The Lounge

I discovered something disturbing today, or, perhaps, "peculiar," is more appropriate. As I wound down from my active afternoon, I wandered the neighborhood around my little patch of the blogosphere.

I checked in on our old friends at the Syndicate and our new friends at the Gouda. I traveled to Wales to read some tales, and meandered to Minneapolis to check in on Margus. Eventually, I logged into the dark master of my soul, Myspace.

Jesus, I stay off the internet for a couple of days and you'd think I was dying of cancer... Slowly, I hacked through the messages and comments, and porn-spam-friend requests. I read blog entries and blog comments, and I caught up on the non-spam bulletins.

Then slowly I sauntered about, checking in on the various changes folks have made to their profiles. I flickered through my friends list until I happened upon Ryan's profile. It has been nicely done up in hellish Halloween fashion. But then, as I scrolled down past the Tim Burton caricatures, I spied something truly wicked.

It was a picture of Dave.

You know, Dave. Dead Honkey Dave. Deuce Dave. Dave.

He's on Ryan's friends list. I mean, holy hell, how does that happen??

First, let me put this into perspective. Accurate or not, I like to hold myself out as a somewhat worldly, quasi-amoral, mostly-godless, drunken lecherous hedonist. However, if I were to envision the personification of my id in the form of the devil sitting on my shoulder, that devil would be Dave.

In stark contrast, the responding angel on the other shoulder would certainly be Ryan. Now, to make matters only more complicated, these images are based on nothing more than the respective duo's public personas, for in reality, both are fine upstanding moral citizens with a duplicitous penchant for the seedy side of life. However, the real kicker is, absent the Lounge, they would never have known each other.

I have been told, time and again, from secret readers and Lounge lurkers that many folks are afraid to enter the fray and leave a comment, because everyone here knows each other and everything is an inside joke.

Alas, nothing could be further from the truth. High school, law school, gateway-friends, wives of friends and friends of wives of friends, most of y'all have never met. Some of you, I've never met. Some of you live on other continents. Most of you live in other states. Some I've met on-line, and others have yet to pipe up and say hello.

And yet here is Dave, who I've known longer than I've had armpit hair, showing up as a friend of Ryan, who I played poker with many years later in law school.

And there are others too! But my head hurts too much from this one to think about those.

Social networking indeed...