Late last year, Sanjeevani tried to convince me to join Facebook. She told me about how she'd reconnected with old friends from grade school, how totally amazing things could be done with music and images:
"And it's easier to communicate on it. It's so cool. We can send each other really cool virtual things like hatching eggs and stuff, and put on music and all sorts of good things."
It seemed vaguely tempting, but I never hopped aboard that bandwagon. Everything that excited her about Facebook seemed like a hassle to me. It represented little more than another web site to keep up with at a time when the amount of free time I had to devote to blogging, reading other blogs, reading music websites, etc. was steadily dwindling. So our long friendship has remained a strictly e-mail based thing, and we're both cool with that.
But I had other aversions to Facebook. Namely, past phantasms emerging from the ether, and the accompanying bullshit niceities involved in the what-you-been-up-to back'n'forth that continues for a week or two before you and that person you haven't been in touch with for so, so long - "holy hell, has it been that long? Wow, we're getting old" - fall, predictably, back out of touch. Yeah, sometimes I do get to wondering: hey, whatever happened to Quincy Johnson, Brendan Sullivan, Monrovia von Hoose? Buffy from Massachusetts whose last name I can't remember, whose example got me into zinestering? Dan Zeller? What does Stu Hartman do for a living? Is Rhoda Farris a high-powered exec, and is she still pals with Zita Thomas? Is Amanda Sherman still alive? Time hasn't burned those names out of my memory yet, but I'm in no rush to re-establish connections that clearly weren't strong enough to last in the first place. Good times? Good times are reading Wiggles books to my son and chasing him around, cracking jokes with my wife, getting lost in dense thickets of noise and rhyme and melody, writing arts copy for the outlets nice enough to pay me (and the one remaining mag that doesn't pay but is such a great honor to be involved with that I don't care - what's up, Pete Gershon?), and emailing/telephoning/ILXing with friends old and new - you know who you are.
Which is a long-winded way of explaining why decided to disable this blog's comments feature. Actually, it isn't. Or is it? Incoherence becomes me - which is part of why I don't post much anymore. What it comes down to is this: unconsciously or not, comments sections have become a measure of a given blog's value. I find that when I visit other blogs, my eyes immediately shoot to the total comments a post has received. Then in the past I'd put those numbers up against my own, and think: Jesus, I suck, no-one (or almost no-one) cares what I think about anything. If people agree or disagree with whatever, they can always shoot me an email or counter on their own blogs.
This is where I'm supposed to tie all of the above into America's hyperactive plugged-in-ness and decry our collective inability to just go outside and walk around. Or something. But I'll leave that to you, the reader - and hope that you'll email me a link to whatever round-robin summary you come up with.
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