Irrational Behaviour

Do you ever have times when you ask yourself what the Hell has happened to your life?  I know I do - in fact, I'm having one right now.  I mean, what in God's name has happened to me that I find myself stalking some bloke on Twitter because I suspect him of, well, I don't really know what I suspect him of.  I say 'stalking', but really it's just obsessively checking his Twitter feed, (obviously, I'm not actually 'following' him, as that might give me away), in the hope that his next Tweet might give me some clue as to, well, again, I don't really know.  It all started with a spam e-mail which appeared to come from a friend of mine.  Whilst I know all about how the spammers spoof email addresses to deceive the recipient into opening them, this one was disturbingly weird as it actually addressed me by my real first name, (none of my email addresses include my actual name, just a little quirk of mine in my attempts to retain some online privacy).  When I looked at the headers in detail, I saw the usual spammer tactics of creating a return email path by conflating my friend's email name with another domain.  So, out of curiosity, I looked up this domain, found this guy's website and consequently his Twitter feed.  And I've been irrationally stalking him ever since.  Whilst I know that it is highly unlikely that this guy had anything to do with sending the spam email, there's just something about the whole business which has set alarm bells ringing in my head.  Yeah, I know, I'm paranoid.

I sometimes think that paranoia is an inevitable side effect of having an active and vivid imagination.  Whilst being imaginative has many benefits, it's downside, I've always found, is that it also creates in you a tendency to try and turn everything into a 'narrative', joining dots to make patterns and plots that simply don't exist.  Modern technology doesn't help, with the internet and social media making it mush easier to indulge these fantasies and conduct 'investigations' into imagined 'suspects'.  It never eases to amaze me how easy some people make it for you to investigate them.  The amount of detail about themselves they put in the public domain on the web is terrifying.  In the case of the guy I've been stalking, I can now tell you all about his working life, his family and even where he lives, not just the town, but an exact address, (although, obviously, I'm not going to reveal any of this info here).  What I can't find, of course, is any genuine connection between him and either myself or my friend whose email address was hijacked.  Because, most likely, there isn't any such connection.  I just have an over active imagination.  Not to mention being paranoid.  Anyway, I've decided that this 'stalking' has to stop - it's achieving nothing and wasting energies which could be better spent elsewhere.  Although I might just check his Twitter feed one last time tomorrow, you know, just in case...