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.

My grandfather didn’t get caught up in the squabbling over the stupidity of a war waged primarily as an international civil war between imperial Eurasian aristocrats using legions of the working class as cannon fodder. He didn’t consider how a toxic mix of big banks, corporations, and nationalism led to the Great War and fueled it like fat tossed upon the fire. Pops felt the necessity of civic duty to step forward and serve his country even if he didn’t always like everything going on within his nation. He’ll go out among heaving waves into the howling wind and lashing rain.

Used to have a medal of his, now lost in a house fire a few years ago. Kept it upon my desk as a reminder of choices we sometimes must make even when we don’t want to. The medal was an old, tarnished coin-like thing. Face-up was an image of a woman in a long dress waving good-bye or hello with a smaller, encircled image of the Goddess of Justice. On the back is inscribed, “Presented by the citizens of Richmond, VA to C.M.B. (illegible) in grateful recognition of patriotic service in the World War, 1917-1918.”

Today the United States is led by an authoritarian usurper too goddamn cowardly to walk in the rain and stand in wet, mowed grass to honor those who fell in battle. This shameless bully couldn’t “celebrate” as he had wanted. The Great War was a great folly that altered our planet forever, and so the leaders of our so-called major powers today best remember this as they boast and connive and play fast and loose with thermonuclear weapons as their warriors engage in near-misses with planes and ships while big banks and transnational corporations profit. Today’s news is fraught with the dangers of another world war. The mainstream hyperbole is bad enough, but it’s the grim analyses of experts in the field who wave the reddest flags.

Pops, I can’t imagine what you and your fellow warriors went thru or felt way back on the 11th of November 1918 or know what your opinions were, and I bow my head to your service anyway. Then I raise my head to look out the kitchen windows of a house in Cascadia built before an anti-Turkish, pro-Russian Serbian nationalist half a world away shot dead the Archduke of the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. I gaze west from the bluffs of my beautiful city into the spectacular Olympic Mountains as the morning sun lights them up. 

I lose composure for a moment and cry.

 

Monday 9 November 2018

Sunset. Soft as clouds. Our star Sol eased down the sky well before 5 then plunged into thin layers of clouds adrift. Orange-pink colors spun out like drapes twisting across blushing skies as Sol vanished behind mountains and sea. The foothills and mountains of the Olympics, due west of me atop a ridge here in Seattle, rise to fade away in layers of blue and gray with traces of indigo orange and vermillion wistfulness. Sunset’s at 16:30 world time on the Pacific coast of Cascadia, but the approaching clouds swallowed up our star 10 or 12 minutes earlier. As I sit still in the open window 3 stories up in this old house built over a century ago and gaze into the vast void of endarkening haze enveloping the Olympics, I hear the quiet thunder of Cthulhu groaning deep beneath cracking ice.

 

Thursday 13 December 2018

Up & down & even sideways for weeks now. Having a difficult time getting back into social media. I don’t miss it, not a’tall, tho, I do miss all of y’all. Outside my kitchen windows in the silver mist a man next door hidden within an orange hoodie quakes as every hammer blow from his backhoe jolts the neighborhood. I wrote my oldest daughter a chain of 30 texts regarding writing & acting when an email would’ve been a better medium, except who read emails any longer? Reads them as one use to read handwritten letters? Time for me to finish my late morning cup of coffee, some paperwork, & scoot off to my job in the center of the city where people ebb & flow from all across the planet. Aye, loves, gotta git, lickity split.

 

Friday 28 December 2018

Do love to gaze west out those big kitchen windows before me as I mull over present, past, & future with a mug of black coffee in my hands. Layers & textures of silver & gray shade into blue juxtaposed across determined dark green evergreens, leafless birches & maples, & resilient bamboo & herbs gone wild. Dying Christmas lights fade into the end of 2018, and my neighborhood on the Ballard-facing side of Phinney Ridge is quiet. The realms around our dark, wild center resembled an extraterrestrial airport carnival every night for a month, I enjoyed watching all those happy lights, but the only things landing were ravens & seagulls, crows & sparrows, and sunshine & rain. A small, yellow car whips around the traffic circle below, zooms uphill, & outmanuevers an SUV. People do what people do, ya, with their reasons, memes, & genes, lost in the confidence they know the truth.

 

Monday 31 December 2018 

Awoke after a heavy slumber into a world of mist, heavy mist, omnipresent & omnivorously malevolent. What is with all this damn fog on the last day of 2019 here in Seattle? Ahhh, but sleeping 10 hours after a week of exhaustion felt incredibly nourishing. Not feeling guilty one minute I should’ve popped up before the crack of dawn & zoomed up into the mountains to catch the morning sun paint the rocks & snow in golden alpenglow. Whoa, wait, a beam of sunshine enters thru the windows. A perfectly circular hole opens in the clouds to reveal yon blue expanse. Will it last? Ahhh, my cup of hot Irish tea, black, is ready. Coffee stays shelfbound & unground. For now. Love, Peace, & Hugs, all! For now.

