How Fatta Watts Will Track Me Down And Blame Me For Her Torment In Kindergarten

Did eight years at Chino for exposing himself to an eight-year-old. Had to go door to door telling everyone he was a pederast.Everywhere you go on the internet there are ads for dating and social networking sites. Some have pictures of attractive ladies with wide piano-key smiles and captions informing you that there are literally thousands of others like her impatiently sitting by their computers, drumming their fingers and waiting for you to chat to them. How it is possible to chat to '1000s of sexy women' at one time I don't know. I suspect there would be a lot of Control C, Control V action involved. Also I want to state for the record I fucking hate the word 'chat' almost as much as I hate the word 'peeps', which is a lot. Who the fuck 'chats'? Chat. 'Chatting'. Fucking hell.

Once or twice I have clicked on an ad just to see what the conditions are like on the meat market these days and what sort of outrageous lies are being told by ugly people in the hopes of striking up a conversation with an old man who has pasted a picture of a young woman into their profile. I only have a very short attention span and have never got past the reams of forms demanding email addresses and dates of birth and so on that you need to complete before being ushered into the members area of these kinds of sites, to browse the good stuff at leisure. This said, I have been exposed to enough to become sufficiently exasperated to make this long, rambling and pointless post about social networking sites.

One thing that annoys me deeply about dating site advertisements are the ones that feature examples of users' profiles. They always seem to pick attractive, cool people (but never intimidatingly so) with pert, witty, quirky little snippets from their profile. Things like 'what are you reading at the moment?' (normally arty like Kafka or something about Trinidadian vegetarian cooking); 'celebrity you most resemble' (Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke, but never Steve Buscemi or John Candy); 'why should people get to know you?' ('I alway read the last page of a novel first!'); 'what you will find under my bed' (my pet anaconda, never 'my dirty undies') etc et fucking cetera.

Barry, 63, is a single account supervisor who enjoys watching children play at the park at chatting on Myspace.I also have a bone to pick with MySpace. A few times I have been directed to Myspace pages when visiting the websites of bands, clicked around at random and almost always ended up at the sites of teenage boys who have decorated in altogether too dense a fashion their 'spaces' with dark tones, chaotically bad fonts and pop-up boxes that blare emo music and flash bad poetry at you, of the 'I lie naked, unbound / my soul a piece of bloodied string from last night's roast dinner / at your dripping maw' variety. As The Monarch so accurately observed recently, their sites are plastered with thumbnail pics of their legions of friends, all taken with a webcam hold aloft while looking moody and misunderstood in their bedrooms. And all these messages are banal in the extreme. The kids, it appears, have little to say to each other except 'luv u' and 'your (sic) pic is sexy'.

A while ago a couple of friends sent me mail urging me to join up with a networking site called Facebook. Find lost schoolfriends! suggested the email invitation, knowing full well the only schoolfriends signed up with such a scheme would be the likes of Fatta Watts, who was talking about organising the 10-year graduation anniversary in grade nine, and not anyone I would be interested in finding out about. For example, that stunningly aloof bohemian angel Lily with the most incredible breasts I have ever imagined, hidden as they were behind a suede Indian jerkin, and the delicate mole on her lip; or Kassia Storey, for whom I burned a candle all my pubescent years.

Today there was a newspaper article in the Sydney paper claiming that employees were wasting more than $5 billion a year of company money on Myface, and I immediately wanted to become part of movement. So I decided to investigate further. I typed in 'facebookdotcom', pressed 'enter' and before I knew it was an entering email address, password and humourously impossible year of birth, income range and musical tastes into my brand new crispy clean profile page.

Without pressing any buttons at all, I found to my astonishment that I already had four friends, the first claiming to be a Russian lingerie model seeking a kind Australian man for friendship and maybe visa cash greencard something more, and another three of the best nefars I have not clapped eyes on in many a year.

Eagerly, but still with a hint of 'this is bullshit', I typed a terse message to my old cronies in a section labelled 'paint a wall'. I pressed buttons at random, growing ever more irritated that the site was proving very easy to understand, navigate and free of wildly coloured font, background wallpapers, emo music and poetry of any kind. There wasn't even much advertising to become pleasingly annoyed with.

After an hour or two spent hunched over the keyboard, I had amassed a further two old friend heads to decorate my folorn little alcove marked 'friends'. Not only had I discovered how to communicate, I had managed to convince my old chums to click 'accept friend' without using any false pretenses.

It did not take long for this new-found enthusiasm to wane. While my 'friend' section boasted three of the finest, Ned's had 300 and Juliet's substantially more. Plus, they had all manner of interesting diversions like games of online scrabble, effusive comments from people I have never met that seemed to have usurped me, understandably of course, as close confidants, and on Ned's pages, a thing called 'The Friendship Wheel'.

Careful with that thing, you could have someone's eye out.Let me talk more about this wheel. This thing took the cheese, and hammered home more than anything that once again I was a total novice at yet another pursuit, at the very bottom of the ladder. Fuck, now I think about it, just about everything I start I am a novice at. Just once it would be awesome to be awesome at something straight off the bat, without any effort at all.

Anyway, the wheel resembles one of those pieces of craft you may have been forced to make in year three, comprising of a piece of blacked chipboard with tacks hammered about the perimeter, and pieces of yarn strung at tangents so as to form a kind of rudimentary star. The Friendship Wheel, while being a talking point as worthy as anything to be hung on a study wall or placed next to a woodshop breadbin or coffee mug tree, has names of friends positioned at the tine of each star and an arrow illustrating the connection between each person. A circle of friends, as it were... a family tree and one would start the think of the House of Windsor.

I noted dolefully without checking that I would be highly unlikely to be represented at the tine of anyone's Friendship Wheel, checked again to see if anyone had painted on my wall, or sent me an e-beer, or written 'luv u' on my message board. Nothing. I faced the bleak prospect of months of training to make my page snazzy, learn the rules of e-scrobble and paste the scores for all to see, insert a witty tag line under my name, and attract the Lilys of my youth for friendship or maybe something fuck I'm married that's right something more. And by that time, everyone would have abandoned Facepage for Frontdick or Backfanny.org and I would be left, once more to languish in my own mediocrity.

I wish I was not jealous enough to say that social networking sites suck. So just add me to your list of contacts. Please. That's beigebaron at faceplant dot com. Dot com.