark said, he had hit upon a mixture that was tasty nonetheless. He was right, it was.

When all three women went into labour on the same night, there was talk again but no one could really work themselves up into much of a tizzy about it. Sitting in front of the TV, passing comment on the event, it felt too Twilight Zone to think of it as anything other than a strange coincidence.
It wasn't as if it was the third day of the third month of a third year. It was the 14th of August. Not an especially portentous day as far as anyone could tell.
"Psychosomatic," said Belinda Chapman, who had taken one unit of Psychology in her first year of university and who was eager to show the breadth and depth of her knowledge to Sam Nicolls. Luckily for her, Sam was much more interested in the breadth and depth of other parts of Belinda.

In the early hours of the morning, in the maternity wards of the same city hospital, each woman gave birth to three small but healthy children.
Two girls and one boy to Sarah.
Two boys and one girl to Meg.
Two girls and one boy to Janet.
There was to be a story on the local news about multiple birth families and a film crew popped around a few days later to take some footage of the three new mothers and their children. But when the story was aired their time was cut to a few cutesy shots of the tired mothers cradling their babies to make way for more time watching the two sets of identical twins of a nearby town run around their school yard.

As the children grew and the new mothers became more adept at juggling the needs of three children apiece and herding them about, the locals became used to the sight of ridiculous multi-seat strollers, then small overactive children on those odd 'kiddie leads' and then just to the different women wandering about, each with an orbiting collection of kids; sometimes just their own, sometimes a mixture.
Given the situation it would have been stupid not to pool their resources and often Meg and Sarah would mind the brood whilst Janet braved the supermarket on their behalf or Sarah and Janet would sit and chat whilst Meg grabbed a few hours sleep and so on and so forth.
And always Father Mark would pop around for a chat and a cuppa and to leave a tin of his biscuits, which the children were always trying to get their hands on.
"You've got to tell me what you put in these, Mark," Sarah said one day when they were all sitting in the yard watching the four year olds run around and scream at shadows and pretend that the dog was a great bear.
"Oh no, you've got to let an old man have some secrets. I've precious little of the housekeeping arts mastered but I know how to make a batch of biscuits."
"Can you at least give me a hint?" Sarah persisted.
"It might be a touch of herbs or spices,"
"Like what?" Meg asked.
"Oh, mostly marijuana,"
He roared with laughter as Janet spluttered her tea and wiped tears from his face as the children looked around to see what was going on and then got on with their games.

The only primary school in town was Catholic but apart from the usual association with plaid this entailed, it didn't make a big deal of the fact. So when time came for the kids to all be sent out of the house and into their education that was where they all went.
And next door to the school Father Mark tended his garden and baked his biscuits and would nod to the children as they ran past his gate in a jumble, laughing and shouting on their way to school.

There was none of that 'mystical twin business', no knowing when another was in pain when they weren't there or reading each other's minds; but it was inevitable that the children would feel a bond. They had grown up together, spent so much time together that each felt themselves to be one of nine rather of one of three.
It was handy to have so many willing participants in re-enactments of favourite movies, in pitched battles to the death between pirates and whatever they decided was fighting the pirates today, and to play make-believe down the back of Meg's garden.
There was a hollow under a cluster of bushes where they could all fit, sitting cross-legged in a circle and murmuring to each other in the solemn, serious way of children everywhere engaged in rebuilding the mysteries of life from scratch and assigning themselves important duties in this new world order.
Father Mark would hear them chanting and stifling giggles as he wandered up the driveway to see their parents and he would smile to himself and laugh a little with them.

When Meg started making noises about finally clearing out the bottom of the yard the kids were up in arms and told her that she couldn't, that they were going to make their own garden, that Father Mark would show them how and that no one was allowed to wreck it!
When Meg raised an eyebrow and asked whether anyone had actually asked Father Mark about this the kids all just shrugged.
Father Mark said he'd be happy to give the kids some pointers and make sure that they didn't try to plant any giant's beanstalks. And he came around with some tools, some fertiliser and a tin of biscuits for the busy gardeners who were busy carefully setting up a small fence around their new garden, in front of the old bushes.

