FACEBOOK FRIENDS

I have to say I enjoy facebook. I hear and read a list of objections to facebook, mostly about privacy. What privacy? I don't have any doubt that "key words" on facebook trigger an alarm to some form of surveillance. After years of sci-fi fear of surveillance in the future, future is now, we are surveilled to the minutest details. Rather than worry about it, something I can do absolutely nothing about, I just go on like before, when we were under surveillance too, as if none of it is the case. Except I'm aware to avoid such words as b - o - m - b. Oh no! That word. Already, before I put this online, I anticipate a swat team breaking down my door and pushing me face-down to the floor, hands cuffed behind my back, hauled off to the unknown. Like in the beginning of the movie, Brazil, where a swat team chainsawed a hole in the ceiling of an apartment, dropped in, tied up a man watching tv and hauled him away. Wrong apartment. Oh well. They got somebody, met their quota. As long as I avoid key words I feel comfortable with facebook. I like keeping in touch with friends by "poke" and sending public messages. Facebook is not the place for telling secrets. I see no problem in that. No place is a good place for telling secrets. When you have to tell a secret, facebook is not the place to tell it. I like the wide-open public forum about it. Not that anything of any value gets discussed, but that's not the point. The point is keeping in touch. I am able to keep in touch with a lot of people I like and seldom see or never see.

It is the keeping in touch that I like best. I like the fun "memes" different people and agenda groups put up. I like getting cartoons daily and videos of Rachel Maddow and David Pakman. I like places like Americans Against the Republican Party, Ayn Rand Collected Social Security, Addictive Info, places that post funny cartoons about republican stupidity and links to articles that are often informative and sometimes funny. I can't watch video of Rush Limbaugh or any of the Faux News talking heads. Sometimes I follow a link to hear Ted Cruz, the Eugene McCarthy wannabe, running his mouth for the absurdity of it, for the comedy, but shortly into it I can't listen to any more. The comedy ceases immediately. Alex Jones embarrasses himself every time he speaks. Limbaugh is just a pig going Oink. A few days ago, for the fun of seeing what kinds of reactions might surface, I wrote, "New oxymoron: Bush library." One wingnut hit the fan. I'm a liberal in love with Obama who is here to destroy the world. Really? One thing I know, the wingnut is not psychic. Every once in awhile somebody I know will post something in praise of police state and I pay it no mind. I like having friends who don't agree with me. I like a mutual agreement that we don't have to agree. I find I like people who don't feel compelled to agree with me, and are not compelled for me to agree with them. In conversation with somebody, I like the other to be comfortable as self, the same as I like to be comfortable as self.

I like about facebook that I see expressions of self in people I know and people I don't know. Somebody posts half a dozen pictures of the sky. I love it. I love seeing other people's photographs. Before facebook we had access almost only to photos by professional photographers in magazines and newspapers, wherever. Now, everybody has a cell phone that is also a video and still camera. I see really beautiful photographs my Friends post in varying degrees of frequency. One posts photos of some of the most beautiful chickens I've seen. Photos of pets in different ways of seeing them. Ones I like seeing are a cat named Squarehead and a dog named Ms Landers. The cat does indeed have a square head. One of my Friends posts pictures of gardens in full flower. Another Friend posts pictures of her baby in phases of development. Some artists I know put up their recent works for Friends to see. Some of my Friends put up inspirational quotations with a relevant image, and some post political quotations for comedy. Both of my sisters are nuts about cat comedy. I saw something, but haven't read it yet--it will be around for awhile--about a principal at a rowdy school with security issues who eliminated the law enforcement in the school and put the funding to pay them into art classes. The school is no longer needing security. I cannot even imagine a school board going along with such an idea. Somewhere, there is one. That's promising.

I have quite a number of people in my life I like to keep up with, but am limited in space and time. Of my friends that are on the other side, I like to think of them as my friends who are at home or someplace where I can't see them. They exist, just not in my field of vision. A cousin in Kansas City, a friend in Portland, a friend in Atlanta, people I seldom see, I can interact with conversationally, though in a briefer form. Sometimes, just a photograph, or a sentence, or a short paragraph. No more than a word or two is really necessary to say hi. And there's not much more to say than that. The rest of it follows implied I-want. I like about facebook, too, that it shows me the variety of individuals I know, each one a culture unto him and her self. Each one radically individual. I like that the people I know are different from each other. It's like living in a play where we are marionettes, our souls operating the strings, every one his and her own story interacting with other stories until the stories are all so interwoven they make a Persian carpet with the patterns in continual motion. A sentence I made a note of from Andre Gide, "A soloist must play in the same direction as the orchestra." The people I know make the flow a context I live out my days as a part of, a bird in a flock, a fish in a school. A connection in the soul holds us together, makes us click Like on a picture of somebody's dog sleeping. I like knowing I have a string of friends a click away.

 

 

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