Before I leave Facebook: FB Posts November 2018 – May 2019

Stories & Observations from a Social Media Memoir 

Preface

I avoid full names & Facebook hyperlinks to maintain some degree of privacy. As people gripped in the passing urgency and speed of social media rarely spell in Standard English or punctuate, I left all actual comments copied over as they were and are, ergo as (sic), Latin for the English thus. Quotes are placed in quotation marks. Ellipses preceded by quotation mark and followed by text imply the name of the Facebook friend addressed was removed, such as “…gotta go there!” People’s names in conversation were replaced by, “Friend.” I also broke up the long, socmed style blocks of sentences into shorter paragraphs.

Plus I use a version of an international dating standard for calendars that makes more sense to me as it’s logical and less tainted by religious and nationalist hubris: day, date, month, year, era.

This series of socmed vignettes begins in the eleventh month of the previous year.

My exit from the corporatized commons of socmed began back in the Great Global Recession as my life fell apart. Felt too overwhelmed by a crush of shame, hurt, fear, anger, and melancholia to write much at all. Those times gradually faded and I began to reemerge. But I began to leave once and for all in late summer of 2017 in the wake of heartbreak as a romantic relationship that seemed so serendipitous with a “this is it, finally!” quality faded away on the Pacific Crest Trail as ghosts between trees.

More and more information emerged as well as to how so many corporations including high-tech, internet-related, and social media companies were manipulating, misusing, and even abusing our private, personal data. Governments were engaged in this toxic stew as well. Criminal hackers, corporate spies, and government controllers interfered more and more with our lives. The rise of populist and extremist politicians of all stripes left and right further poisoned socmed and their rabid, ideologically rigid, slobbering followers turned social media into a toxic wasteland of dueling echo chambers where so-called Influencers dominated with their capitalistic narcissism. I got frakken sick of what I once loved and enjoyed becoming a putrid void of well, vomit, blood, and shit. I had to get out!

Leaving this emotionally distracting digital world began to speed up in November of 2018 and by Spring of the following year I was done. Didn’t delete my account, however, as the task to save fotos, especially of my children as they grew up to explore their lives is a laborious one. As is gathering the contact info of so many wonderful, faraway friends I desire to stay connected with regardless of socmed. Aye, this is my Exit back into the real world, my exit to a wild Cascadia, a world where even Terabithia is more real than socmed.

Peace.

 

Sunday 11 November 2018

The horror of World War 1 ended with a ceasefire 100 years ago today, although people continued to die by the millions in the numerous revolutions and civil wars left blazing on nearly every continent while the Spanish flu pandemic burned grimly around the globe. My paternal grandfather, Carol M. Bass, served in the United States Navy in those terrible times. He fought in the North Atlantic hunting German submarines. His ship sunk subs full of sailors from the other side. I remember asking him what it was like way back when I was a preteen lost in fantasies of glory.

Pops, our name for him, struggled to describe his experience. He didn’t say much, and he died of cancer when I was 12, so all I can recall were impressions as if splashed with black and red paint and cold water. Pops said being on a ship out at sea during the winter was freezing cold and sometimes scary. The ocean was immense, dark, stormy, and deep. The ship was small and noisy. He and his fellow sailors lived in dread of being torpedoed by German U-Boats and going down far from anywhere. Even when the ocean was calm and beautiful. Continue reading

Blue Light White

So tired of Facebook love
So tired of falling in love with beautiful women so far away
Brilliant women, too
Remarkable women
Deep soulful women
Most seem too young
Oh, there’re a few close to me in age
Some even older
Every one a Goddess Incarnate within the human animal
But all too far away

I throw my smartfone into the darkness
It glows back at me as blue as a UFO
Keeps me up at night
Keeps me awake all night
Until I go crazy with loneliness
Or am I crazy from too much light?

The digital bonds stretch into emptiness
More yawning than the desert twilight
Roads disappear into
Before time snaps me awake

I want a hotel
A place to sleep
Can we fuck now?
Hell no
No connection
All is unplugged
Too virtual
And dead
Minds zoned gray as grey
Hearts still as stones before the tide
But no water comes
Only sand.

Quickly I retrieve my fone amidst inky stillness
I text too much still
Without ever coming close to filling the Void
Facebook feeds us all into like blue and white Soylent Light

Out among destroyed celestial spheres and broken stars
Shiva battles pseudo-Shivas as real as every machine
To save darkness from white light blue.

 

William Dudley Bass
Sunday 13 March
&
Monday 21 March 2016
Seattle, Washington
U.S.A.
Cascadia

Copyright © 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.