Depraved

Still feeling like a whore.

It is not as if I have to take my clothes off or anything, but it is a meat market out there in cyber-space. I had never realised before what a debauched place the internet is. Of course I had heard about child pornography, but I assumed that these things kept to their own corner of the internet, I did not realise that the whole place had been infused with seediness. On this blog, I am paddling in the shallows at the family-holiday-camp area of cyber-space, but, out there, down in the chat rooms, it's like a the Red Light district, the internet’s equivalent of Hamburg’s men-only Herbertstrasse.

It might be day time in Australia when I am hanging out on the online chat sites, but for the people I am meeting, it is invariably the middle of their night. Some take the trouble to make a little small talk before unleashing their lecherous natures, but others launch right into it, instructing me to turn my camera on. Oh the wonders of the internet, where continents are no barrier for perverts.

When I used to work in Hamburg, as I drove home from work in the dusk, I would drive up Suederstrasse, which is in an industrial area, the kind of place lorry drivers and the like need to go for “work” purposes. As soon as the sun sets on Suederstrasse, the prostitutes come out and lean on the bollards at the side of the road, bottoms thrust out, dressed in nothing but knee-high boots and skimpy leather jackets. Well, that is me now, lurking on online chat sites, my bottom stuck out, on the off chance someone suitable will stop by and chat.

Of course it could be worse, I could be working in a call centre, cold calling people; a job which would destroy my will to live completely. But, all the same, I have had enough; it is cold leaning on that virtual bollard, with bare legs in the winter. I am through with lingering on online chat sites. The people should come to me and and not me to them. I have started up a work blog and a twitter site.

Flirt

I’m chatting online with an Egyptian who works for the Port Authorities in Alexandria. I feel like a strumpet. He is checking me out as a replacement for his Kuwaiti wife who he tells me was, “bad”. He tells me he “did not do any wrong with her.” And, yet the ungrateful wench got into bed with his best friend, and so the Egyptian port authority worker dumped both of them. I encourage him to divulge more. I am a whore checking him out for his value to me as a potential tester of the mystery project. I knew that things were getting on to the wrong tracks when he asked me how old I was. Some would say just talking to a member of the opposite sex is tantamount to flirting, but I am a little more generous; however, when men start asking me about my age, I know they are flirting, checking to see if I slot into the acceptable-age-for-a-wife category.

The flirting makes me feel dishonest, because not even in my most fanciful of fantasies do I see myself giving up my life here and moving to Egypt to become a Muslim wife. On moral grounds, I feel that I should end the conversation with the port authorities guy, however, on the other hand, my brief is to find testers for the mystery project, and so far everyone I have spoken to has become flirty. Are the only people who hang out in online chat forums people looking for “love”? (I found this guy on an internet site devoted to learning languages, so you would think that he had other things on his mind.) Or is the whole of human society so base that all our interactions can be boiled down to lust? In certain cultures they seem to be more upfront about this. A few years ago, I had a stop over in Dubai. The guy at passport control gave me his phone number as he returned my passport. I did not call him, but I was not unhappy that he had given me his number.

Chip chip

I spend my days chipping away at the virtual coal face. Shovelling nuggets of coal into the mine owner’s truck. June was a bad month down the mine. And, I have been given a dodgy shaft to excavate for July. The mine owner has a temper, a quick temper, and I am a spark that lights it. I’m also the canary: the first one to die when things go wrong. A excerpt from the mine owner's rant last night.

I am not going to accept anything like "I've tried to make them active, but they did not do it." I gave you this responsibility, and you have to get it done. If you don't think some of the team leaders are any good, then we must start thinking of changing them.

I have lowered myself down the shaft today and am testing how well things are propped up. I am reluctant to agree to any outlandish targets before I know that we have a realistic chance of achieving them.

All day as I chipped away, I kept telling myself that this is just a job and that my goal is to make money, just enough money to allow me to finance my life, but that this job is not my life, and I should not take the ranting mine owner too seriously. And yet the longer this job goes on, the more it pulls me away from who I really am.

