I’m not dead

No, I’m not dead.

I just took some time off-line.

Facebook had gotten out of control for me.

With its belabored, oftentimes ignorant, political rants, random pictures of starving animals, stories of death, disaster, and for causing wasted hours at playing voyeur into the lives of people I may once had known but at this point, didn’t really care to “friend”.

Yes, it was nice to see what people were up to, but it ultimately became pathetic to see how hard some people were trying just to present themselves as something that they really were not and everyone knew it.

It got tiresome…

So, I decided to commit Facebook suicide and I deactivated my account.

My wife said that it was weird how all of my pictures faded from her Facebook. Like a ghost, I was there one minute and gone the next. She still sees me all the time so she got over it fast but it makes me wonder if anybody else misses me on their Facebook or if they ever even noticed that I was gone?

Oh well, it’s a small price to pay to be clean of the addiction known as Social Media. I never did really start to Twitter much, but to me now, it too seems like an opiate for people that thrive on drama and a need to be intimate. An opiate that’s awfully hard to kick.

Somehow, miraculously, without Facebook for 6 months I’m still in touch with most of the people that I care about and I don’t feel much of a loss over the rest.

Just before I gave it up, I ran into a Facebook friend that I had not actually seen since high school nor did we ever communicate directly. The only thing we ever did was friend each other and I can’t recall who “friended” who. Yet, from that point forward we both knew what was going on in each others lives as if we were related. Most of it I never noticed but some of it, I couldn’t help but follow.

So, what I think could have turned out to be a nice encounter with an old pal turned out to be an awkward 5 minutes and I felt as though I had “too much information” once again.

I knew about the gravity of his personal problems just as he knew my current lot in life, which then, as now, is quite happy. It made me feel guilty and I certainly didn’t want to talk to him about it then, at that moment, in that location or ever.

I couldn’t even think of a way to bring it up without sounding pitiful and small, talking about the weather or some obscure recollection from our collective experience.

And that was it. I gave it up. I pulled the plug.

I couldn’t go offline completely, as work requires me to maintain a professional presence but I could completely give up writing anything about myself in the public domain.

For me, Facebook had morphed my love of writing into a love of “checking in” and its embarrassing to think back of how trite I had become.

Now, after about 6 months of abstention, I’m ready to write again but this time try to only share things through a well-filtered lens, and only on certain subjects.

I will be writing short stories, vignettes, spoofs as well as a few other random musings but I’m no longer going to share my every move with a haphazard collection of “friends” that I managed to collect yet never truly connected with.

If you have read this I thank you and I hope that I present a few things that you find entertaining in the near future.