Troubles

Some good - I'm working in Alaska this week, a place I've never been before (and probably won't be again) - and some...very much not so good.

It's not life-threatening or anything like that. I'm not dying, or, at least, no sooner than we're all headed for our appointment with the Reaper.

But things are happening that are very difficult and stressful, so it's hard to focus on anything else, hence the long silence here.

A lot of this "bad" trouble is still unresolved; though; that is, it's hanging there, ominous, but as yet not quite "as bad as it could be". 

It depends on someone's heart and mind, and those are still as yet unknown. When they become so, it will either be "troubling but hopeful" or "very, very life-alteringly awful".

When that happens, I'll be back here.

Envoi

Well, it's time to admit it; this has officially become a "ghost blog".

The proof, for me, anyway, was the post about my old Honda getting stolen, pimped-up by the tweaker that bought it, and then recovered, to the disconcertion of everyone involved. I drafted the thing up back in the doldrums of summer and then...it just sat there. I honestly tried to work up the interest to finish and publish it, but just couldn't find enough give-a-shit.

I write soccer for Stumptown Footy and politics and military affairs for http://milpubblog.blogspot.com/. I have run out of battles to write up, other than the odd one or two. So what's left for this joint?

I don't have anything worth reading to write here anymore.

I won't say definitively that there will NEVER be anything new here again. I'm sure at some time I'll come across something or other that tickles my fancy or irks the shit out of me and I'll come here to talk about it.

But daily content? The sort of thing that makes a blog a living thing and not an artifact? I just don't have it in me anymore.

I've enjoyed the ten-plus years here. I've done some damn fine work. I'm currently in the process of collecting the "battles" pieces with the idea of putting together some sort of submittal for publication. I've enjoyed writing about Northwest geology for you, too. And I hope that you've enjoyed the smaller bits and pieces, too.

And those will, I hope, always be here. I hope you who come to visit enjoy them, and leave happier and, perhaps, a little wiser, or more thoughtful than when you arrived.

But for now I say; goodnight.

Not living as large as I'd hoped...

Well, I know, I know. I promised content. And, as it says in the Scripture: "They cry "Content! Content!" and there is no content."

I can't plead anything but sloth.

Turns out that my easy pile-nanny days are turning into 12- and 14-hour pile nanny days. AND I have no internet at the place where I'm staying, so I have to work from the job trailer and, not surprisingly, I REALLY don't want to hang around the job trailer.

This has sucked in a lot of ways. It's sucked because I've had to miss my beloved Timbers and Thorns. It sucked because I can't chat with my loves back in Portland, or send and receive pictures other than through my tiny phone.

I've got an early afternoon off today - we had some trouble here at the jobsite - but, again, I don't want to hang around the job trailer. So I'm slamming this out and heading off to the Price Chopper for half-and-half and bagels. Here's some pretty waterfall pictures, though.

Oh, and these.

These are Devonian fossils from the outcrop described in this post; it's right outside the little town of Schoharie, the seat of Schoharie County, and I've since spent a couple of pleasant afternoons picking through the gray sandstone and shaley "grit" to find the valves of Gypidula and Spirifer and Atrypa and an occasional gastropod, long-vanished denizens of the Devonian seas.

I really will try and post something more substantive if I can get the damn internet back this weekend.

Checking the block...

...through a long day in CPR/AED/First Aid class yesterday. Not a bad class, just not a lot new for an old grunt medic. It WAS kind of interesting to note that the AHA has dropped the pressure dressing; it's straight from the dressing and bandage to the tourniquet. Ouch. CPR...well, that's all different. But I swear it's like car models; sometimes it changes just to change.

When I scanned this I took a moment to look back at the doodles I did back in 2012 whilst I was immured in a HAZWOPER class and I gotta ask myself: what the hell is with the zeppelins? You got some kinda phallic thingamabob going on? Or, as Freud himself is supposed to have said, is a zeppelin sometimes just a zeppelin?

I do like the old 193rd Brigade crest and the canal; I think one of the old USSOUTHCOM units had the motto "The Path Between The Seas". Or not. either way it's a great motto.

Still slow around this joint. But I'm finally getting to the bottom of the Philippine Sea (sort of). Do you have ANY idea how hard it is trying to figure out which IJN land-based aviation units were where, and with what aircraft, in June of 1944? It's a stone bitch, I tell you.

