About Face and Why I Booked

My father never taught me much. Oh,sure, he said the obvious things about being good and working hard and about not letting people get you down. But he never really gave me much in the way of practical advice. How to step to the side to avoid taking the full force of a punch or how to fix a sink.

These things I learned on my own, through pain and repetition. And maybe these are our best teachers after all.

Still, he left m with one bit of advice that made sense to me--advice that I gladly shared with my own children and a few others over the years. He told me to never put my name on something that did not make me proud. Your name, he told me, is something you’re given a little after you’re born, and is the only thing you really own, throughout your life--and even after you die-- should you care to leave a marker.

I’ve done that with my writing. I’ve done that with my work as a teacher. Even when my bottom line was the dollar, I never let that be my measuring stick. Basic sentence, essay, story. It was all the same to me. To do things in a way that, at the end of the day, I could step back from, appraise, and proclaim, “Yup, I did the job on that, and I don’t care who knows it.”

This is why I quit my Facebook page the other day.

Quite a leap,huh? Let me explain.

I originally joined Facebook several months ago to follow the work of several writer friends. They have pages and, as part of the content, they list recent publications--not to mention discoveries and new projects. It was a good way to keep up with a couple of pals, to eavesdrop on their preoccupations and, maybe, use them as a guide for some of my own.

I was content--and even more so when a couple of friends from grad school and,then,from college discovered my page. We caught up on old times, traded information. The ex-wife of an old friend even found me there and sent along a cache of photos that he’d left when he passed away last year.

Photos of my youth with a grim reminder of its going away. I thumbed through and relived the memories, experienced the loss.

Facebook giveth and it taketh away.

Wearily, I backed off until my email bore messages of more friend requests. Some were from people who really were/are my friends. Some were from folks that I barely knew at all. Thus, I became aware of a phenomenon well known to Facebook frequenters-- the use of the site to network for commercial purposes or merely to gather friends like the early Plains indians used to gather honor in war--counting friends as a kind of counting coup. Thus, I was comrade and commodity all at once. I didn’t like the feeling. I began to pull further away.

Next, I began to notice the postings of people who must record their every living movement or sometimes lack of same. I’ve read of past eccentrics who have filled rooms with journals of their daily lives, recording every minute down to the “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly” event of recording the very act of recording the very act of.... (It’s a pity there was no Facebook in their day. Think of the living space they’d have saved.)

Then, there were folks who took the endless quizzes provided by whom? (Is Barbara Walters behind this site somehow?) If you were a tree; what kind of tree would you be? If you were a painting, a sandwich, a song....?

To be called a gelatinous, tree-hugging, bug-eyed Lilliputian might have been the cause for a bloody nose in bygone years. These days it’s a quiz result on Facebook.

Oh, brave new world!

Still, I was not completely blameless in this world of infinite show and tell.

A few months ago my daughter gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Alcina Mae. My son-in-law, a photographer, fully and beautifully documented this arrival. And I, a typical doting grandfather, posted a select few on my page--perhaps doing my own part in driving others from the surety of their screens.

But one must pay for his mistakes, after all. And I did. With congratulations and cutouts of teddy bears, floral displays and rainbows and cuddly creatures rendered in pastels guaranteed to grow fangs on even Mary Engelbreit. And, worse yet, I was sent hugs. Daily hugs. Hourly hugs. Hugs by the minute, by the second...hugs enough to make me claustrophobic....

But finally it was not just “ beauty killed the beast.” It was a politically conservative friend who drove me screaming from the net. He was the last friend I’d been asked to admit, and he brought with him, predictably, a backload of screeds and rants and jeremiads the like of which you might find any day on the Limbaugh show or any minute on Fox News. Some of the language, not to mention the logic (which most conservatives in the post-Buckley era seem to have little use for anyway) was appalling-- but nothing I’m not used to--and certainly not enough to justify barring him from the page.

He was and is a friend. He was freely admitted as same, and I would not have thought twice about inviting him to a gathering at my home to trot out, at his own peril, some of his ideas for my generally ”progressive” pals. I might have encouraged it, in fact--then gone out to give everyone a round of drinks before returning to enjoy and, if need be, join in the festivities.

But, seen on the page as part of this pastiche of other less than satisfying things, his jibes were finally too much.

There was no longer anything of myself about this concoction save for the name at the top of the page--the only thing I used to own.

All of a sudden I felt like my site was a sandwich board and I had become the local stewbum who’d been trapped between its wooden pages. Doomed to carry it aimlessly and without even the promise of a jug at the end of the day.

I know there are things I could’ve done to block people totally or to sanitize the pages so that they’d be palatable once again.

But these actions didn’t seem fair.

And my name would still be there to remind me of my complicity in creating something as undemocratic as it was uninspiring. No, this was not for me.

So, I quit Facebook. And I don’t need to stay up to date on what car you’d like to be driving let alone on which one you’ll likely become. And, bereft of the online tools, I can only make myself into a cartoon the same way I’ve always done, with my writing and my words.

And I don’t need any evanescent hugs.

I’m much happier now, sitting here with the blank screen before me, awaiting words that I might, at the end of the day, gladly add my name to.

But, damn it all, I’d still like to be your friend.