Hey There

Hey now. It’s been a while. Almost a year, in fact. Where the heck have I been? What have I been doing? Not writing creatively, that’s apparent.

Let’s see….

The shortest answer is the most boring one: I’ve been working a lot more, focusing on generating as much income for myself as possible while it’s currently available. My profession is cyclical, with a fluctuating salary, for better and for worse. You eat what you kill and you need to eat while the food is plentiful. COVID has allowed me to work from home, which, paradoxically, has made me more productive than I’ve ever been. It’s been an introvert’s paradise in many ways and financially beneficial. Get up, get coffee, go to computer, log on, start work one or two hours earlier than normal. You can’t beat that, people. Going back to an office environment, whenever it happens, is going to suck in some ways. I’ve gotten used to this. On the other hand, I haven’t seen my assistant and many of my co-workers with my own eyes in three years. That’s weird.

What else? Trips to Chicago to try and maintain a long-distance relationship now going on two years, which per se presents a lot of challenges. It’s still the best relationship I’ve ever had apart from the distance, and we’ve done really well speaking on video every day (Thanks, WhatsApp!) and seeing each other as often as possible. But the circumstances of her family situation, some voluntary, some not, are really restrictive and have boxed her in, which limit what she’s able to do with her life until her kids are older. It can be frustrating and requires a great deal of patience and intentionality for both of us. This is a positive thing in some ways because we are very present and focused when we’re together, and we don’t take that time for granted. On the other hand, it would be nice to come home to her and go out to dinner on a whim before I’m 65 years old and contemplating retirement.

I mentioned leaving Facebook in my last post (damn, that was a while ago). In February, I completely deactivated my account after 12 years. It was liberating. No more keeping up with every trivial life event someone wants to celebrate. No more giving lip service empathy to someone’s bad life moment without giving it the time and attention it deserves. No more superficiality. No more annoyance and disappointment at viewing further evidence of the abject political stupidity or apathy of my friends and family. No more people knowing my business and using it against me, or someone I care about. No more me knowing their business. No more bullshit.

The people who cared still reached out to me offline and vice-versa. The people who didn’t, didn’t. It’s not like I moved to a cabin in Montana and stopped using electricity. I’m still findable. People still have my phone number and email address. I learned a lot about relationships and social media by leaving Facebook. A lot about myself and how I spend and waste my time. I learned that no one outside of my family and close friends will remember my birthday unless Facebook tells them first.

Is there a downside? Of course, as with everything there’s a downside. The biggest is that I lost contact with my family in Italy and friends who are overseas and in different states. They were the main reason I stayed on Facebook for so long. Now I’m far less able to keep up with them. Some of them have asked my mother where the F I am and why I’m not around anymore. I feel badly about that and don’t like it because some of them are older, and they’re not going to live forever. I also found that I really don’t know what the hell is going on with most friends and acquaintances at all any more because pretty much the only way they stay in touch is on Facebook. So in some ways, the pendulum has swung too far the other way. My choice is to be inundated with the trivial and “Look at me, give me attention!” or be left completely in the dark. There’s no happy medium.

I tried to mitigate this by posting on Instagram from time to time (which is owned by Facebook, of course), but Instagram is like 99.99% ads now and there’s little or no interaction, so it’s even more superficial and useless than Facebook. Instagram really sucks.

My Facebook withdrawal is a two-edged sword, but on the whole, the positives have far outweighed the negatives. I have a serious problem with Facebook as a company and with the role social media plays in our lives. Our laws and public consciousness have not caught up to either. Honestly, it’s an addiction, just like smoking. It may not affect our physical bodies like smoking does, but it does affect our brains, all those little dopamine hits and the surge of ego validation we feel every time we see a Like or notification from someone. It’s the same shit the casinos pull in Vegas to keep people at the slot machines and craps tables. This manipulative shit is STUDIED. It’s an intentional strategy. The goal is to keep eyeballs on web pages, sell ads, and make money. That’s the goal. The companies who do it best keep those eyeballs on their sites the longest.

All this said, I will probably get back on Facebook soon to resume contact with the few people I miss and share the occasional picture of my daughter with my family. I recently visited my aunt and uncle in Massachusetts–he’s 82 and really getting up there in age–and my aunt told me she missed seeing pictures of M. and seeing how she’s growing up. That made me sad and want to rethink some of this. I guess there are ways to mute people and control more of what I see and do there. It’s been a cleansing sabbatical that I can always return to. We’ll see.