Drifting

I apologize, gang. This damn blog has been going nowhere for almost a month and - much as I hate to admit it - I've really don't have any notion where I want to go with it.

Every so often I've sat down at the computer and called up the big white Blogger posting screen and...sat and looked at it. I couldn't find anything to say worth hearing. I know. That's fucked up. But that's the truth.

I just can't stomach writing about politics or foreign affairs. It seems like the Stupidic Orogeny is taking place in human-scale time. Here the GOP is everywhere doubling-down on its lethal dose of crude venality and vicious rapacity; apparently the urge to ram the national dick into the Gilded Age meatgrinder is irresistible to the sort of Ayn-Rand-gobbling idiot capable of being elected in a safe Republican district, whilst the Democratic Party seems to be unwilling to defend the grand bargain that the New Deal secured after seventy years of class warfare hammered away on everyone not already members of the New Century Club.

And abroad? What the hell can you say when the only "democracy" in the Middle East does a 2004 and re-elects its little tinpot Duce, whose only answer to every political problem is force, might, and beatings? When I think of the utter fuckery that this brickheaded sonofabitch is going to lead my country into I could weep.

Sure, I could rip off some sort of incandescent rant about that fuckery, or the domestic fuckery of the domestic fuckers who want to return my country to the open kleptocracy of the fucking Cleveland or Harding Administrations. But why? You all know the problems, and you all know that nothing I can say here will solve them, or even get the addled 27% who long for the firm hand of Daddy Cheney on the wheel to agree that this nation would be more secure, more prosperous, and more promising if that vampire sonofabitch was buried at a crossroads with garlic in his lying fucking mouth and a stake through his shriveled secondhand heart.

I don't have a battle to write about until May when I'm planning on doing the 1422 Siege (and Fall) of Constantinople. I'm frankly having a difficult time dredging up anything interesting to tell you about the end of my active duty service and the beginning of my USAR time back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

And everything else is just home and family, or pastimes, and I don't find those - generally, unless there's something larger to be said within them or about them - any more interesting to write about than you would find to read about them.

So.

I'll try and come up with something here soon. I'm not sure what it will be. But it's either that or turn the lights out in the old place and shut the door for good.

Acta est fabula

I was saddened to read not long ago that a blogging sister has decided to hang 'em up.

"I really feel I’ve lost heart for it." she concluded.

I know how she feels.

I've tried to interest myself in posting about the rampant idiocy of the Paleolithic Right, of the profound indifference of my "fellow Americans" as the blunt reality of torture and secret policemen and oligarchs make the fine words on the 18th Century parchments more and more ridiculous and even louche. Of the seemingly endless concatenation of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision that constitutes the public "news" (the World's Worst Newspaper just downshifted itself yet again, going to a tabloid format that contains less than a page or two of actual local "news" with the remainder the usual wire stories and sports or "entertainment" filler) sources.

I've tried to work up the ire I felt when the idiot Bushies were sending my Army brothers to fight, die, and return in bags or forever marked from a pointless land war in Asia about the idiot farkling about in the lesser-paved parts of the world by the Obamites.

I've tried to regain my antipathy towards the elites whose rapacity and blind greed have helped put us in this handbasket, at the Cliven Bundy sorts of greedy, grifting morons whose blind hatred of the Commons has blinded them to the fact that they themselves are the cows, culled, outsourced, downsized, laid off, crammed down, and eventually ground down by their masters, the very "job creators" they idolize.

I've tried to work myself into a spitting fury over what may well be the single biggest disaster of the Human Era, our own unwillingness to accept that we are changing our very climate. As Chesterton said about Christianity; it is not that trying to restrain climate change has been tried and found difficult, it has been found difficult and never tried.

And after all that trying I keep coming back to the realization...what's the point?

If you're here reading about that you know about it; I can't tell you anything about it you can't find better expressed over at Charlie Pierce's place. I can match Driftglass' incisive spleen, or Krugman's clinical exactitude.

If not politics, then what?

I can turn this into some sort of Daddy-blog, writing about home and family. And don't get me wrong; those things are important. Vastly important. Top-gallant delights and keelson depths, but both utterly central to my life.