They grew some simple vegetables in rows with little herb plants dotted amongst and around them, some for the kitchen and some just for scent and flowers. For the girls mostly, Father Mark explained, because what little girl wouldn't like a bit of colour and life in a garden.
And he taught them how to tell when the vegetables were ripe so that they could proudly carry in baskets of fresh produce to their appropriately admiring parents.
And he taught them when to plant and when to pick from the smaller plants, some of the uses that herbs could be put to in the kitchen and home and the old names by which they had once been known.
And shooing Meg and Sarah out of the kitchen one day with a conspiratorial grin, he extracted double-pinky promises from each of the children and he taught them how to make his biscuits.
And periodically after that the children would take over one kitchen or another and the scent of baking never completely faded from any of the homes.

When the children were ten and the 'shake and bake' planned communities creeping out from the city were within plain eyesight, it was announced that a new freeway was to be built to help connect the city and it's ever spreading fiefdoms.
It was to cut through the last of the countryside between the city and the town and whilst the suspiciously enthusiastic local member of government assured them that it would bring fresh money to the economy and fresh opportunities to the community, the image in most people's minds was that of great semi-trailers belching black smoke and riding their airbrakes on their way past.

The surveyors turned up and had a few patches of bad luck. It rained for three weeks for the first time in over fifty years. The ground became boggy and impossible to negotiate.
One man set up a tripod and stepped back to get a bit of a feel for the angle it was on and watched it disappear into a forgotten mine shaft which had opened up just as he was back on firm land.
Small marsupials and rare birds thought to have left the area decades ago were found nesting, foraging and breeding all the way across the bushlands that the freeway was to cut through.
Protestors from the city hired buses and drove out to campaign against the freeway, bringing their signs and their chants. And Father Mark would set up a table in the school yard where the groups would gather before their marches and he dispensed cups of tea whilst the children trotted around with plates of biscuits, bright-faced and helpful. Janet, Meg and Sarah watched with indulgent smiles as their self-proclaimed little 'Greenies' did their bit to save the environment.

Under the pressure of mass public opinion, conservation laws and the eye of the Nation, the Premier announced the scrapping of the freeway plan and the unveiling of the new plan to resurface the existing highway and add two more lanes, which would barely impact on the current environmental conditions at all whilst still providing the increase in services that he had promised to the people he was proud to serve.

When it came time for the kids to start high school in the next town over, Meg, Sarah and Janet fussed a little, bought them their new uniforms and sent them off on the bus. And when Father Mark went by on his bike, he stopped a moment at each house to share their wonder at how quickly children grow up and to reassure them that the kids would be just fine with this new phase in their lives.

There was a bit of a to do some time later when Brian Marsden, an unimaginative but persistent jerk-butt - as one of the girls put it - from the new school managed to fall down a flight of stairs all by himself in full view of the playground and in the process broke a leg, an arm and gathered himself a concussion.
Meg, Sarah and Janet tried tactfully to make sure that the kids weren't upset by this turn of events and independently tried to start one of those 'talks' that adults give to children when they're not quite sure what point they're trying to make but they're sure that one should be made.
The kids said that they were fine, Brian Marsden was a jerk-butt and no one minded that he had fallen down the stairs. And Meg's daughter didn't come home with red eyes or blotchy cheeks any more.
Father Mark dropped around and had a quiet word on how they were all God's children and should care for each other and not be glad or indifferent to hear of someone else's suffering, even if they were a jerk-butt.
No one else fell down any stairs after that but Brian Marsden kept his distance all the same.

And the town rolled on as the children grew and the city crept no closer as there was now a National park between it and the town. The small local businesses did well enough for themselves that people could stay and raise their families and not have to commute or move for work. And Father Mark wobbled around on his bicycle and worked in his front garden and every now and then one of the girls would pop around and bring him a tin of biscuits and he would laugh and thank them.

All too soon the kids were getting their Learner's Permits and taking it in turns to pester their parents for driving practice around the streets of the town and out onto the carefully maintained highway, making plans for what they would do when they got out of school, talking of travel, of study.
And Father Mark knew that it wouldn't be long until the kids scattered, went out into the world as young adults and started to find their own way. But it had been a good sixteen years and he had at least another two before the twin spirits of 'progress' and 'change' would begin to creep back in to this little corner of the world which he had cosseted and protected.
And wherever the children went they would carry a little of his knowledge with them and one day, when each of them found a place to settle down, they could plant a little garden, even just a few pots of a few different herbs and they could teach their children to make biscuits.