Welcome back, all three of you.
I know this to be so, because there was a spike in my stats – by the way, I go all red when I talk like that – and when your status quo is flatlining, you can get a little over-excited about that thin, vertical blip that seems to trumpet “finally getting the deal with HarperCollins” but is really telling you “a senior citizen was searching for bath accessories, thinks this is eBay and is now looking for a Santa outfit for her cat in my tags cloud”.
I’d throw in something about “chagrin” but I can never figure out how to pronounce it.
Anyway, Curly, Larry and Moe it is, and today’s lesson deals, in a roundabout way, with sharing, so sit y’all down, fasten those leg irons and no pigtails in the inkwells.
You see, since the – you know – election-thingy – I’ve been feeling like one of those T.S. Eliot guys, the Hollow Men, heads filled with straw, and one could be forgiven for thinking that Eliot was having a clarivoyant flash about the Republican Party leadership and the right wing generally.
And from the moment Donald ushered in the End Times with all the finesse of a three-hundred-pound Walmart security guard on Black Friday, nothing has seemed worth writing about.
Then I went back to my roots, and here please cooperate by imagining me striding through the revolving doors, the tiniest little jitter where the film was cut, then me striding out wearing a different t-shirt and soiled jeans, but basically looking just the same cause it was only two years ago.
(No, you can’t log in to Bubble Witch 2 Saga, and stop interrupting. You have NO IDEA how good I am being to you right now. NO IDEA.)
You see, since you asked, this whole slowpainful conflab started with Facebook. Yessir, that little freckle-faced rascal! Facebook is the best creative and staffing solution – or you could use its technical name, “con job” – yet devised by a multinational marketing firm who wants to fire all of its copywriters and producers but still wants to sell everything on the planet down to your belly-button lint and those “shards” on the floor that you’ve been trying to pick up with your moistened index finger for three hours that are really Peak Freen biscuit crumbs.
WE supply the copy – ALL of the copy AND our original images, for free, plus enough false rumors and conspiracy theories, enough flat-earthers and CERN-exorcists to fill a season of Twilight Zone with a few storylines left over for David Duchovny, while Facebook rakes in the money with a special combine money-harvester that Mark invented in his spare time while waiting for a puberty that may never have happened.
Then we pay them to advertise! Are we easy or what?!! LO friggin’ L!!??
But my five-years-behind late-adopter love affair with FB was over in a week, by which time I had learned two things: Groucho was so spot-on about not wanting to belong to that club that would have me as a member; and two, Facebook is anodyne.
Facebook is a lobotomy that would make the one they performed on Frances Farmer look like the opening of your seventh chakra, whatever that is.
Marketing is about finding out what the fuck you, the citizen-consumer, want now that you live on pre-packaged snack-em’s, fruits that grow their own labels (giving occasion to my famous Apple Crumble with QR Code) and whichever inmates of the national poultry drug rehabilitation program happen to have expired from stress in a given week, and live in a gated community whose rainbow colors are all beige, including the actual neighbours;
Marketing is finding out what you want, bending you over, slathering everything in sight with original Crisco and givin’ it to ya with both barrels, and don’t think for one second that they bother to take off the diamond cuffs.
But while they’re loosening you up, it’s anodyne. Bland and happy! It’s everything you want that doesn’t want you back, it’s a pair of fluffy slippers shaped like Elmo; it’s conformity the ’50s never imagined because at least they knew what a commie looked like.
And – are the kids out of the room? – I am a chafer. I chafe daily as I pin the soiled nappy of conformity betwixt my raw, prickly-heated loins. I chafe at rules, restrictions, boundaries. Even though I am the only homo alive who can spend twelve hours naked in a bathhouse and fail to have sex, believe me when I tell you that I am really, at heart, an outsider, an iconoclast, a loose screw in the cogs, a bottle of Shopper’s Drug Mart “Intimate Fluid” spiked with jalapeno peppers. Yowza!
So I began to get subversive on Facebook – a rebellion on a par with tying a non-regulation knot for your Eagle Scout badge – and when I looked at the results, what was there for me to think except, “This is way too good for the hundreds of people on Facebook who’ll see it. I should really go it alone and reduce my readership to something like the world population at the beginning of a John Wyndham novel – a defrocked nun carrying a copy of “Vogue” and a small, precocious child with his posssessions in a “Whole Foods” bag, side-by-side on a fluorescent beach. I tell ya, I’m gonna kill ’em in Des Moines!”.
So that’s how I ended up here, about to share a share. See above, and please for the umpteenth time don’t try clicking the pic, it’s not linked to anything. Gawd, you’re easy!
Which brings us back to “doh!” Yes, I’m sharing a share. That’s so socialist it’s – communist!
That’s because, as every Republican Trump-humper will tell you: Sharing is wrong.
Hang on tight to what you have, from that log cabin you were born in that you built yourself, to that deluxe walnut casket lined with raw silk, and everything in between, cause it’s following you to the gilded, bimboed, Trumpian afterlife, where you will presumably meet a lot of Egyptian Pharaohs in your Mercedes, and eat a lot of really stale hummus while wearing thousand-dollar sneakers with flashing lights in them.
And those suckers who signed up for Obamacare, who didn’t think you’d say, “Why should I pay for this guy’s triple by-pass? He can just breathe slower!” – what will they have to talk about? How they made do by putting broccoli in the Kraft Dinner and the provenance of their hand-woven “Last Supper” wall hanging? Damn right, and if you ask me that’s an afterlife finely crafted from “lose”.
Anyway. This struck me as a perfect not-to-be-clicked picture of me in 10 years. I think it’s a guy. Yes, no?
(You see, I CAN laugh at myself. It doesn’t matter that after I’ve shared a laugh at me, with you, I run outside convulsed with girlish sobs and hide behind the barn, smoking.)
The pic is actually kind of repellent cause it reminds me of someone horrible who lived with me, then died; these events, much as I wish they were, are not related. And how are the foules mesdames this evening, Kenneth?
I didn’t watch the video yet. No, that’s not entirely true. I didn’t watch the video ever. This is because it has all the hallmarks of something heart-warming. And I don’t do heart-warming, mainly because it makes me cry and vomit at the same time, which poses a severe danger of aspiration.
And yet aspiration is supposed to be a good thing. Otherwise, how will I accumulate all those shiny trinkets that I will then refuse to share?
Pharaohs aspired to be the Sun God; I aspire to get through the rest of the evening without garroting someone with picture wire. Stick THAT in yer sarcophagus, Tut!
I suppose I could try watching something heart-warming in the “rescue” position I learned in CPR. That might work.
Or not.