But yours? Why should you care whether the Boy is being happy and cooperative or (as is the case at the moment) a sulky young mandrill in desperate need of some corrective action. If he was eight years older I'd be on the verge of wall-to-wall counseling, myself, but you can't do that with ten and expect good results. Or not going to jail.

I could write about what I love. Soccer? You guys hate that and, besides, I already have a place where I can write about soccer amid the applause of dozens.

Well, a couple of people, anyway, then.

Military history. Poetry. Some of the more topical, funny, or curious family stuff. Random musings about men and women, people in general, places.

In short, I haven't come to where my friend Labrys is.

I still like the sound of my own voice enough to continue writing and posting here. But I suspect that I, too, will spend less time on the rostrum shouting at the crowd that passes by deaf to the sound of my most impassioned oratory.

Not Blogging

I just happened to glance at the sidebar while proofing the previous soccer-jersey post and realized with a start that I only posted six times in March 2014.

Six.

Fah! Six crummy posts? Six?!

I know that March was badly slow, if nothing else from the comments on the Glorieta Pass writeup. People were "welcoming me back" and I briefly wondered where I'd been.

But now I realize; not here.

And I got to wondering about that; have I ever been that unproductive on this blog before?

Well, yes. But it was a long, long, long time ago.

Going back over the past seven years - I started this thing back in the late summer of 2006, almost seven and a half years ago - the slowest period was the winter of 2008. I posted a whopping total of 26 times between January 1 and March 31, 2008; 9 posts in each of January and March and the low point, 8 posts, in Fabruary.

But you have to go all the way back to December of 2006 before you find a month when I was slacking this badly.

In December, 2006, I also posted only six times.

Well. Crap.

I can blame some pieces of business outside my own laziness.

A lot of traffic on this blog was generated by the ridiculous wars in southcentral Asia. Those wars are not exactly finished, but the end, like a dragon by the side of the road, is well in view. There doesn't seem to be anything more to say about them, or, really, much about military affairs in general. I've been out of the service too long to have any more inside information. And, frankly, all that remains at this point seems to be arguing over trivialities. My friend jim over at Ranger just put up a post fulminating over women in the combat arms that got me thinking "Damn...if this is what we have to argue about now we don't really have jack shit to argue about, now, do we..?"

The other big-ass reptile squatting alongside the highway seems to me to be the degree which We The People have stood around with out thumbs up our collective ass and our brains in neutral and let the plutocrats, the oligarchs, the hedge-fund fraudsters and wanna-be aristos and Great Power fantasists kidnap our republic.

But what's the point in my writing about that?

You want incisive take-downs of these skeevy bastards you've got Pierce. And Krugman. And Taibbi (although Matt appears to have disappeared into the mists of some sort of fucking vanity project called "First Look Media").

You don't need me pounding my little tin drum. Hell, my friend Labrys can work up a better head of outraged steam than I can these days. My opinion has pretty much settled on "You worthless fucktards are perfectly happy to let these scumbags steal your patrimony for a mess of pottage. Fine. I'll do what I can where I can right here and the hell with you people."

Right now the part of this casual abandonment of the Republic that most grates in my craw is the...well, you can't really call it the "revelation" since we all pretty much knew this shit had been going on for years, but the...deobfuscation, if you will, of the brutal regime of secret prison and vicious torture that we have payed for and looked away from since a bunch of raggedy-ass Allah-pesterers made the Bush Administration shit its pants.

(That's the Boy on the left, above, by the way. I have no excuse for the illustrations in this post. I'm simply going through my pictures folder and doing a photo dump. Cartoons, personal pictures, nonsequiturs...the visual accompaniment for this one is "you get what you get"...)

Anyway.

Here's the thing about this.

There is no way. No possible way.

Not a single, imaginable, potential, even-wildly-hypothetically-conceivable way that the Islamofantacists could have created an existential threat to the United States of America, even after 9/11.

Never.

Not possible.

Created havoc? Perhaps. Killed people? Maybe.

But destroyed the Republic itself? Overthrown the "freedoms" that they were so supposed to hate?

Nuh-uh.

But imprisonment not just without trial but without even a public name or a file number? Disappearances into night and fog without trace?

