Saturday 12 August 2000

Pic of the day: I hope you like the Jack & Jones shirt, because I put it on specially for you! And I even filled my glass with red fruit soda that looks vaguely like wine, just to cheer you up, even though I am tense and thoughtful myself.

Hello <EMBED STR=NAME>

Against my better judgement (gradually increasing to self-recrimination) I stayed up all night reading It's Walky!. Yet another online comic strip. Obviously I luvved it. The drawings are rather mediocre - they are not bad, mind you, and I could not have done it nearly as well, but I sometimes had to look carefully when two of the more similar girls showed up in the same panel. The humor was my style, though, and I enjoyed watching the original comic (Roomies) grow from a collection of college gags to a deeply involving story about friendship, guilt, shame, and redemption. Roomies - third year - was in my opinion the best so far, though the current story against a sci-fi background isn't all that bad. Especially considered it is freee! :)

Around 6 I went to bed in they early daylight, and slept for five hours. I woke up and checked my e-mail. There I found the friendly greeting on a piece of spam (unsolicited e-mail): "Hello <EMBED STR=NAME>"

***

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have a mail filter that sorts out the most obvious spam mails and removes them from my inbox. Anything containing $$ or various vulgar expressions goes straight out. But I'm not too critical, and I do glance at some of the spam. Usually it's just a glance, and so also this time. I loved the pathetic error, though. This is obviously an inexperienced spammer.

Yeah, I know it can be difficult the first time. You're young and eager and have these high hopes, and then suddenly you discovered that you have let go before things were in that should be in. Ouch! But don't curse yourself; others will do that. You should follow my example and learn from your errors: If you don't get it right at once, give up and never try again.

***

Being out of bread, I decided to walk to the local grocers again, as I usually do on Saturdays. Normally I go down the hill, through the woods, over the bridge and along the road past the farm (where I met the doggie last Saturday. As I was about to go there, though, a voice in my head piped up and asked me to go to the other grocery store, in the other direction, not through the woods. (Of course, as usual, it's not really a voice, just an independent thought. C.G. Jung called them complexes, but most people use that word in a different meaning now.)

As I came to the crossroads, I remembered the delicious bread they use to have on Saturdays in my favorite grocery, as well as the longer distance to the other shop. So I veered off towards the path. But as I passed into the woods, the thought panicked and urged me to go back. A very strange experience indeed. Since I had plenty of time, I decided to humor it. I listened to my minidisc while I walked. It was my Food for Thought mix disc, with among others one of my favorite songs, Up here in Heaven by Chris de Burgh.

Up here in Heaven we are together
both the enemy and the friend, till the end of time.
Up here in Heaven we are forever;
there is only one God up here, for all of the world.

Eventually I arrived at the shop and bought a fresh, delicious bread and some boxes of yoghurt. Also some sugar-free chewing gum, which is recommended by my dentist. 'Look! Plastic bag!' said the thought in my head. And sure enough: There were plastic bags, exactly like the one I stole on the 12th of February. I knew what I had to do, then. I bought the plastic bag, along with the limited groceries. Then, while the cash register lady was occupied with another customer, I put the groceries in my double plastic bag, which I had in my pockets. And sneakily left the other bag behind, the one which I had paid for. Yess! Finally! Innocence regained!

***

My complexes don't like that I write about my complexes. They want me to take responsibility for myself and present a unified persona to the rest of the world. You know I usually do that, as do we all (except some insane or very strange people, and some New Agers and psychologists). It's a bit like a family that quarrels inside but the neighbors must not get to know it, or the sky might fall.

(This wasn't the case in the family where I grew up, mind you. But we did have an autist hidden in the attic, which we did not talk about. Sort of fair, since he certainly didn't talk about us either. But for most of my life, I used to remember that we were a family of 8 - I did not count my autist uncle. Things change, though. Times change. People change.)

But it is human to be of two minds, or more, about things. Especially things like shapely females, of course, but also less controversial things. Thoughts don't just come out of our mouth, we do think over things inside first. I refuse to deny it, though I am certainly not going to describe it in detail every day. Usually I reach my conclusions very fast and stand up for them as best I can.

But sometimes the inner workings of the mind becomes visible, much like my unlucky spam friend who inadvertedly disclosed the shameful secret of his mass mailing software.