Google At Your Own Risk

I've decided to stretch out my Asia traveling posts even longer, and intersperse them with my usual rantings. I promise I will eventually get through the whole trip. It might just take a few months.

---Deni


Like a lot of you out there I do a decent amount of people Googling. Not the celebrity or historical figure Googling, but of people you know or used to know. We all do it, just like we all Google ourselves from time to time. I don't do that very often, and usually it is just this blog that shows up anyway. I used to show up quite often in reviews of plays that I had directed, but since I don't really do a lot of that these days those don't really show up too much anymore.

But quite often I will type in the name of some long lost friend or acquaintance if I happen to think about them and will suddenly want to know where they're at and what they are doing with their lives.

It is also true that I have Googled the names of certain bullies or some other ass hole I hated in high school, secretly hoping to find an obituary, arrest report or sex offender registry. But alas, nothing like that has turned up yet. I'm still convinced that John Knox from Lake Zurich High School in Illinois must have turned out to be a serial rapist. I'm just sure of it.

But mostly I use it to try to find people with whom I actually would like to get back in touch. If you've done this yourself you know it doesn't work as often as you like. If you had a friend a long time ago named John Smith you are basically screwed. But every once in a while you get a hit. My friend Ben, who I've known since about 3rd grade in Georgia, has a unique enough of a last name that he was the first thing to pop up when I typed in his name. That led to reconnecting with our mutual friend Ian since Ben was still in touch. Great to reconnect and for the most part no real major revelations, Ben still married to the girl he married the last time I had seen him, though no kids, which I suppose surprised me a little. Ian had gotten married since I had last seen him, not a real surprise since that's what a lot of people do between the ages of 22 and thirty-something.

I thought my friend Lee Baca from high school in Illinois had a unique enough name that he would pop up right away, but it turns out that he has the exact same name as the sheriff of Los Angeles. I'm not sure how many pages I scrolled through before I gave up on that one. Like I said, not always a successful search.

I'm not an easy one either. If anyone from my pre-college past has ever tried to Google search me they would have hit dead ends as well. I changed the spelling of my first name during college. That's actually why I recently added to my blogger bio to include my old spelling and the cities I've lived in, just in case any old friends are looking for me. Or any ass hole bullies having a Flatliners moment in life and want to make up for previous wrongs.

The other night for some reason I thought about my old friend Andy Riemer from Lake Zurich High School in Illinois (I moved my senior year in case you are confused about the Georgia/Illinois thing). I haven't seen Andy since probably 1991, when a bunch of us went up to see him one summer weekend after he had moved to some godforsaken hell-hole called Richland Center in Wisconsin.

Andy was the friend I hung out with the most my first year out of high school. I was still hanging around the shit hole suburb of Lake Zurich because I didn't have the money to start college yet, and Andy was a year behind me in school so he was still stuck there too. Typical of all my friends, he was a misfit as well. The only person I ever knew who answered "Stray Cats" to the question of favorite band. Seriously, do you know anybody who says the Stray Cats are their favorite band?

He had a pretty screwed up home life. His dad seemed fairly distant and grumpy all the time, his younger brother was into killing small animals and had way too many weapons and he had an older brother who was a coke-fiend. A coke-head to the point that one night we were hanging at his place when his parents were out of town and we found his brother passed out in one of the rooms, with his arms kind of up in the air and his hands in a stiff, claw-like position.

Beyond being distant, his parents were generally pretty shitty too. Even though he was still in high school, when he turned 18 they booted him out of the house. So he moved in with my family. He was there for a while. We had planned to room together at college the next year, but he ended up not graduating. At some point he moved out of my mom's house and up to Wisconsin where his parents had moved. I don't know if they asked him back in to the fold or if he begged back.

Between my being in school in downstate Illinois and his residence being in Wisconsin we didn't see each other very often after that. The final time was the aforementioned weekend of wild debauchery at his apartment in Richland Center after he moved out, or was booted out, of his parents' place again. There is actually video of this weekend out there somewhere that would kill me if I decided to start a political career.

Sometime after this Andy went off the deep end. I'm not sure when or how it happened, but at some point he had a born again moment and became a Jesus freak. He had been drifting and was pretty damn vulnerable, which is exactly was those religious fanatics look for in a victim. Eventually Andy shunned our friend Rachel, probably his closest friend at the time, because she had a history of bisexual relationships. My last conversation with him was about how he treated her and my own status as a non-born again. I don't remember the exact quote, but he said something to me along the lines of his duty now being about converting people, and if they won't then he would be done with them.

And that was the end of what had been a pretty close friendship. Last I heard he was still in Wisconsin, married with a kid and still über-religious, but that was probably more than a decade ago.

Like I said, I was thinking about him the other night for some reason. So I typed his name in to Google.

I wish I hadn't.

I had hopes that I would find out he got through his religious wackery phase and became like a normal human again. Completely the opposite was true. He seems to have gotten in even deeper and become even more of a loon.

I found a blog he keeps right here on blogger, called Riemer Ramblings, which is just basically a journal of his mundane family life. First thing I find out is that he doesn't just have one kid, he has NINE FUCKING CHILDREN! It is just not possible that I was ever friends with someone who would go on to have nine kids. I looked around his blog looking for clues to this being a different Andy Riemer, but it was him. Mentions of places he's lived pretty much sealed it.

And he is still praising god all the time, using capital letters for the h's in him and he, and always thanking him for the few good things that come their way. He even does this when the good thing was something done for them by an actual flesh and blood human being. Some people bought them some groceries, others gave them money when their new kid was sick in the hospital. He wrote posts each time thanking god and saying how he always provides, instead of writing how thankful he is for the PEOPLE that provided for his family in a time of need. He is, of course, a worship leader for a small congregation, whatever the hell that means.

I thought I was going to be sick. I couldn't believe this was actually someone who was once a friend of mine, a close friend at that. The worst was a post he wrote about Wal-Mart, which you really should read to believe. He puts up a letter he wrote to Wal-Mart to make a complaint. It was a really, really long letter that came down to two basic beefs with the local Super Wal-Mart. Their substandard grocery bagging by their clerks and the quality of their produce. At one point he suggests a retraining every month of their clerks on correct bagging, I fucking kid you not.

See, myself and the kind of people I generally hang around have our own beefs with Wal-Mart too. But our complaint is Wal-Marts substandard fucking waged they pay their poor slaves, not that the underpaid, overworked people accidentally put toilet paper in the same bag as the frozen food.

Typical of most religious people I experience. They claim to care about the world but they are really only interested in their own self-satisfaction and convenience. Any negative effect it has on the rest of the world isn't their problem.

He even at one point, I kid you not, accuses them of going upscale like Target. Let me say that again, he accuses them of going upscale like Target.

I can't possibly have ever known this guy.

I didn't leave him a message. What could I have said? "Hey man, long time no talk. I see you are still a crazy bible-thumper who has made both your life and the world a worse place by breeding too goddamn much." Probably wouldn't have gone over well.

Oh Google, you have brought me so much joy. I suppose enduring some bad every once in a while is a small price to pay for what you give us. But this one was really painful.

I would have been better off not knowing.