Lawless torture, and then frantic efforts to hide this lawlessness and torture?

That not just can but inevitably will destroy any democratic state and the freedoms it is supposed to protect.

A state must, if it is to remain in the hands of the People, be a state of law, of open government and relatively equal justice enacted in open courts.

When you start giving parts of your government the go-ahead to do their business in secret, when you give them the authority to sieze people and disappear them, to spy on your own people, to torture and kill in darkness and without fear of justice, you cannot simply stop them outside your borders and at the strandlines of your oceans.

Those people will then come within your government, within your states, and your citie,s and your houses.

And they will bring their own lawless entitlement to take what they deem needs taking, to destroy what they deem needs destroying, and to rend what needs rending.

Because that is what you have taught them to do.

They will not stop because you protest your innocence, because you avow your loyalty, because you claim protection under the law.

You have already given them absolution from the laws, you have already taught them that the end justifies the means, that secret torture and secret imprisonment and secret spying are part of their brief.

You will have given the sheepdogs a taste for the flesh of the sheep.

Right now this nation should be seething with anger. Our agents, paid with our taxes, have been torturing and kidnapping in our names, and then lied to and hid from the People in Congress. As they have before and will again, we have sowed the wind, and even the dullest amoung us should know what bitter storm that sowing reaps.

And we do not seem to care.

If those simple facts do not enrage you, I cannot think of anything I can say that can.

And thus I found that I just stood silent, having nothing more to say. I feel utterly voiceless, shouting over the roaring waves of indifference like Demosthenes.

I'm still here. And part of my silence was laziness, and distraction, and the world intruding on me.

But if you wondered why the other reasons why there was so little here in March, well...there they are.

Check Firing

I'm going to take a break for a while.

Frankly, all I can think and write about at the moment is how at this point any sane U.S. citizen can contemplate the issue of private firearms without questioning our slavish devotion to the 2nd Amendment since the end of the assault weapons ban.

It makes me curmudgeonly. I don't want to write that stuff and you don't want to read it.

So I'm out of here for a couple of days until my head clears and I can write about something else.

Take a break in place. Smoke 'em if you gottem.

Battles in September

I've been trying to write up the Battle of Sedan for September, really, I have. Like a schoolboy who sits at the table unwilling to begin his homework, I have made several starts at it only to stop, sullenly unpleased by the brutal waste of the L'Année terrible.

"I take up pen to tell of the terrible year,
And suddenly I stop, elbows on my desk.
Must I proceed? must I go on?
France! what horror! to see a star fade in the heavens!
I feel the lugubrious ascent of disgrace."

Like Hugo, I feel the need to document the Terrible Year: N'importe. Poursuivons. L'histoire en a besoin.

But I fear that it may not be in the appropriate month but, rather, in October that I finally write the doleful tale of the end of an empire; perhaps alongside the battle for that month, Milvian Bridge, where an earlier empire ended and a new one began.

Soon, though. I promise.

Radio Silence II

Everything is utterly mad around here, between work, wife's work (which is WAY crazy), and kiddos, and I just haven't been able to get my thoughts together, much less post anything. But given the dearth of comments I suspect that that's kind of like the dog which did nothing in the nighttime.I will try and get my stuff together and post something this weekend.

Break in contact

I forgot to mention - I'm out of town on a drilling job for this thing......called the "Willapa Hills Trail". Pretty part of Washington. Interesting geology. I just wish the damn water pumps - on the drilling rig as well as the water supply pumps - would stop breaking down. We're on day five of a four day project.

Hopefully we'll rejoin the main element tomorrow.

Why are things so DAMN slow around here?

I agree with you - I'm not making my quota. Three - THREE? - posts and it's mid-May? WTF, dude? you ask... Are you on a slow-down strike? Cat got yer blog? What's the hold-up?

Well, if you look at the little sidebar, you'll see one big reason; I'm teaching at Portland Community College nights. Notice how I was on track for alomst a post a day in January and February. Now look at March, when the class started.

