Facebook … deactivated

You can tell how worthless Facebook is by the difficulty Meta has made to get out of it. I deactivated my account this morning because my feed has morphed into an endless sludge of bile and stupidity. Then, I tried to log into the browser tab for Messenger, and it logged me back into Facebook and reactivated my account.

I hate it so much.

The journey to freeing myself of that swamp really started back when I was a local newspaper reporter right as the worst of the pandemic was passing. Everyone was angry. Then someone I knew launched a dumb recall campaign against school board members.

What followed were four of the stupidest months I’ve ever endured, with people digging through my account and gossiping. I set my account to public to prevent that. Humanity’s stupidest instincts were plenty to overcome that.

Facebook provided easy access to an audience. If you’re a creative — I write, I also dabble in photography, I like sharing about typewriters … who knew — that makes it a difficult place to leave. You can create and share. You won’t get paid, but you’ll have the audience. If you aren’t interested in monetizing your creativity, that’s a strong incentive to put up with humanity’s worst.

Four years later, Meta has transformed Facebook from a place where you can share with strangers and keep up with folks to an endless slog of posts encouraging strangers to fight. It’s like a nightmare version of a town in the Old West, where every building is a saloon full of drunken cowboys who start slugging it out at the slightest provocation.

My original plan was to delete my account. Yesterday, I learned that deleting my account would make Messenger unusable. The unfortunate thing is I’ve used Messenger as my primary communications platform for a decade. So, once I move all of my conversations to something else, I can finish the job.

Facebook is a toilet. You should abandon it.

Discworld

I’m working my way through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld along parallel lines … one of the City Watch series followed by one on sequential.order. I’ve been told that his storytelling really ramps up in the forth book, but I want to watch it grow.

I’ve been seeding them in between non-Discworld books. The goal was to increase my reading using Pratchett as incentive.

Finished my third City Watch book last night over a burger and beer at The Bird. Feet of Clay was a fine, fine book. The last two non-Discworld books I read were disappointments, so it was also a relief to read something excellent.

I’ve been told to skip past the first few Discworld books because that’s when they start shining with Pratchett’s social criticism. Feet of Clay is full of excellent commentary on free will, the nature of existence, power structures and how societies arrange themselves.

At one point, one of the bartenders asked me about it, recognizing Pratchett from his co-authorship of Good Omens with Neil Gaiman. Figuring out a new home for my Sis world books will be a chore. If this dude takes up the challenge, maybe I can pawn off my Discworld.books on him.

George Washington was a dick

I was in the stately home fixing a display of fake plants and looking for my cat. My neighbor was a refined older woman, a genuine patrician. Her gray hair was parted in the center and ended in curls. She wore a black pant suit with large white buttons and a string of pearls. She stood erect and less walked and more glided across the plush white carpet. Yet she was friendly enough to me as she moved between rooms.

She announced the arrival of her husband. Holy shit, I thought to myself, it’s George Washington. I’m about to meet George Washington.

The two front doors opened in unison and Washington strode through them. It was almost as if he opened them with a wave of his hand.

His gray hair was pulled back into a tight knot. He wore no wig. He also wore a modern navy blue suit with a golden chain from one pocket on his vest to a pocketwatch in the other. He nose was thin and sharp, as were his limbs. He had a stern feel to him, like hardened steel just after being plunged into ice cold water.

Our eyes met as he walked through the room. His were full of contempt. I could almost hear his thoughts. “Are you trying to f**k Martha? Good luck, you little sh*t,” his eyes said.

I gathered my stuff. I was down with the fake plants and the cat had returned. With an eyebrow arched, he escorted me to the door and stood in the doorframe as I walked out. The cat scampered ahead of me and fell into an open-air sunken kennel. I could hear it meowing.

“How do I get my cat,” I asked him. With his eyebrow still arched, he wordlessly shut the door.

February is an ass

We should be on the downside of winter by the time February rolls around. It snowed for the first time a few months before and January brought ice and bitter cold. The days have been getting longer for a months and a half, so naturally it feels like it ought to be getting warmer.

Yet, February always seems to be colder and snowier and icier. The forecast calls for cold and wind and snow into the foreseeable future. I woke up this morning to three inches of bullshit on my car.

Not only does this mean time wasted shoveling off my car to run weekly errands, but it also means long minutes spent getting dressed for the cold. We’ve already been doing that for months. We should be slowly unwinding that, slowly peeling off the layers and relax into days with highs in the 40s.