Later…A friend from my grad school days back in the MFA way who remembered my trekking up the Appalachian Trail with Gwen posted me a link to an article for an amazing new trail 15,000 miles long:

Hickman, Matt. “Canada opens world’s longest hiking trail that stretches coast to coast,” Mother Nature Network, MNN dot Com: https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/blogs/canadas-great-trail-stretch-15000-miles-coast-coast?fbclid=IwAR1QVBvAtrI3fvVz8E3bUidGgyjMXdPtYazVoVQoPItdCMYFL4_tHfR4Pgk.

This new year 2019 C.E. starts off with calls by friends to two of my favorite outdoor adventure activities, and a memorial of sorts to someone who once inspired me from a distance. Well, one adventure was posted on the last day of 2018, and I’ll take it right here in 2019, woo HOO!

 

Wednesday 2 January 2019

I remember Margie Profet, a radical and controversial evolutionary biologist, back in the day. She’s a year older than I am. Never met her personally, but reading her research papers and her theories on the intersections between allergies, menstruation, immunology, cancer, infections, and evolution galvanized my imagination. Especially back when I was a licensed massage therapist & master bodyworker & registered counselor as well as a former W-EMT who was part of a small, informal network searching for some kind of mindbodyheart TOE, a theory of everything.

Margie Profet’s work was an inspiration. Those days have long since passed, however, and I find myself on my own journey into oblivion. No, wasn’t any successful genius like she was, but her disappearance resonates with me. Her story echoes with rich lessons, warnings, even, for what direction to go and not to go as the ebb tides flow. The Wild always awaits, tho sometimes more in the mind than far over the Dakobed Range into the Upper Napeequa.

Well, Margie Profet, here’s to you wherever you are. Life finds a way, ya know, to live no matter what, and may yours somehow, somewhere flourish as well.

Martin, Mike. “The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Genius,” Psychology Today, PsychologyToday dot Com, 2012, 2019. See: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201205/the-mysterious-case-the-vanishing-genius?fbclid=IwAR30LhSiwkGshy6-ABMKIveyvuw0DTZoKRoAQkmD_bu27d439L-9S0z55Xo.

“You have a rich past!” my Canadian writer friend wrote.

 

Friday 4 January 2019

My former classmate from high school decades ago posted a video by “ViralHog” at VT to my FB page of a whitewater kayaker paddling down a long, hairy waterfall slide.

“For some reason (perhaps a long time ago previous post of yous) had me thinking of you!” she wrote.

My response: “Me, maybe, ah, maybe 20 – 25 yrs ago, LOL! Thanks, Friend! I’da be a wee bit whiggy bout being stuffed into the offset cave just above the last slide. Yeah, was a time whitewater was kinda like a religion for me. I was obsessed with paddling. Wasn’t ever all that great as I wasn’t a natural athlete, but I worked & trained hard at kayaking as best as I was able to, and eventually worked my way up to running some very difficult & demanding rivers & creeks. Wasn’t ever interested in racing or rodeo, just exploring extreme wilderness. As I got better, made fewer & fewer mistakes, but when I did the consequences were terrifying. Finally stopped by the time child #2 of 3 entered into my life.

She: “I knew you no longer did this for the very reasons you stated, but I recalled a photo that you posted from way back then and, of course, this had me thinking of that photo. Even in my younger days, I’d not be able to do this – I still prefer the speed and horsepower of one horse. 🙂 Take care and Happy New Year!”

Me again: “Friend, backatcha! May 2019 bring a big, messy heap o snorts & giggles! And good health & joy, too!”

 

Monday 7 January 2019

Bussing home from work. Metro coach had to squiggle our long, articulated bus around a tractor trailer stuck beneath an angled overpass. Signs in the dark. Aging Aurora bridges & roads constructed decades ago, we talkin’ 1920s & 30s!, covered in a mix of grey, grungy graffiti & bright, colorful murals.

City on the edge of the continent surrounded by increasingly distant wilderness being torn down and rebuilt atop its self before the next big earthquake or volcanic eruption. Twas a fitting metaphor, however, of rocketing increases in masses of people taking mass transit instead of stuck in cars.

Yet here was a big, human-operated tractor trailer truck stuck under a bridge almost three quarters of a century old. Truck stuck under a bridge. Reminded me somehow of the predicament my country is in at the moment, indeed most of the world.