I love my students, they're great, but......they take a lot of my time, some from my family but mostly from my outside pastimes like blogging. So that's had a LOT to do with the silence around here.And there's always home and family...which this month included a week-long trip East to Grandmas and Grandpas.It was a shame, really, because my parents are just too old to enjoy their grandlings, but the maternal grandparents make up for it with the fierce love they hold for their little ones. And the nice thing is that this time the littles responded, giving their gaffer and gammar an ocean of love to lave their spirits in.The kiddos loved everything about Grandma and Grampa's - the beach, the little house, the adventures in Boston and Plymouth, the spoiling and the ice cream.

But between kids and travel and teaching and work...

I suspect that things will be fairly quiet here until June, when the grades are handed out and I am a free man in the evenings again. I could wish otherwise, but we all know the maximum effective range of a wish, don't we?

Pinned Down

I apologize for the slow drip of postings here. We were away last week, taking the kidlets for a long-delayed East Coast visit to the grandparents. In what I have to admit was something of a surprise to me the trip turned out to be relatively painless (other than the flying, which really is getting exponentially more awful every time; the combination of brain-destroying time-wasting with the petty indignities of the Security Theatre and the grinding greed of the airlines - you now had to pay for your meals if you wanted anything more than a handful of over-salted bridge mix - has made the experience as close to a Dantaean torture as I can imagine. Luckily the kiddos were sweeties and managed the journeys with nary a whimper) and the love for my in-laws for their grandlings was tear-inducing.

Upon our return things have been insane; Mojo is absolutely shelled at her work, I've been up early and back late, and I swear I've exchanged a total of ten sentences with my bride between Sunday evening and this morning. The whole menage feels hectic and tedious at the same time...is that possible? It's like we're overwhelmed by work, home and school while at the same time just plodding on a treadmill of the same-old, same-old...work, home and school.

My attitude hasn't helped, either. The world around just seems stale, flat and unprofitable, distinguished principally by greed and hubris from the wilds of central Asia to the Gulf Coast of the United States to my own city. I either have nothing to say about the goings-on or my comment would be nothing more than a long burst of profanity.

I'll try and come up with something for Friday, and perhaps the weekend will motivate me to think and write a little.

Falling Behind

The first three days of this week have been a manic confusion of work and domestic chores interspersed with a moment or two of sleep. I promise to place nose back to grindstone before the weekend.

Tacitus

Sorry so silent.Bryn's birthday was especially hard this year, we've all been fighting colds, and I've been busy at work. Oh, and I've been scratching my forearms like an ape with mange - I picked up a bad case of poison oak strolling about the project site in Lebanon last week. I've never had an infestation this bad - nasty stuff. I had always thought that poison oak was just a slightly stronger version of poison ivy. No such thing. I will definately work to avoid the stuff in the future.

I've been thinking and blogging lightly over at MilPub, but I want to try and post something before the weekend. Check back in a bit. Thanks.

Maintenence Halt

I'm still here, just slogging through the tail end of a busy week. Plus there's nothing very interesting here at home; wake, eat, dress, work, school, daycare, home, meal, play, read, sleep. Get up the next day and repeat...

Good discussions over at MilPub; check 'em out.

Breathless

It's 3am, a close August night and I'm up because I ate too much spicy pizza and beer before bed.

The Peeper is sleeping on the couch, a huge treat for him that he covets, begs for and gets to do ever couple of weeks or so. He gorges on kidvid and juice and the random sugary treat and has a good time feeling grown up and daring. Good times.

Mojo is swaddled in our big sleigh bed, probably in a pink rayon chrysalis formed from our third-favorite sheets (very cool and sleek but impossible to keep from sliding off and that ted to pill up like sonsofbitches. She's had a long, hard week, and feels a little run-after, and run-down.

Maxine is crouched in her big girl bed having thrown all her covers OFF, as usual - the girl has something against blankets besides being one of Nature's most athletic sleepers. We're watching her carefully because she had a terrible nosebleed today; shocking the daycare staff and sending both of her parents careering across Portland to get to her. She's fine, her usual happy self, but her cleft makes these nosebleeds a potential health issue. We'll be watching her carefully over the weekend.

We're in the midst of a lawn-and-garden project in the northeast corner of the front yard that was put in time-out by the appalling heat of the past week but looks to be a go for the coming weekend. The dryer seems to have finally given up, so that's an expense we're going to have to make. I like to think of it as doing our little bit to help the people at Goldman Sachs get their...sorry, our...economy ck up and running again. Lucky fucking us.

