Everybody's Famous!

I'm sitting on a couch at Bimbo Deluxe, pushing my brain through the ringer, hoping to squeeze on drop of mana from a brain which today has the verve of a dust bunny. I'm trying to write on this couch, flanked at right angles (mercifully facing away) by two more couches. Two couples take either couch within the space of a minute. As though I'm in a Bjork music video nightmare, these two couple take out cameras, huddle, and make the thing go flash. When you see them on MySpace or Fabebook, I'm the amoeba in the background on a mac.

I imagine when a young girlie posts those first photos of herself on MySpace, Bebo (or whatever), she imagines all the cool guys and girls around the world who will be looking at her, wondering what she's really like as a person. They call them social media now, but really, social media websites share more in common with the hotted-up V8 cars that used to drive circuits around my old home town of Moe. A MySpace page is the new vehicle kids use to show off, be the centre of attention. Like with cars, there's still a dick measuring contest. The number of friends replaced engine block cubic inches. There's still eye souring festoonments, bad music that supposedly tells you everything about me, cranked loud, and public conversations between idiots.

Then there's the photo gallery. Photos with friends tell people you have friends. It's important to tell the world there's people that like you -- enough to spend 5 seconds posing with you. Lots of photos with lots of people = lots of friends. Lots of photos with lots of attractive, cool friends = my friends are good looking, therefore I am cooler, better looking by association.

There's two reasons someone like me doesn't collect friends or post photos. One, I'm not a teenager anymore. Anybody my age with a often used MySpace profile is like that pathetic old guy at a club, wearing fashion he's fifteen years too old for, hoping to pick off a drunk 18 year old from the herd. Same goes for Facebook, really, when you think about it. Conversations on either are about as sophisticated at drunk pub blather, the music too loud to follow a topic further than two sentences, way too busy looking at tits.

Two: I don't photograph well. I tried online dating for a while. I now have great respect for the lighting and angles of those glamour photographers who do mid-morning TV advertorials. How do they take any photos of all those fat house fraus and for them to come out half decent? I must have taken a hundred shots, experimented with as many lighting sources and positions, until my numerous chins went away.

Online dating photo tips: beware of the photo shot from above, subject looking up. And ask how long ago the photo was taken. Watch Super Size Me. A girl can get down a lot of happy meals in a month.