One of the team leaders resigned after I told her the new tasks for July. I will see how the others react. I am getting them to send me weekly reports so that I can keep an eye on progress. I am also setting myself the same tasks as I am asking them to do. I will suffer with them under the draconian rule of the mine owner. To do the job successfully, I have to adopt a friendly sociable, larger-than-life virtual persona, completely removed from the miserable hermit that I really am. For how long can I maintain this double life?

Absolute conviction

This post comes to you with the help of two Paracetamols (with added codeine), a puff of Ventolin, a mouthful of Dimetapp and a Strepsil.

I used never to take any medication. I was a medication Puritan. If I had a headache, I would just wait for it to pass, but now that I am injecting artificial substances daily, I see no reason to hold off on the other chemicals. I am suffering from “flu-like symptoms”, so I’m swallowing, breathing, chewing and sucking all the chemicals I can find. I feel a little light-headed, but otherwise fine.

I went to bed in a similar light-headed state last night, hoping for a prophetic dream about the lottery. At eight-thirty tonight, the number will be drawn, and as I am relying on psychic powers to secure my win, I was hoping for a dream or a sign of some sort to show that my win is pre-ordained. I want modern-day Augurs to sacrifice a bird and read the entrails for signs of my good fortune. Apparently, other people who have won the lottery through psychic means have always had an absolute conviction that they were going to win, so much so that they had already started spending the money before the balls had spoken.

I, on the other hand, don’t even have absolute conviction that I am going to get paid this month. The money has been sent from Moscow, I have the remittance form in Russian, but after the debacle of last month, I am not confident: so what hope is there for me in summoning up the faith necessary to secure a lottery win?

I’m beginning to wonder if I have absolute conviction about anything in my life.

As was lying in the MRI machine back in May, I did have a moment of absolute conviction: in a flash I knew I was not "ill" at all, and that the MRI scan was going to be clean -- so we can see how wrong my instincts and convictions can be. I am now left in a state where even minute-to-minute, I cannot say with absolute conviction that I will survive the next sixty seconds. There is always an element of doubt. The bookcase behind my seat could crash down on top of me and crush me -- dead. The electric fire could malfunction, burst into flames; my highly flammable clothes could be hit by a spark, and I could burn to death. None of these possibilities bother me in my day-to-day life; I am not a gibbering wreck reluctant to move for fear of the consequences. In fact under normal circumstances, these scenarios of possible gloom-and-doom never enter my mind. However, I do suspect that my lack of absolute conviction about anything will prevent me from winning the lottery, and I fear it cuts me off from other things life might have to offer.

Psychic

I decide to buy a lottery ticket.

I have not actually bought it yet. I need to find out where to source them. I have never done the lottery before. I have always been put off by the low probability of winning. But, that is because, until a week ago, I thought that the world was governed by science and statistics. That was before I started reading “The Perennial Philosophy”. I need never read another book again.

...the fact that the fall of dice can be influenced by the mental states of certain individuals seems now to have been established beyond the possibility of doubt. Aldous Huxley

Shortly after reading this passage, I was in the car listening to the radio, when it was announced that the jackpot for the oz lotto was $60, 000, 000. The idea that I should buy a lottery ticket floated through my mind, but it was late, and I did not know where to buy them from, so I forgot about it. Until Yesterday, when again in the car, I heard on the radio that the jackpot for the oz lotto had now reached $90, 000, 000. No one had won it last week; clearly because last week I had failed to buy the winning ticket. So now this week, I am determined to buy a ticket. That’s the easy bit. I then have to summon the psychic powers necessary to ensure that I win.

This will not be the first time that I try to summon up psychic powers, while I was a child, before I turned to logic and statistics, I used to sit in French lessons, staring at a pencil willing it to move, it never did. And, then there were my experiments with levitation. I had seen a programme about levitating yogis on the TV and decided that levitation would be a cool skill to have. After much practice, I managed to twist myself into the special cross-legged position that seemed to be necessary, but much to my disappointment, I never managed to rise off my bedroom floor and float.

There is some doubt swirling around my mind: If psychic powers can be summoned up at will, why then do psychics such as Uri Geller sometimes have to resort to trickery, and why are there not multiple lottery winners every week?

I decide to do some internet research. I type: “summoning up psychic powers” into google. I get two, just two, results and one of them is about a Pokemon character. I am on my own...