However, I did retain a "Friends and Family and Some Work People" Facebook, which kept me up to speed on the world. You haven't seen it, trust me. And won't, either, because I finally got fed up with it about a month ago and flushed it. Today's the last day I can recover it if I want, and just as I was considering that (and being amazed at the desire to do so, which ran contrary to every single fiber in my life) I ran across a Bukowski poem:
the telephoneAs soon as I read it, cold fingers played my spine and I knew I was done with FB, for real, for sure, forever. Via con Dios, Facebook, you hollowed-out, wired-together corpse of rotting, dry bone. Keep clattering random nonsense to yourself as you dance in the hot playa dust-devils just like you really have something to say. I've left your sad parody of life.
will bring you people
with its ring,
people who do not know what to do with
their time
and they will ache to
infect you with
this
from a distance
....
the telephone is needed for
emergency purposes only.
these people are not
emergencies, they are
calamities.
I went back on in April. I was lonely & bored, missing some peeps who didn’t communicate with me after I left in 2018. It is a giant shitpile. But there is an occasional something of interest.
ReplyDeleteYeah, my experience also, except the "Giant Shitpile" turned into a "Giant Shitpile Dumpster Fire" and finding the rare nuggets that made it worth slogging through (or around) the bone-deep dickheadery was like digging for pretty dime-store beads in a roaring tire-mountain blaze that even the fire department has given up on.
ReplyDeleteI continue to back out sloooowly. I enjoy the local history nerd groups and there are a few writers groups with promise. But most of my friends belong in quotation marks and the distraction of interacting with them doesn't actually serve me. Not sure what actual decision to make. Life is weird and uncomfortable anyway, so what's the difference.
ReplyDelete"Life is weird and uncomfortable anyway, so what's the difference." Up till fairly recently, I'd have agreed 100%. But the thing is that my life IS weirder and more uncomfortable than most I know by a considerable margin, and yet FB managed to keep growing in that category until it was actually an appreciable addition to the pile for all its insubstantiability. Is that a word? Astonishing, actually. In any event, I've taken to limiting or heavily managing the "weird and uncomfortable" chunks of my life. Turns out I have to inflict myself with a LOT less of them than I'd been accustomed to taking on and/or just dealing with. Facebook became one of those pleasures like hitting myself with a hammer: "Just think how good it's going to feel when I stop." Yeah, got plenty of those, thanks. Don't need another...
ReplyDelete