Return of the Living Dead

Under any other circumstance, I'd have found this freaky. Over the last ten days, my dead past has been crawling out of the woodwork in the form of orkut contacts. People I haven't met, spoken to, mailed, IM'd, thought about, fantasized about, or even had featuring in nightmares suddenly appear in their new avatars of networking pages, coming first in ones and twos and then by the dozen.

Coincidentally, the last ten days have also seen a massive surge in zombie movies. Resident Evil, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead... I finally aquired the Constantine divx and the new Omen, Underworld 2, and Final Destination III released in theatres... not to mention Hellboy tonight.

Diabolic Conspiracy or Divine Communique? The frequency of calls coming from the US for one highly work-intensive client also went sharply up, so I mapped the correlations between horror on TV versus horror on call.

It was .76.

Not funny. Not funny, man.

That is - I don't consider my clients in any way to be associated with the Downstairs, or possess any form of demonic powers or influence. They may have, but someone will need to actually banish one with holy incantations before I'll accept it.

But that's the beauty of networking sites - they network. Simple fact of life but comes across as pretty creepy when you see it in action - one person signs up, starts getting in touch, and suddeny long-lost friends and enemies turn up everywhere... and they're all mailing, messaging, scrapping, smsing. A cloud of cacophonous virtual pigeons around my head. And unlike real pigeons, I can't even catch and eat 'em.