MySpace Party Crashes Town

GAGSBORO, KS – This small town in the heartland of America lost its electrical power  as a result of a party thrown by local Tad Wilcox, to which he had invited all 25,608 of his MySpace friends. The 25-year-old Wilcox is the director of web technology at Johnson’s Feed Store on Main Street. He had managed to fit in a year’s worth of work into three hours, and so was afforded a lot of paid time to concentrate on his passion – making friends on MySpace. Tad’s interests include “grain alcohol, girls with lips and hay snorkeling.”

A week earlier, Tad (MySpace moniker cornjazz) had posted a bulletin board message to all his friends that he was having a party at his parent’s home while they were in Oklahoma to see a tornado.  The timing was perfect, as all 25,608 of Tad’s friends had nothing planned for the next weekend – and to a man, woman and one eight-year-old boy (tonkadude) whose interests are “drinking 56-ounce Mountain Dews” and “playing video games that end in decapitation” -- they all arrived at the appointed hour.

Said neighbor, Edith Barrow: “I looked on down the road there and, darn, if all I could see was cars lined up for miles. Just like that baseball movie starring the handsome fellow, whatsisname, the colored guy, oh yeah, James Earl Jones.”

Yes, Tad Wilcox had built his MySpace friends network, and they had come. Moreover, each friend had brought along his or her laptop. Much of the party consisted of thousands of people looking at one another while IM-ing a particular friend sitting on the grass not five feet away.

Mike Powers (toolax) is a 42-year-old biker from Fresno, and the people he would like to meet are “Sonny Barger and Sonny Jurgenson.”  He sat atop his Harley cyber-communicating with Jenna Snell (jenelhell), a young lady with four nose rings, and dressed all in black except for a yellow happy face pin in which the smile was turned upside down.

toolax: wut up?

jenelhell: not much lol

toolax: just hanging, hah?

jenelhell: bored

There were thousands of such exchanges that day and night. Extension cords were plugged into every available socket in town to charge the laptops in order to keep the party going. Dino’s Bar and Grill went without its jukebox loaded with the tunes of Tim McGraw and Faith Hill to make room for a stray plug that allowed the continued existence of flexy, pimpmommy and zadza. The patrons were even nice enough to forgo watching Saturday Night at the Hog Races to give the invading mass the necessary energy to play You-Tube clips of a man castrating himself and calling it a vasectomy.

Everyone did their best to put their computers down long enough to take pictures of each other holding a cup of beer in one hand while using the other hand to display just their pinky and index fingers either right-side up and upside-down, depending on how rebellious was the poser. Then these crazy photos were quickly posted on the “pics” section of their MySpace profile.

But as the night neared its end, as Gagsboro’s power grid began to hemorrhage amps and electrons, the 25,608 friends realized that there was one friend missing in action, the most important friend of them all – Tom, 32, from Santa Monica, the man who had been everyone’s first friend when they signed up on MySpace. Everyone knew that Tom liked to serenade you with the song “Big Casino” by Jimmy Eat World, but it would be great to ask him – maybe in person using their larynx – why the hell such a cool guy likes Billy Joel.

Said an apprehensive Sally Greenwood (payola): “Some friends and I are wondering if Tom really exists, or if he is just a face we can put on our Friends Profile to help us not look like losers.”

Then, just as the town went dark save for 25,608 glowing laptops, Tom strolled up the driveway of Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox. Everyone’s fingers went still. Tom mounted someone’s ’98 Volvo and stood tall before extending his arms, and shouting: “My friends!”