I spent dinner all hot and bothered, ranting and yelling about that which I discovered today on the internets. Have you heard the one about the poor teenage suicide and her last encounter on myspace.com?

It seems a year ago a 13-year-old named Megan Meier crushed on a boy who gave her an add os a new friend. Of course, myspace.com has an age limit, and you’re supposed to be 14, but yeah, probably not the first kid to join up, right.

(By the way, the local paper describes her various angst-y hells of 13-dom, including giving her height and weight and apparently long-time struggle over the fat kid thang. The height and weight they gave for the tormented, two inches taller than me and not that far away on the poundage. In the pic, she looks, how should I say, “normal.” Ah, body image, at 13 and 43, I relate.)

Anyway, well in the realm of imagining, the teenage girl has some emotional issues, and the boy she found on the internet told her he couldn’t be her friend any more. Then “he” sent bulletins talking your basic junior high/high school smack. Ending in how everyone in her town hates her.

Shocking right? I mean, every single, fucking day, some kid somewhere gets shit on or tricked or otherwise made to feel ostracized. Back in my day, it was Chris Morrissey and her entourage telling me I couldn’t walk to school with them any more. (I think I lacked sufficient cool, or some other perceived weakness. Ironically on the cool scale, her older sister, Debbie, replete with the hip cache of being one of the older kids, welcomed me into her fold for the school walking.)

Now, inter-child cruelty is web-based and cyber-shitty. Sadly, one email too many ended in this girl going to her room and quietly killing herself before dinner.

Here’s the thing, though. Here’s the thing that has me apoplectically wondering about the utter fuckeduppedness of the world today.

Turns out the boy on myspace.com feigning interest at first an then betraying Megan was a fake. OK, again not surprising. But, FUCKING GROK THIS MISERY, “Josh,” the fake profile, was created by another 13-year-old girl from the neighborhood AND HER FUCKING ALL GROWN UP MOTHER. What kind of sad, sorry excuse for adulthood would fucking do that?

Everyone on the planet has now seen Chris Hansen shame the pants off of predators on the web. Hell, “To Catch a Predator” got so big that other news channels started investigating the investigations. And, don’t get me started again, about Perverted Justice.

I understand some of the law behind it. By the way, it does seem a bit fucked up to me that it’s wrong to solicit from folks who ain’t never going to give up the goods. I mean there’s a weird little part of it that makes me wonder if we’re bordering on mind policing with the whole online laws.

It’s not right and it’s not moral and it’s icky as hell, but I figure a good chunk of the the soliciting dudes are all sitting in their dingy grunts by the dim light of a basic beige box blazing up the intertubes with proposition after proposition. Like slightly retarded spiders they pounce on every breeze that vaguely shimmies their webs. They miss, they move on until the next breeze touches their world of eternal hope.

The key is mostly no one ever says “yes” to the dudes with online handles like “DavieWants2,” “can_i_rape_you_anally” and “kinky_man_in_corona” (all real names from the folks Perverted Justice notes as convicted). The guys are most definitely by most peoples standards total scumbags, I get that, but I think we all gotta admit that chatting up a teenager with:

manofdarkneedsl951 (10:36:56 PM): you like to see men jack off?

amid foreplay like “you want to meet an older man?” and misspelled questions about masturbation isn’t being deceptive. You read through a few Perverted Justice chats and the creepy guys aren’t exactly hiding the slime and luring folks into their lair.

I imagine if I had a teenager I could even show them the transcripts and pictures and instantly, even the most rebellious kid, would agree, “Yeah, Ma, no worries, that’s just gross, don’t worry about me jumping on that.”

Back to my point, though. In my world where free speech is a core value, there ought to be a law against a mother who poses on myspace.com to fuck with a girl to help her own sad 13-year-old. For her, I’d be willing to bring back some stocks, pillories and good, old-fashioned public shaming.

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