With the reality TV cameras always rolling, anal probes at airports and Sarah Palin spying on Russia from her kitchen window, we finally understand the term "get a life." Before we started worrying about our phones being tapped, we thought it was something annoying kids in tie-dyed shorts said in the 90's to annoying adults who rollerbladed. But now, as we prepare to invade your space, we are starting to realize the Confucian wisdom in this seemingly trite utterance. We're paranoically babbling about stalkers.
It starts close to home. There are a lot of ways to stalk someone, and not all of them are of the "If I can't have you nobody can" variety. We’ve been endlessly pursued by well-meaning friends who just want to talk about life. And stuff. For hours. We’ve also been chased after by lonely people we reached out to in a misguided attempt to be kind. At the end of the day, we’re still staving off the unwanted attentions of the desperately lonesome ilk.
Stalking can also get ruthless. The more the stalked pulls back, the more vicious and hurt the stalker becomes. "Why don't you want to know me?" the stalker moans, "We're perfect for each other," the twentieth pathetic, self-serving message of the day. Delete it. Stalking is the most self-involved art form, it assumes smallness, an insecure self-effacing mask--but the stalker is really all-important to themselves. No one else is taken into account as they send flowers, emails, and death threats at rapid fire.
Stalking is a complicated pastime. Admittedly we all practice it to a certain extent. There is the social network stalking where we keep checking out someone’s lame MySpace profile to see if they changed their song, or their Facebook to see if there are some embarrassing pictures they may have been tagged in. We’ve all Google stalked people (our favorite to Google stalk is ourselves). We’ve all checked someone’s blog constantly and these are all private methods we have of staying connected or engaged with the human experience. We are the generation permeated by loneliness and overcompensation, so I suppose that makes us a generation of stalkers. But the question begs, if you are not being called and emailed and followed, if the words you choose to represent yourself are the only things being stalked, then did you ask for it?
That may be a terrifying question, but perhaps a legitimate one. Now that Pomp fliers are clinging to your stoop and the magazine is flying off the shelves, are we asking you, dear reader, to follow our every step, to shadow our minutiae of movements and moments, to have a certain knowledge about us that might be T.M.I.? In other words, now that you’ve let us into your homes, should we necessarily let you into ours?
I don’t know… just remember to knock… at least.
-Kastoory K and Royal Y