Elicited 16 emojis, 9 comments, and then even more emojis & responses to comments, LOL…

A friend wrote: “We’re crumbling. Bug-out bag at the ready. Nowhere to go.”

A coworker also wrote: “Dude that’s some good writing there. Wow”

A distant cousin back in rural Virginia wrote: “These places, these examples of age or flawed design or overuse are only another hazard in our landscape. They are everywhere. In the city and in the wilderness. A competent truck driver knows what street he should avoid. A competent trekker knows to find a safe campsite.”

My response: “…Aye, indeed. This is the thing, tho: the pace of change is accelerating faster than we can keep up with it all. New people moving in from everywhere are unfamiliar with new places especially here in Seattle where the city is unrecognizable. People who’ve been here awhile don’t even know which way to go where from one day to the next. GPS can’t keep up with road closures.

That truck was boxed in heading west to turn back south…no other way except to drive east and zig zag north & south to go west. It’s insane. We’re insane, LOL!

We’ve so over reliant on technology we dare not look up because hey to do so might mean we all get off the bus to redirect traffic and push & help each other out in a small town yeah we know who y’all be sleepin’ with but we’re all in the same bathtub without a paddle here kinda way while we dream of love & tranquility & good health while waiting for those big ass asteroids to hurry up & get here to clear the planet clean.

Such will only happen, tho, the moment we have to pee rilly super bad but we’re too stuck binging Netflix to go to the bathroom. Wonder what happened to the truck stuck under the bridge and its driver, tho.

Faraway cousin: When is it time for you to leave the city, at least to keep it at arm’s length?

Me, again: “…now, lol”

My New England friend: “Who uses squiggle ? <3 <3 <3 I approve this message as well !”

My transnational-based-in-the-UK writer friend: “Great metaphor”

 

Thursday 10 January 2019

Too many people who use compasses keep adjusting the declination as if it’s still 1970. Or 1990. Gravity is uneven around our planet, & the magnetic poles are moving more quickly than ever. Fascinating and often overlooked. Our magnetosphere has been in decline for some time as well, and that’s unhealthy for both our biosphere & our electronics.

Posted this article with my observation: 

Witze, Alexandra. “Earth’s magnetic field is acting up and geologists don’t know why,” Nature. January 2019: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00007-1?fbclid=IwAR1aK4MDeCec_cVrd24Oj1t6prVuH0diDbz8DcPWLALTawwUV6cRJUNx6R4.

Elicited 10 emojis & a range of comments. Fascinating to the degree, pun intended (must we write, “pun intended,” whenever a damn pun’s indeed an indubitable one?) people quickly derailed the original direction of mercurial thrust.

A Pagan friend: “To say nothing about how far off our collective moral compass has gotten!”

Me: “…Indeed!”

One of my New England friends: “That I can relate to!”

My Bay Area friend down in California: “I thought I’d been feeling a bit more Wobbly recently!

I can find my way “well enough” with a compass. I’m not accurate enough to have ever bothered with the 7-11 degrees of declination for Southern California, and now my eyes are barely good enough to read those tiny marks on the bezel.”

He followed with picture of public Wobblies poster. I planted a laughing face emoji & wrote, “Aye, Wobblies unite!”

 

Sunday 26 May 2019

PZ, a Facebook friend from the era in which I heavily engaged in socmed wrote to ask how am I, as “It’s been a long time since I saw U… Miss U much!” 

My response: “Hi Friend! Glad to read your words! Miss you, too, Bro. It is simply me choosing not to be on socmed much at all these days & nights. I’m unlikely to leave completely, & also unlikely to get back on to the same degree I used to do. You’re among those I’ve met primarily online whose friendships I treasure, tho. Wow, you wrote in May & here I am responding in September, LOL! At least we’re in the same year here!” Then I love-hearted him. A friend from the Philippines gave his comments a blue thumbs up.

Love-Hearted me back, he did. 

Isn’t love all anyone really needs? Deep, deep down under everything that makes one frown? Even those among us humans driven by hate and rage need love. Love long enough, however, and love will demand you to take responsibility and make choices when the feelings and thoughts of love evaporate. Ultimately, see, love is a choice. Deep love is a choice. Love and live, dammit all! We’re all gonna die anyway. Eventually we shall all die even if our lives get extended for a staggering billion years. Don’t waste time, space, and energy with hate. Love, love dammit all, love deep and love wide while you’re still alive! Love until there is not anything left, not anything left at all. Love!

***This is an unfinished work in progress. Please enjoy anyway, thank you!***

William Dudley Bass
Saturday 29 February 02020
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Sol

 

Copyright © 2018, 2019, 2020 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.