friendly death threats

Dear The Internet,

It's my goal in life to destroy you.

I've been going around for a few years telling my friends and family, "I'm going to destroy the internet one day," whenever they ask me what I'm doing my life or how I see the future or whether I'd like more peas. But I realised I had never made my intentions clear to you, the target of all my sinister aspirations. So here it is, the internet: my job as a book store employee, my study of computer science in university, my online weblog, they're all converging elements in my master plan to orchestrate your grand and sudden and complete and permanent collapse.

I'm inside you, the internet. I'm scraping away at the very foundations of your existence. Sure, your hardware and software components are significant factors to consider when plotting your death, but your ultimate death will be cultural.

Now here's where you get the fear: Do I mean cultural stagnation? Violent conflict the likes of which not even Usenet has seen? A creeping infiltration by corporate entities and agents with agendas posing as ordinary users? Will I dilute the online proletariat with armies of payrolled sockpuppets?

Or am I planning something even more subtle and diabolical? Consider, the internet, what would happen if all the pointers and clickers out there in the wealthy electronic regions of the world were simultaneously struck by the futility of their actions. What if one day surfin' the weeb felt as pointless and bland as janitorial work or calculus homework?

What if people realised that you're destroying their minds and stealing their youth and vitality?

REVOLUTION!

Pitchforks and torches and marching boots through server farms, wires snipped and hardware smashed. Computers would be disconnected from one another across the face of the Earth, a great Simplification, the destruction of the gossiping machine. TCP/IP and its associated protocols would be proscribed by all major religions, and computers would be returned to their previous uses, like weather forecasting and electronic dating and Tetris. And a few years later people would sit around the television and say things like "Hey, remember those decades when we were stupid and lost our days and nights and pieces of our souls to a vast egalitarian network of computers and their users?" and then other people would say "Nope" and all would laugh.

So think about these scenarios the next time you try to sell me photographs of people having sex with their grandmothers.

Your nemesis,

Regan

Dear Canada's right-wing blogosphere,

Why do you take so much pleasure in discrediting yourselves and your political views by tacking-on gleeful threats of physical violence?

Am I supposed to take your objections to pedophilia seriously when they're linked to enthusiastic discussions of murder?

Perhaps a plurality of Canadians keep voting Liberal (and a majority shun the Conservatives) because they're just a little bit reluctant to support people who think that sharing their fantasies about killing people is neato.

To centrists, radicals are like icebergs. When scary things like this slip out now and then, regular folks can only assume there's plenty more lurking beneath the water's surface.

In conclusion: The difference between sex with children and sex among teenagers is substantial. Opposing both is fine, but shouting "pedophile!" at people who think the latter ought not to be illegal makes you look pretty foolish.

With befuddlement (and a little fear),

Greg

Dear Greg,

The blogosphere is coalescing around you.

Amy and Trevor offer you gifts of representation. In addition, WLUSU Campus Clubs refuses to recognize my Presidency of Laurier Activist New Democrats.

Finally, you are famous because of your second blog, while my second blog struggles to develop and maintain a trendy readership. Also, this photo reminded me of you. I might try to go to Grad School in Toronto so I can be cool like you and Liam.

With love,

Dave

Dear Ikea,

I have a great deal of stark, white furniture in my home now. Which is nice. And little round rugs. Which are also nice.

But I'm not made of money, goddamnit.

With this in mind, I hereby kindly request that you cease and desist stocking reasonably priced solutions to each and every one of my at-home furniture, decorating, and knick knack related needs.

Please build future Toronto-area locations either further from my apartment or considerably less easily accessible by public transit. Discontinuation of your free shuttle from the Leslie subway station to your North York store, for example, would help.

Those wee meatballs are great, though.

Hänsyslöst,

Greg

Give me back my service fees

Dear banks of Canada,
         I'll bet you think this is pretty funny. I'm sure these debit fees started out seriously enough. One of you got mad and decided to punish the other banks by charging a fee to their customers for the use of your debit machines. Then you all started doing it and the other banks probably sent you a nice thank you card printed on the skin of a homeless person you found in the warm area surrounding the bank machine. You showed that bum.
         Then you thought, hey, we got a good thing going here, but why is Royal Bank getting fees from our customers while we're not? So you thought, hey, maybe if we all start charging a service fee for using other people's bank machines, our customers wont run away.
         Well think again TD Canada Trust! I'm sick and tired of paying you fees for shit that you imposed indirectly when you started charging members of other banks for using your bank-machines. I'm tired of thinking, why do I bother depositing money that I'm just going to use anyhow? I don't have any savings. What is it that keeps me initialing those awful deposit slips while my balance receeds to zero again and again?
         In case you forget, the agreement was this: I let you invest my money; you pay me a small amount of interest. I understand the fee concept. When someone adds value to something I own (for exaple, style to my hair or long-distance service to my phone). But there is nothing you do to my money that I couldn't do myself.
        So consider this your final notice: I will no longer deposit any money at your banks. I will keep my money in a shoebox where it belongs.

