Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) Read Online Free Page A

more attractive. But I wasn’t about to give
up.
    Intelligence, height,
wealth and wit.
    These were the most
commonly sought qualities on datemedotcom. I already had three of
them and I could mimic the fourth in the right shoes. I was never
going to attract many replies on my looks alone but I was confident
that most girls were going to at least feign interest in a guy who
made two hundred thousand dollars a year as an Advertising Art
Director. And as such, having worked with some of best digital
retouchers in the business I couldn’t help but notice that many of
the photos had been modified. Skin lightened, blemishes blended,
legs lengthened, weight reduced, children removed.
    It quickly became clear,
after only a few dates, that if a seemingly gorgeous
twenty-five-year old girl was willing to meet a guy nearing forty,
it meant he was going to have to pull up an extra chair for her
ass. Witnessing a girl rearrange the table in front of her as she
waited for her anatomical entourage to catch up was not something I
wanted to repeat. I felt like the victim of a crime but with no
emergency number to call because legislation had yet to catch up
with whatever this was.
    Scrutinizing the profile
photos even more carefully I realized to my horror I had been
deceived by three very basic methods of in-camera trompe l’oeil. 1)
Lying face-down on a plush carpet absorbed all manner of immensity.
2) Holding the camera high created a false perspective that
funnelled even the most amoebic madness into a neat vanishing
point. 3) Posing between two friends converted a milk-churn
silhouette into an hourglass figure.
    I was looking at this all
wrong. Instead of being the customer, I needed to become the
product. Instead of buying I would sell. At first I didn’t catch
the significance of profile names like Erin76, Shannon12 and
Colleen111, but it soon arrived in me like a smile. As a walking,
talking, realistically rendered, three-dimensional, life-sized
export of that mythical faraway land called Ireland I had something
to sell after all. These misinformed females, having grown up with
stories of the old country strained through generations of omission
and embellishment, were ripe for the romantic advances of a
native-born Mick.
     
    An Irishman
with a girl’s name?
    Yes, that’s
going to be my headline for this e-mail. You probably get a lot of
messages(gorgeous girl like you) and as you trawl through them
going…DELETE...DELETE...DELETE….I thought I’d at least grab your
attention with an eye-catching line.…and let’s face it, it must
have worked because you’re still reading. But why would my parents
give me a girl’s name? Well, since they had me late in life they
knew I’d grow up with less attention than my siblings, and like the
Johnny Cash song, A Boy Named Sue, the hope was that I’d grow up
independent and tough (imagine the playground taunts). Did it work?
You can judge for yourself when we meet. Girlsname

    At first I only copied and
pasted this message to girls who referenced Ireland in their
profiles but pretty soon I began to send it out randomly. Why not?
Irishness was attractive to all cultures except the British and
there weren’t too many of them over here. And anyway I could always
screen the responses later. The objective was to see just what kind
of quality I could attract. It was revealing how grateful they all
were, beautiful or not, for being referred to as gorgeous.
Seemingly, this was enough to blind them to the fact that what they
had received was a form letter. And almost all of them wanted to
meet, or at least learn more about the man behind it.
    “ You have two
new messages. First message.”
    Beep.
    “ I hate
you…I hate you…I hate you…I hate you... I hate you…I hate you…I
hate you… I hate you...” It continued, with a few breaks for
inhalation, until the tape ran out.
    “ New
message.”
    “ I hate you,
I hate you, I hate you….”
    Yvette had obviously felt
a need to