Instead what we’ll get is another bullshit year that gives us two weeks of spring in between this weather and where we sweat sitting still.

February is an ass.

Trapped

Hi, I’m trapped and have to use the toilet. Lunch time is also rapidly approaching. I would also like to stretch my legs.

The tree

I met the governor at the end of a two track. Our destination was an abandoned cabin in an area flooded to knee depth.

Well, the cabin was the human landmark. We were really looking for a tree. It was a special tree, but it was difficult to pin down why.

We found the tree after a short hike. I marked it's location for her with a stick. Soon, other people would show up. Her staff, police, scientists.

The tree was barely the size of a shrub, sticking above the wat only about a foot. It was shaded by other, full-grown trees but you could sense its qualities. You could feel them.

Those qualities flowed through the area, affecting plants and animals. A large fish poked around near the tree’s roots, oblivious to me standing next to it. I poked it. It swam away as if in a trance. I could see deer gathering, watching, on a small hill just outside the flooded area.

“There’s a black bear over there that won’t move,” one of the other people called to us as they arrived.

I knelt down beside the tree, my knee resting on muddy ground. The air was full of dust particles slowly floating around and up.

The others set up equipment. We were going to stay a few days and needed to set up cameras and audio equipment to observe the area, and places to sleep. I rolled out my sleeping bag under the collapsed roof of the cabin’s bedroom.

Everyone else left. The governor and her staff had official duties, the guides to get food. That left me and a small child. I boiled water from the flooded area and when cooled, bathed the child.

I became aware of what can only be described as a low hum accompanied by the sense that something was aware of my presence. The dust danced to the tune of the hum and continued its slow drift up.

The hum got slightly higher; the sense of presence increased. The child and I looked at each other.

The Mt. baldy snack bar

I watched Commando yesterday. Rewatched, actually. It’s a thing of beauty. Lots of Arnold Schwarzenegger Easter eggs, bad one liners, the 80s worship of big muscles and Dan Hedeya in a role that will touch you. The plot is implausible. The action is as funny as the dialogue. It also has David Patrick Kelly, and a vastly underappreciated Rae Dawn Chong.

Matrix’s relationship with his daughter is also set-up in super cheesy fashion. They fish and pet deer (these days, potentially exposing your children to chronic wasting disease ought to be a criminal offense), and get ice cream cones. Where? I thiefed the name of the place for this website to honor the totality of Commando.

Pigeon, Missouri

The propane salesman had bright, red gums and wire Tim glasses. We’d walked into an open door to find him cooking breakfast.

He knew the short, curly-haired man I was with. That made one of us.

They talked about the health problems of Mr. Gums and Glasses. From the stacked boxes of insulin injectors, I took it that he had diabetes.

There was a third man sitting on a stool. He didn’t say a word. There also weren’t any propane cannisters. There also wasn’t a parking lot. No sign. And the doorway we walked in was in the middle of a non-descript brick wall behind a couple of corn silos. We’d walked a winding, worm path through the post-industrial waste of Pigeon to get here.

The curly-haired man gave me started giving me directions as if I was from a neighboring town. He asked if I knew a landmark. He got a look on his face like he thought I was maybe from Mars when I told him I couldn’t even begin to describe where I was. That shocked me. I thought I oozed that I wasn't from around there from every pore.

The only thing I was certain of, as I woke up, was that I was just in the company of two of the fullest people I’d ever met and that we were all in Pigeon, Missouri.

So, so full

Who the Hell eats the refried beans and rice at a Mexican restaurant? I do, that’s who. Ate them tonight while pigging out on carnitas at one of our local Mexican restaurants. There were chips and salsas, tortillas stuffed with fatty crisped pork, and the beans and rice. There was a small, white pool of melted queso in the beans that absolutely called to me until I scooped it up and stuffed it into my mouth. It was creamy and salty and warm.

Letters from a Nut

When I was a much younger man, I heard about a book about letters a mysterious man wrote to various people. One was to a physicist asking why if he could lift more than he and a chair weighed why he couldn’t just fly around the room. I sometimes thought about that book.

I finally read it. Sometimes thinking about a book is a much better experience than reading it. Some yucks there were, but it was not — as advertised — the kind of book that would make me laugh so hard blood would squirt from my eyes.

Prank correspondence wasn’t perfected until a decade later by David Thorne.