WE’RE living in ex-obsessed, stalk-happy times.
From MySpace to Facebook to applications like TweetStalk (which lets Twitter users follow others without their knowing), 2009 is a rough time for moving on with your life. Witness the case of publicist-turned-accused-digital-hacker Ali Wise, who was arrested recently on felony charges of computer trespass and eavesdropping after allegedly hacking into another woman’s voice-mail account.
Think that’s bad? That’s just the tip of the I-don’t-want-to-get-over-you-berg.
“After my divorce, I decided to do a Google research project, and the title of the project is, ‘Who Is My Ex-Wife Sleeping With?’ ” confesses 45-year-old comedian Marc Maron, who turned his obsession with his ex-wife into a one-man play, “Scorching the Earth,” which recently showed at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival. Within a half-hour, he easily found out his ex was dating a “screenwriter who was Harvard-educated, comes from a rich family, writes for a TV show and has a script deal with a major studio.”
“All I didn’t find,” says Maron, “was footage of them having sex, and stopping in the middle to turn to the camera and laugh at me.” He pauses. “I’m not saying it’s not out there. I just didn’t want to search anymore.”
It seems the question nowadays isn’t: Are you going to get crazy about an ex? Rather, it’s: How crazy are you going to get?
Consider: The woman who figured out a voice-mail code for her ex (he spelled his name numerically), checked his messages for three solid weeks to discover he was cheating with two different women, then called Woman 1 pretending to be Woman 2. Or the lady who faked cancer to get back together with her ex . . . for one magical week. Or the man who found out his ex-wife’s e-mail password (it was her license plate number — “she was really into her car”) and discovered the sketchy New Age guy she was cheating on him with was now asking to borrow $1,000.
Classy-town.
“I would look every day at my ex’s MySpace to see if he changed it to single, and then he deleted me and all my friends,” confesses 28-year-old Alexis. “Then I took a Landmark Forum class, and they brainwash you and encourage you to invite a person you’re trying to seek forgiveness from to come to your graduation night. So I invited my ex.”
He politely declined. So when she got an e-mail intended for him from the Mac store six months later, she forwarded it to him, and said, “Dear Passive Aggressive P – – – y, Please remove my address from your Apple account. I do not care to read what boring items you purchase. Thanks!”
Ah, love.
But it’s Internet personality Tionna Smalls who has perhaps the best story of all. A few years back, the chesty soon-to-be VH1 love expert logged into her ex’s Sprint PCS account and read his e-mails from a new “low-budget girl who was asking to borrow $20.” Then she called the new girl to inform her that she was still messing around with the ex. In one final stab to make him “sweat her,” she used his debit card to buy paper online. That’s not slang. She just bought a bunch of paper. Twenty reams. Four hundred dollars worth.
Then Smalls hit bottom when she went over to his house, tried to confront him, he closed the door in her face, she punched the door in, fell down his stairs and her pants fell down. Unfortunately, she was going commando.
“My whole ass was out, stretch marks and all, honey. I was so embarrassed, I realized, I got to get my mind right,” says Smalls.
“But after a year or two, he started looking like a crackhead, so it all ended well for me. Holla!”
mstadtmiller@nypost.com