Googling can be both dangerous and weird.

I proved it to myself today, messing around with ethernet memory keepers, when I found a picture of the now-adult children of a now-deceased man fictionalized in my novel – the man who psychically scooted me up the interstate to the Playboy Club a while back, to try out.

And what’s even weirder – I never met his daughter (she was only eight years younger than I was at the time) (he was almost exactly ten years older than I was at the time, and I was quite literally barely twenty-one), and when the Club hired me but said I couldn’t use my real name, because they already had a Bunny Robin, which name did I want to use, I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say, so I picked the guy’s daughter’s name, even though I’d never seen her. And here I was today, looking her right in the eyes. Her father’s eyes. She looks like her father. He was very handsome. She is very pretty…AND NOW IN HER FORTIES. Mother of God.

And in the picture with her…her younger brother, who will never know how close he came to never being born out there in the West, because his daddy begged me more than once to come out West with him after he left me, high and dry. It was only a few months after he left that the begging phone calls started, and the visits back in town. I won’t go into the wild detail of it, but the begging went on for years, on and off, before, during and between our respective marriages. And this kid, in his mid-twenties now, would never have been born if I’d said yes, I’m on my way…

But the weirdest, weirdest part of all, is that below this picture was a picture of the man himself, older but still quite handsome, with the exact same halfway smartass smile, the same mustache, and a big, big cowboy hat sittin’ on his head.

You know, I hadn’t thought about this guy or much of anything or anyone else I wrote about and turned this way and that to craft a novel from, as the odd combination one just does have when combining the fodder of experience and imagination, but now that I have, finding out this man recently died, when I only remembered him and knew him as young and very much alive, really gave me pause.