Way back in the summer of 2009, I decided to join this hip, happening thing. Yes, I decided to be a joiner. I had been steadfast in my refusal to join that ghetto alley known as myspace, but this thing seemed different, cleaner.
Some of the thirty-something women in my Math 501 (Teaching Math to Elementary Students) class would go wild over 15-minute breaks, checking their walls with enthusiasm and the kind of pull that once drew me outside to the alley outside the newsroom for three minutes of sucking down a Marlboro.
With any big sale, there’s always that moment that will make or break everything, the definitive phrasing and word play that will seal the deal. A few years back, this gal wrote me a note on library stationery, saying, “If you want someone who will stick with you through thick and thin, I’m it.”
Bingo!
Sure I was non-commital, emotionally elusive and clandestine, but this young lady threw a sales pitch at me, uniquely marketed to my needs and desires. Not everyone in my sphere is to be trusted and somehow this pretty young thing had detected that loyalty and perseverance were highly valued commodities in my world.
I’ll marry you
It was a similar, if not quite intense situation in 2009when I started my illustrious blog – you know, that expression of my inner energy which I launched and hold to with fierce obstinacy and manly control even though my wife calls it the “bane of her existence.” So I was reading an on-line article about how to promote “jguywrite.”
If you want your work to be noticed, you must join Facebook
So I joined up as it was the practical thing to do. Naturally, I didn’t mention this to Liana right away. But there’s always someone breathing at my heels, a hell-hound on my trail – an insatiable little woman who will probe into a life with journalistic devotion and shamelessness and hold me accountable for every little decision I make.
“I see you’ve joined Facebook,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s right,” I answered.
“I thought you were a rebel,” she said. “I thought you didn’t go with the status quo. Now, you’ve sold out and joined The Establishment.”
“Well hell, I gave over my soul to you as well, didn’t I?”
“Never thought I’d see the day,” she continued. “J. Guy, the rebel, the non-conformist jumping on the bandwagon.”
“I see your point,” I responded. “But, good or bad, facebook is an excellent resource for promoting my blog.”
Eye rolls from Liana.
Soulless superhighway
Initially things are fresh and inviting. Lost connections from high school and college are friending me and I’m doing the same for them. The largest giant leap for mankind takes shape in the form of a special request from Adam, my old buddy from the outside whom I have recently reconnected with.
“Will you write for me on my new website?” he asks. “I’m crossing my fingers that you’ll say yes.”
FB initiated opportunity mixed with shameless appeals to my vanity. Sonovobitch knew how to play it.
I agree to it. The opportunity revives the youthful energy I held dormant so long in a world of marital concessions, sterile jobs, in-laws and twenty-something hung-over guilt. Adam and I communicate frequently by social network. We’re messaging back and forth one day when he informs me – emotional understatement in his text – that wife number 2 wants a divorce.
In the meantime, my own wife is asking who the woman is (from high school, college, my so-called working life) wanting to be my “friend.” It’s any woman I might be a “friend” of on the lost highway where all faces look before you from an impersonal glass screen, nightly companions blaring into your life like a dysfunctional family.
“Who’s that woman?” she asks. “And why is Adam Knapp friends with her?”
“Adam Knapp’s friends with everybody,” I respond. “The man has more ‘friends’ than some D-list celebrities. You know he’s a facebook whore.”
Family dysfunction, both deep-seated and manufactured by technology, seeps through a viral pipeline.
“Why won’t you friend your step-mother?” asks Liana, who long ago caved into lamebook and invited people from her family and mine to be constantly in our lives via social network.
“She’s a sweet old lady,” Liana says. “Do you have some bitterness toward your step-mother.”
“I like my step-mom just fine,” I say. “Wonderful lady, but facebook was not invented for 70-year-old women.”
Meanwhile, there is my mother-in-law – a woman only in her mid 50s. “Mom” is a sweet lady (not that step-mom is not; she’s just old) so I gave her the privilege of making her a friend.
“Are you doing okay,” she asks me. “You sounded a little blue on facebook the other day.”
Her 20-year-old son did not de-friend “Mom,” not even when he grew weary of the matron figure commenting and dispensing maternal wisdom over his every post.
“How can you Christians say there is a God of Love when you are a bunch of hypocrites who talk up some bullshit deity I’ve never seen and condemn anyone who doesn't agree with you to burn in hell forever?” the angst-filled young man posts.
“Wyatt, I’m so proud that that my son is so open in expressing his opinions,” Mom, never far behind, writes back. “While I wish you could grasp how much God loves you and wants to enter a personal relationship with you, I will respectfully accept that you are a growing young man with his own opinions, searching for his own way in life. Your mother is with you all the way as you go about this journey of self-discovery. I appreciate the young man you are becoming and I value your honesty and openness.”
Within a week, he told “Mom” he was deleting his facebook account, then started another one under a different name the sweet woman did not know about.
Meanwhile, I befriended a young man from the university who wears his heterosexuality on his sleeve like a 20-year-old Jeff Guy. One of the “likes” on his profile is a site devoted to the cause of safe sex. Penciled drawings of females and males, respective reproductive organs blowing in the wind for physicians and nurses to examine.
Listen. I’m all for safe sex (“There is no safe sex except in marriage,” my mother would say if she were on lamebook, which – thank GOD, she is not.) but I don’t want a picture of a guy’s schlong hanging out on my fb wall for God, Grandma and the damn world to see. Of course, neither of my grandmothers are going to see my lameass profiles because they’re not on fakebook. Also, they’re dead. But it’s the principle of the thing.
"Playboy magazine named Ablah Library at the university one of the top 10 college locations in America to get busy in,” young testosterone-driven man posts.
Eyes rolling.
Walls erected
“My family does not want their names mentioned in any more of your blogs without first reading what you have written,” lovely wife tells me. “And Mom wants Wyatt’s name taken out of that blog you wrote last week about the murder.”
Face tightening. Eyes shut as I sit before a glass teat, hands fixed in a motion I learned long ago in a high school typing class. A crescendo of volatility building up in me, such as has rarely been seen since I was quite young, student-like and trying to maintain on a testosterone-fueled Jim Beam and cigarettes rage.
“Okay, I will take the name out,” I said. “And I will never breathe their names into one of my columns again, but one day – one day! (voice builds into a serrated staccato rhythm) they will be begging me to write about them.”
I say something about how I’m happy to have “Mom” as a “friend”, but I’m going to hide all fb posts from her and if she wants to see my blog, she can google it.
“I hate your blog,” this beautiful woman says.
“Well I don’t see why,” I answer. “You know I love love love you.”
“What am I going to do with you?” she asks, shaking her head.
“I don't know,” I say. “You know I love the shit out of you.”
Somehow, as if through waves underground, I feel our relationship maturing in ways I never imagined possible with anybody when I was early twenty-something, perpetually drunk and living on libido – years I’m glad were never chronicled on facebook, twitter or youtube.
But I won’t get into that here as I’m not one to wear my emotions on my sleeve.
