sacred monkeys, butterflies and I wanna kill you

An old friend once told me over dinner that when I died he intended to throw a party and force all of my friends to tell a story that I had once told them. He laid claim to the one about my Great Uncle the merchant seaman. It seems he once stole a sacred monkey from an Indian Temple. Of course, he trained the monkey to beg for whiskey. The monkey would drink half a shot and my Great Uncle Jack drank the other half. Although this story has a good punch line I believe there are better ones in my portfolio. After my friend told me this I had to resist the urge to kill him and then throw a party to tell my friends the story.

This leads to the question is this blogging thing about stories? Is it about the absurdity of cyber space? Is it about my obsession with the obscure footnotes of long dead prussian military logistical theorists? Is it about the relationship between you and the Simpsons? The simple answer is Yes.

Those who cannot do teach. Those who can not do it in person blog. We do it because we can and in dreadfully simple human philosophical terms that makes it somehow have value. This of course tempts me to test how valueless this can be. Time's a wastin' they say and I say Thank God for that.

So now I have this page on myspace and immediately I encounter myspace spam. This spam is based on the assumption that you are a turd. Oh, yes a beautiful twenty something well lit model wants to be my friend. Oddly she is obsessed with free ringtones, myspace tracking software and me. It makes me all gushy to think of it. Yeah, I'm a turd and as a result I'm gonna click on all those parasitic links.

In addition to this kind of spam I've received a few really disturbing friend requests featuring little girls and well, I can't even describe how warped the comments are. Oh great, you're sick and now you want to bless us all by making us want to hunt you down and end your miserable existence. It's enough to make me want to become a Luddite.(wow look at that I put a link in I'm almost as clever as my three year old daughter!)

My new revelation which is about six years behind the rest of the universe is that many of the lady's pages on myspace take about nine weeks to load. I've got broad band (hell, my 3 year old daugther has got broad band - but that's a long story. I had to give it to her to distract her from making cell phone calls) and it takes forever to download these confused over designed pages. By the time the pedestrian rap song starts to play, the graphics flash, the automatic video playback begins and the midi score loads I've started to shop for a coffin. The really scary thing about this trend is that there is a whole generation of young people that have developed the "I'm gonna serve up web tomfoolery to you weather you like it or not" school of design. When these over enthusiastic young designers come to power on the web we're in for trouble. I forsee chaos when every house hold has to have a fiber optic trunk line the diameter of a two hundred year old oak installed to handle the ten quadrillion gigabits of butterfly backgrounds that are roaring down the web whenever we click on a page. Boy do the ladies love the butterflies.

Don't worry, I realize that the male equivalent in over design is even worse. I guess it boils down to soft porn, speed metal and explosions.

Well I'm off to build a butterfly house, sew up a butterfly coat and teach my two year old son to say the word Lepidoptera while winking to prepare him for the teenage battle for the attention of the fairer sex.

Oh yeah, in the end the monkey ends up sitting on a fence post, with his throbbing head in his hands and Uncle Jack says "I told you not to order the sloe gin fizz!"