My work is still dire. Slow isn't the word for it, it's practically stopped. Hopefully we'll see something start to pick up soon. Otherwise...brrr.

We're creeping towards Mojo's 43rd birthday this Labor Day, and our second Family Day with Maxine in September. My in-laws are coming for a week-long visit next Saturday. The heat, hopefully, will have abated by then. Big Peeper starts first grade in a month. He's had a trying summer, what with an increasingly cute and demanding sister all over him, and no school friends to help pass the time faster. Poor little guy is very weepy these days; yesterday he told me, in tears, that he'd "had a hard day", for all the world like a little burnt-out Mamet adman wearing a Transformers T-shirt.

Why am I meandering around all this stuff?

Because I'm treading water. Between work and family and friends and home and whatever my blogging has suffered. I note with some sour displeasure that my post count for July was 11. Eleven. Eleven fucking posts is probably the lowest monthly total since, hell, since probably some time in 2006.

I have some posts I'd like to write. I want to talk about the Boring Lavas, Portland's own urban volcanoes. This year's Tour de France got me thinking about our culture of celebrity and what it's doing to us and our worldview. And, of course, there's always fun, oddball stuff like chicken fried bacon...

But I just don't seem to have the time and, when I do there always seems to be something more pressing. Or inescapable. Or desirable,like playing with sweet, giggly little girls or exciting, imaginative little boys. Or winsomely, sweet, desirable wives.

So I'm going to try and make some time for us here. Because I value our little on-line community, and the only way for us to stay part of each other's lives is to keep meeting here.

But right now, I've gotta get some sleep.

G'night.

Contracts versus Mommies

Crazy week this week. Poor Mojo is completely slammed trying to get half a dozen ginormous contracts, purchase agreements, etc., cranked out by Friday.

Monday was moderately crazed - she got home at 6:30 or so. Tonight it was 9:00 and tomorrow and Thursday look just as bad.

So that means that Daddy gets to take up the slack - which is a lot, my DW is a spartan around the Fire Direction Center - and I'm not able to do nearly as much blogging.

Bad week for it, too, what with Spring arriving on Amherst Street with the first pink and white blooms budding out, Little Miss developing new heights in willfullness and the Peeper's awesome "counting-to-100" accomplishments.

Aaaannnd the G-20, with Brazil's Lula promising to whip up on some greedy white blue-eyed-financial-devil ass. And our boy Karzai plumping down firmly on the side of "She's your wife, Rahim, don't beg like you're whipped, boy, just TAKE that ass!" in grateful acknowledgment of the debt he owes to patriarchal Republican Christopaths everywhere. And of course we're up to our ass in the usual economic Sea of Troubles.

Oh, yes, and speaking of ass, Justine Lai is up to the 18th President in her "Join or Die" portfolio showing the artist having sex with America's chief executives.

Not to blab or anything, but...Ulysses, who knew? Did you EVER tell Julia about this spanking thing..?

And I'd never have figured Frank Pierce for such a playa. Just goes to show ya...

But at least I can say that "Monsters versus Aliens" is a very nice little movie.

It's a Dreamworks deal, so it's no Pixar. It lacks...something. The action parts don't quite carry it and the character development doesn't quite click; too little or too much.

But Reese Witherspoon (whom I usually can't stand) does nice vocal work as I-am-50-foot-woman-hear-me-roar, there's lots of monster funny and alien battles to amuse the Peeper and Steven Colbert and pop culture riffs to amuse the Daddy (though I have to say I got most of my laughs out of the straight-up send-ups of the classic monster movie stock characters, especially the giant kaiju mothra clone). It's not too scary for over-fives but might be for under-fours. If you have a littlie, and a rainy day, it's good popcorn fun.

Just remember that they won't understand the "Doctor Strangelove" reference at the end and, yes, freezing your head DOES hurt and is NOT a good idea for trying out on your baby sister just to see. Just in case. Because. You never know. Really. Reeeeaally...

C'mon, Peep, knock it off.

Out of the Net

Well, the littlies are in bed, the bags are packed, the clocks are set ahead and the sitter is due here tomorrow at 7:00...

