Post by billthebutcher on Sept 13, 2010 13:06:18 GMT -5
Do you still remember your first days on the net, when it was a thing shining and new, and friends online were few and so precious that you were ready to forgive them their obvious bullshit because (assuming you were lonely and intellectually frustrated, like I was at the time) you needed them to feel as though you mattered?
You do? Good.
Way back when the first Homo sapiens were trudging out of Africa to enslave the earth, i.e., 2001, and I was dredging outlaw motorcycle club sites, I got an email from a woman who found me on one of those sites. She said her name was Tina Marie (for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, I soon came to the conclusion that it wasn’t her real name) and she was from someplace called Jax in Florida, which I assume actually exists.
Anyway, over a period of a couple of years, this Tina and I formed a casual friendship over a series of desultory emails. It was sort of like the pen-pals we used to have back in the Homo erectus days, only slightly faster. And long before it ended, with her “moving away”, I’d decided she was quite literally insane.
Tina, how did I come to this conclusion about thee? Let me count the ways.
She started off by claiming that she was on a shared computer, so naturally the email address (I'll call it orbisonpool@aol.com here, which is almost what it was) too was shared. I went, you know, Huh? at that but quite frankly had better things to do with my time than point it out (I came across a similar thing recently on Multiply where a former contact was posting photos from email forwards and pretending they were of her family, but that’s another story).
Then she, Tina I mean, said that outlaw biker and Hells Angels chief Ralph “Sonny” Barger was her dad. How did she know that? Well...she just knew. She had, she said, demanded a blood test for DNA identification and Barger, whom she called “daddy” in her mails, had turned her down. Quelle horreur! I mean, if a random woman mails me claiming she is my daughter, I’d just totally send over a sample of my blood so, y’know, she could settle her doubts. Wouldn’t you?
No? I thought so.
Well, it went on from there. The next thing I knew, Sonny Barger’s then wife Noel (or Noelle, whichever spelling suits your fancy) began sending our heroine viruses. Such was the devastating effect of one of these viruses that her computer could only display and type italics! It had to be, you know, just completely reprogrammed! And here I was wondering why she even bloody opened Noel(le) Barger’s e-mail attachments in the first place.
Then there was the time she was reminiscing about her past and how she was driving her car too fast down a hill, the brake failed, and there at the bottom was this narrow bridge with a truck coming the other way, and she was sure she’d die and...she totally drove harmlessly through the truck and out free the other side! God was saving her for something, man! I assume that “something” was to harass the hell out of Sonny Barger, who, being a career criminal, probably deserved it.
And then again there was the great occasion when she was discovered unconscious, and someone called Karen emailed me from Tina’s email address asking if I’d had any clue who might have attacked her. I said it might be her husband, since she’d been griping about him. This Karen then said they were examining her computer for clues. Her computer? I thought she was on a shared computer? By that time, of course, I had pretty much decided Tina Marie and this Karen were the same person, so I wasn’t at all surprised when she recovered consciousness two days afterwards without any ill effects.
Also, I recall the famous occasion when she sent me a photo of herself. It was shot from far across some kind of large room, with a Christmas tree in the foreground, and all you could see was an overexposed white face, almost featureless, surmounted by a frizzled mass of reddish hair. Hell, it could have been Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris with a shave for all I could make out.
She left my life sometime during 2003, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, which she decided to oppose after discovering that I opposed it. The excuse for leaving was that she had decided to divorce her hubby and move away from home, which also meant moving away from the shared computer. I guess Karen had taken a back seat. By that time, anyway, I’d moved far, far on.
I think I forgot to mention that she was a racist as well, something I found out fairly late. Strangest of all was that she was, it seemed, only anti-black. She was fine with Indians or Arabs or other heathen. It was only the blacks whom she couldn’t stand.
Seven years later, I wonder just how crazy she was, and what the hell she thought she was doing.
Has anyone any memories along similar lines?
You do? Good.
Way back when the first Homo sapiens were trudging out of Africa to enslave the earth, i.e., 2001, and I was dredging outlaw motorcycle club sites, I got an email from a woman who found me on one of those sites. She said her name was Tina Marie (for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, I soon came to the conclusion that it wasn’t her real name) and she was from someplace called Jax in Florida, which I assume actually exists.
Anyway, over a period of a couple of years, this Tina and I formed a casual friendship over a series of desultory emails. It was sort of like the pen-pals we used to have back in the Homo erectus days, only slightly faster. And long before it ended, with her “moving away”, I’d decided she was quite literally insane.
Tina, how did I come to this conclusion about thee? Let me count the ways.
She started off by claiming that she was on a shared computer, so naturally the email address (I'll call it orbisonpool@aol.com here, which is almost what it was) too was shared. I went, you know, Huh? at that but quite frankly had better things to do with my time than point it out (I came across a similar thing recently on Multiply where a former contact was posting photos from email forwards and pretending they were of her family, but that’s another story).
Then she, Tina I mean, said that outlaw biker and Hells Angels chief Ralph “Sonny” Barger was her dad. How did she know that? Well...she just knew. She had, she said, demanded a blood test for DNA identification and Barger, whom she called “daddy” in her mails, had turned her down. Quelle horreur! I mean, if a random woman mails me claiming she is my daughter, I’d just totally send over a sample of my blood so, y’know, she could settle her doubts. Wouldn’t you?
No? I thought so.
Well, it went on from there. The next thing I knew, Sonny Barger’s then wife Noel (or Noelle, whichever spelling suits your fancy) began sending our heroine viruses. Such was the devastating effect of one of these viruses that her computer could only display and type italics! It had to be, you know, just completely reprogrammed! And here I was wondering why she even bloody opened Noel(le) Barger’s e-mail attachments in the first place.
Then there was the time she was reminiscing about her past and how she was driving her car too fast down a hill, the brake failed, and there at the bottom was this narrow bridge with a truck coming the other way, and she was sure she’d die and...she totally drove harmlessly through the truck and out free the other side! God was saving her for something, man! I assume that “something” was to harass the hell out of Sonny Barger, who, being a career criminal, probably deserved it.
And then again there was the great occasion when she was discovered unconscious, and someone called Karen emailed me from Tina’s email address asking if I’d had any clue who might have attacked her. I said it might be her husband, since she’d been griping about him. This Karen then said they were examining her computer for clues. Her computer? I thought she was on a shared computer? By that time, of course, I had pretty much decided Tina Marie and this Karen were the same person, so I wasn’t at all surprised when she recovered consciousness two days afterwards without any ill effects.
Also, I recall the famous occasion when she sent me a photo of herself. It was shot from far across some kind of large room, with a Christmas tree in the foreground, and all you could see was an overexposed white face, almost featureless, surmounted by a frizzled mass of reddish hair. Hell, it could have been Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris with a shave for all I could make out.
She left my life sometime during 2003, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, which she decided to oppose after discovering that I opposed it. The excuse for leaving was that she had decided to divorce her hubby and move away from home, which also meant moving away from the shared computer. I guess Karen had taken a back seat. By that time, anyway, I’d moved far, far on.
I think I forgot to mention that she was a racist as well, something I found out fairly late. Strangest of all was that she was, it seemed, only anti-black. She was fine with Indians or Arabs or other heathen. It was only the blacks whom she couldn’t stand.
Seven years later, I wonder just how crazy she was, and what the hell she thought she was doing.
Has anyone any memories along similar lines?