Your broke acquaintance,

Dave

Dear the Fembots,

Your music is helping me understand Charles Manson.

This realisation comes as a shock to me. I've loved music for most of my life; I've memorized entire albums and learned the intricate histories of any band that could hold my interest. When I find a band or an album or a song I enjoy, I get single-minded and obsessive. Every important moment in my life is somehow inextricably linked in my memory to the music that was playing at the time or the song that represents the events' effects on me.

When I was five my family moved from Wadena, Saskatchewan to Barrie, Ontario with only Blue Sky Mining by Midnight oil and Billy Joel's Greatest Hits, Volume I and II in the tape deck of our fake-wood-paneled station wagon. No matter what "Piano Man" may mean to Billy or the rest of the world, It still represents the cold, bleak close of the 1980s. I quit my first job over Sloan's Navy Blues.

I have a habit of making long speeches about songs and bands. I commandeer social situations to teach classes on the finer points of 90s East Coast rock, or the events that led me to associate Ric Ocasek and Weezer's debut album with reclining car seats and vomiting in a friend-of-a-friend's flower garden. I just get nervous in "ordinary" conversation because I feel I have nothing to contribute but complaints about obscure technical issues and a few tales that are wearing thin, so I resort to the "Ongoing History of New Music" talking points.

I had to unlearn my habit of proselytizing about "music's significance to me right now." Turns out girls don't like it when you stop halfway through making out to note that this is your favourite Eels song and did you know Peter Buck plays on their albums?

Girls are weird.

I'm pretty susceptible to suggestion from musical sources, but I never understood how a person could latch onto a song like "Helter Skelter" and attach such murderous meaning to it. It's a freaky little Beatles tune with vague lyrics about a generic drug delivered in a half-talk over manic, hyperactive guitars. Sure. Maybe it reminds you of drinking and driving, or taking mushrooms and cowering in an elementary-school playground at 3am. But as an omen of impending race war and a signal that it's time to murder wealthy Caucasians in LA, it's flimsy at best.

I used to think that was a pretty rational way to look at the effect of even the most intense musical barrage on the psyche. But then you guys showed up -- in my stereo and in my brain. I remember being unimpressed by your performance at Hillside this past July. I guess I dismissed you as uninteresting, as Dave Alexander music. Cowboy hats, guitars, synthesizers, cowbell, etc. Yawn. But Amy bought your CD and I heard it in the car. One line stood out: "Let them break their bats on our heads...."

Methought, That goes down smooth. Your website (curse its Flash interface!) yielded another fateful tune: "Small Town Muder Scene."

What kind of cruel bastards would write a song they knew would become the soundtrack for my every thought and deed for two straight months and give it such gruesome lyrics? It's sadistic! I walk around at work singing "the bottom basement stair / is caked in blood and matted hair." I live in a dark, creepy basement. I'm starting to get impressions -- fleeting thoughts, really -- that I should perhaps bring about the situations described in your songs simply to exorcise the lyrics' grip on my consciousness. But then I suppose you already knew this.

I'm just another cog in your diabolical scheme. You'll be pulling the strings when the new class war arises from the student ghettos of our nation. And when the land has been levelled and the blood of the innocent floods the soil and all the wealth has been redistributed in accordance with your plan, you'll take up the cowboy crown and cowbell sceptre and rule over a new nation of ignorant twentysomethings, enslaved and strung along by their co-opted ideals and their hunger for liquor and inexpensive ethnic foods and the unstoppable music in their heads.

The future is much bleaker than December '89 on the prairies.

So basically what I wanted to ask is, when the time comes and the shit starts flying, can I just rat people out for you? I don't want to have to kill anyone.

Your unwilling servant,

Regan

Dear Pigeons,

I know a 23rd floor perch must have seemed like the ideal place to roost, but it's not my fault that your eggs didn't hatch; on the contrary, I suspect that the half-assed scattering of pine needles you call a nest is to blame.

If you continue to taunt my cat I may at some point be unable to restrain her -- at which point she will most likely burst through the screen door and claw you to bits as you plummet toward the pavement together, locked in a horrific struggle to the death.

Also, please stop shitting on my balcony and in my air conditioner.

With grudging respect,

Greg