It's a week of sun and no agenda, startng tomorrow. So until then, may you enjoy your week and whatever and whomever you are engaged in. I'll be back here again late next Sunday, hopefully tanned, ready and rested for a whole nother three years, since that was the LAST time we had a vacation.

Not that I'm snivelling or anything.See ya!

Face to Facebook

So. I've been part of the facebook virtual-community for a little over six weeks now.

It all started here, where a friend referred those of us who enjoyed her blog over to the other medium. She wrote:

"I love Facebook because it doesn't take itself so seriously...It restricts your tendencies toward excess. Which I find refreshing and humbling and interesting, in the way that cryptic or aphoristic statements are always interesting."

I couldn't let that go...so over I went, filled in the little information form, and there I was feeling like I'd just gotten my first off-campus apartment.

The facebook is a curious thing, and it has interesting effects on those who visit there. The person who got me interested is very natural there. She usually posts a nicely varied mix of updates, notes, photos and information, being entertaining while clearly entertaining herself. She's a "good facebooker".

At the other pole are the people who never use the thing - they made a page and then left it, a sort of bookmark in the aether, a lamppost in the deep woods that, once lit, shines lonely and unvisited far from the busy chatter of the rest of the facebook world. You wonder - why? Was it just Not Their Thing? Too much timesuck? Just didn't trip their trigger? What?

The one person that I thought would react that way to the application has become, instead, a sort of uberfacebooker, a facemaniac; joining groups, signining petitions, sending and receiving chickens, cows, mardi gras beads, cocktails and sushi. It's been fun, really, watching this tender comrade become more facebook than the old hand facebookers.

I have to admit that I find the FB gimmicks and gadgets silly and a little irritating, the way that once I'd become comfortable with digital commo I found the cute little gimmicks on America Online frustrating (yeah, I was one of the original Eighties AOLers - Christ, I'm older than dirt...) The little goofs are fun at first, then just something to get through, finally a minor irritation; a Dancing-Paperclip-for-the-Internet sort of thing. It's not that I object to someone sending me an imaginary drink, I just think "I could probably spend this time mixing one of these upstairs and it'd taste better..." And, frankly, the snowballs just baffle me. WTF?

On the other hand, teh Facebook can be good for a quick larf, as in in this exchange that took place today:

J is relishing the smell of monkey dung in the morning. 8:54am

First Friend at 8:58am January 22
you should probably wipe better than:)

FDChief at 9:19am January 22
Smells like...evolution?

FDChief at 9:28am January 22
Bipedal locomotion?

FDChief at 10:28am January 22
Opposable thumbs?

J at 10:31am January 22 via Facebook Mobile Texts
Chief-do some work!

FDChief at 12:44pm January 22
Brachiation?

FDChief at 12:45pm January 22
Binocular vis...oh, sorry. I'll go do some work.

J at 1:01pm January 22
You crack me up Chief!

Second Friend at 2:50pm January 22
Gross

I think the capper for me is Second Friend coming in at the end with the classic Witty Comment On The Original Post ("Gross") after we'd already made a stand-up gag out of it. Sometimes the best funny is the guy who completely misses the gag.

Curiously enough, as I went to lunch thinking about writing this post, I open the World's Worst Newspaper and what's on the front page of the Living ("Where J-School Failures Go To Die") Section? Just 1500 words from the textually-challenged Peter Ames "What's Happening NOW!" Carlin on "Are people hiding from Life on Facebook!?", full of useless crap quotes from somebody about their opinion bout facebook. Damn, Peter, if I want to read someone babbling idiotic bullshit I'll dictate to myself, thanks.

Which means, of course, that the Facebook has had its 15 minutes and will soon go the way of AOL, populated by sad old bastards and aged grannies desperately trying to hook up with their grandkids using The Next Big Thing That Was Big Ten Years Ago.

So I guess that so far, my feeling is that FB's fine. It's not All That. I enjoy it for the e-mail and instant-messaging I can exchange with friends. But I'll pass on the snowballs and sushi, thanks. I still find that I enjoy the broader canvas of blogging and other writers for the breadth and depth of what they produce, for the thoughtful responses the more complex fora provoke in me, and provide for me. But if you just want to drop me a line, I'm around the facebook, every day, once a day or so.

Just don't come expecting to get a cyber-chicken out of me.

I don't do chickens.