Processed meat

It being gone midnight, I've just archived November's spam across to its very own folder and started a new folder for December. In November, I received 17,989 spam emails.

Seventeen-thousand, nine-hundred and eighty-nine. No wonder the Internet is slow.

I heard recently that a crowd caught a guy using a public WiFi access point to send spam, and beat the shit out of him. That story made me happy.

Yarrrrrrr!!

*strokes PotC DVD*

Today/Nathan

So today is World AIDS Day. Today I'm remembering my friend Nathan.

Nathan introduced me to horror movies (Return of the Living Dead at 8 - good job I didn't spook too easily).
Nathan once spent an entire game of Monopoly against me with his hand up his girlfriend's skirt. I lost, badly. It was quite distracting. So maybe he introduced me to voyeurism, at the age of about 12 :)
Nathan's family were such useless twats that he practically lived at my house, and he called my mother 'Mum' until the day he died.
Nathan came out when he was about 18 (I was about 15 at this point, I think), and he left the disapproving family home to go and live in Brighton, where he became a stripper in a variety of gay nightclubs.
Nathan probably shagged around a bit, but in particular, he shagged the manager of one of those clubs. A man who already knew he had full-blown AIDS, but chose to have unprotected sex with young guys who he didn't share this bit of information with. He'd decided he didn't want to go out alone, it seems. And so Nathan became HIV+.
Nathan got into a long-term monogamous relationship not long before he found this out. Fortunately, he hadn't infected his partner. Unfortunately, they didn't get to have that long a time together.
Nathan never did develop full-blown AIDS - he died in a motorcycle accident. On a straight dry stretch of road, with no witnesses, him and his bike were found wrapped around a lamppost. Maybe he rode a bit too hard and fast - 'carpe diem' and all that. Maybe someone cut him up and drove off from the scene of the crash. We'll never know.
Nathan had given some thought to his funeral. No-one was allowed to wear black, unless it was leather or rubber :) Which meant I was the only one in black, having ridden to Brighton on a 250 Superdream to attend, in my bike leathers. His boyfriend asked me to lead the funeral procession, because I was on the bike, and he thought Nathan would have liked that. At the service, they played Dancing Queen. The song makes me think of him whenever I hear it now, but in a good way.

I'm not religious. I don't believe Nathan is now somewhere else - not in 'a better place', and not somewhere being punished for his lifestyle either. He's gone. But I do believe he made the most of his life while he had it, which eases the pain when I think of how little time he had.