Do I Know You?
With extreme trepidation I joined the legions of people on Facebook over a year ago after I was censored by the MySpace goon-squad and was likened to ‘lice’. Initially, I found the good-natured and well-mannered people on Facebook to be like crisp, clean sheets – seductive and a great comfort to linger about in on a Sunday afternoon. I’ve made some great friends on there, reconnected with old ones, sold art through it (which I never did on MySpace!), and found the conversations to be adult and way above the troll-like behavior of some of the gay message boards filled with shadowy faces and dubious profiles seemingly created for the sole purpose of flinging feces upon everyone and anyone on the internet.
You had to put your face and some information about yourself on Facebook – hence the name I gather – and meeting people was similar to doing an event or going into a bar and feeling very much like ‘fresh meat’. Good for the ego with none of the downsides. A pure win-win situation, I thought.
Then I started playing the little games and apps on there, spending way too much time clicking and poking and prodding at candy-colored tiles and flash or java based games. I’m a diabetic in a candy store who can’t stop filling his gullet with the oh-so-sweet treats, knowing all too well that I was wasting my time waiting for somebody to reply to my message or comment when they very well might be asleep in bed.
I got lazy somewhere between the crisp, clean sheets – thrusting my butt up in the air, much like my cat does when I come home demanding a good solid brushing, at best and at the worst, like some wanton sex fiend on Craigslist. Where I used to be rather suspect of anyone without a face on Facebook or just a photo and some brief blather about themselves that would make me walk away in any other social situation, I began adding people with glee abandon.
Blind invite after blind invite came so fast and so furious, studied for a brief moment in some sort of A.D.D. litmus test and then added just so I could go back to Scrabble or my Dungeons & Dragons Tiny Adventure or Castle Age, until I was so full of anonymous electronic Facebook semen that I just lost the will to stop. I’ve got ‘friends’ on my Facebook account that I can’t tell you one thing about. Not one! ‘Friends’ with such dubious taste in music, fashion, and some might say lacking in basic intelligence that maybe it is I who should have his head examined!
So I guess it begins and ends with me.
If I want the madness to stop, I have to apply the brakes. That means deleting everyone and anyone whom I don’t like, speak with, have no interest in doing things with, all those desperate people padding their friends lists with ‘cool’ people, even the hot ones, the ones who post Madonna concert footage, the ones who can’t be bothered to spell correctly, and those with personalities that must taste like cardboard. In real life, I have maybe 5 friends. Close friends. Online, I have over 600! Six-hundred people who don’t give a shit about me and frankly, that street goes both ways.
If that makes me a douche, so be it, but at least I’ll feel sane.