Which brings me to Twitter and TikTok. For all that time I saved by shitcanning Facebook, I gave it back with increased activity on Twitter, and far less activity, but activity nonetheless, on TikTok, which E. introduced me to a couple of months ago. Call it a rationalization, but I get far more out of Twitter than I ever did from Facebook. Twitter is my main news source now. I don’t watch CNN or MSNBC and haven’t for a very long time, except for when there’s a speech or live event they’re showing. I read WaPo and WSJ and NYT, but they’re slow with breaking news and owned by one of the the 8 corporations that filter and control our news, and they never hammer political leaders the way they need to be hammered because they want to maintain continued access to these leaders and their corporate owners want to avoid adverse regulation by the people they’re questioning, so they pull their punches. At best, we get watered down “facts.” At worst, in the case of Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN, we get outright lies, propaganda, and disinformation passed off as “facts”. And now, after getting its ass handed to it by Fox News for the past decade and a half, CNN’s new leadership wants to turn CNN into Fox News. All of you profit-driven pigs, please go fuck yourselves.

So MSM is out for me. I’ll read those publications I mentioned (understanding that WSJ is owned by Murdoch and represents Wall Street interests and thus, is a cleaned up, respectable right-wing paper), but Twitter is where I get my news now. It requires a lot of due diligence of course. Gotta vet those sources and make sure someone isn’t making shit up before facts are known. But on Twitter, I get raw, unfiltered, critical opinion from people I respect, including foreign journalists who put ours to shame. I get to see what PALESTINIANS on the ground think about the Israeli occupation and how Israel is a disproportionate actor, using an elephant gun to kill a mouse. Good luck finding objective U.S. media to report on it. I get to see live, breaking footage of women in Iran challenging the theocracy there after the murder of one of theirs by Iranian “moral police” a couple of weeks ago. I get to see footage of the reality on the ground for Ukrainians who, against all odds, and with significant help from the West, have been punching Russia in the face for half a year now. I get to see opinions that make me question or solidify my own on guns, capitalism, immigration, and a host of other things. This is what news should be. And on a daily basis, I interact with people whom I don’t know, who are African-American, Asian, Latino, and tired, middle-aged white men like myself. They broaden my perspective and make me see things differently and see the world from their eyes.

All of this presents its own form of addiction, of course. And in many ways it’s more addictive than Facebook ever was because as Eckhart Tolle says, it directly impacts the mind. Every news hit, every post, every comment, every sports live blog is a dopamine hit.

Don’t get me started on TikTok. Jesus Christ. TikTok is like crack compared to everything else. You get the news, you get hilarious videos, you get tits and ass, you get life advice, you get recommended books, you get celebrity interaction, and you get it all in less than 2 minutes per. THEN the algorithm sees what you like and feeds you MORE based on how long your eyeballs remain on a particular video. TikTok is mind cocaine. It’s dopamine crack. Like 80s crack, not today’s watered-down crack. The good thing is, it’s so obvious how addictive and time-sucking TikTok is that it’s easier to be self-aware about it. I force myself to get off of it and not spend so much time there. TikTok is bad news for brains. And I’ll be damned if I let my daughter on it until she’s 30. Jesus.

What else? Well, for the first time in a long time, over the past year I’ve had to face the reality that the body I occupy cannot do the things my brain still thinks it can, and occasionally it will tell me to go fuck myself because it has other plans. I’ve had a couple of relatively minor–but could have been major if I continued ignoring them for too long–health situations to deal with over the past few months. All good now, but they were sufficiently painful at the time to wake me up to the fact that I have a shelf life, and I need to start living for the present, not worrying so much about the past and the future. I’m 54 now. Much of what I write about are First World Problems and Musings that take for granted that I have my health. When one’s health gets challenged in a life-altering way, it’s a serious wake up call, and it makes you really focus on what you want out of life and how you’re living your life. The COVID Era also gave people a serious scare and a lot of time to think. Now that we’re emerging from it, people want to live again. They want to travel, get out with people again, interact, and enjoy life. I’m craving all of that myself. I need to get my ass to Italy this year, and I will.

I don’t want to live a virtual life, I want to live a REAL life, while I’m still healthy enough to do it. My father hit his life wall at 74, eight years before that, actually, when he was diagnosed with dementia. He died 20 years from the age I am now. 9/11 happened 21 years ago, and those 21 years passed with a blink of an eye.

Like Andy Dufrense said: “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin.”

All of this seems like a jumble, but I think it’s all related.