A few days ago, I knocked out my not-very-old Facebook account. I was already feeling pretty ambivalent about the whole enterprise when I got a message from my past that I definitely didn’t expect. It’s not that I bear this person any malice, but the last 25 years of not being in touch with them was going really well, all things considered. There are some loose threads in each of our tapestries, I believe, that are simply better left unrepaired. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that what I ought to do is ask some of the folks I’d gotten back in touch with for their preferred method of contact, and that I should actually write (or at least call) them if I was really going to make the effort to “stay in touch”. So I asked, some have responded, and now the Facebook account’s toast. Good riddance.

Today, as I was scanning Twitter more out of habit than interest, I realized that there was nothing there I truly valued, that I was just spending time. Typically I feel like I’d get more out of watching the Brady Bunch for 30 minutes than I do reading people’s tweets throughout the day, and those are from people I know and love. I couldn’t come up with a good reason to keep the account, so that’s toast as well.

The problem with these revolutionary digital thneeds, like the consumer crap and cultural detritus that form waist-high drifts of meaninglessness in my life, is that there’s novelty, but little else worth caring about. Each of these toys cost precious and finite moments of my life that I could be doing something worthwhile, unrecoverable time I could be spending with my children before they grow up and I grow old, time I could be spending eating and drinking with friends or cuddling my wife.

I turned the same critical eye to this blog, wondering if it too needed to go, but I stopped short of dropping the axe on it. Updike I’m not (and thank the good Lord for that), or Mencken or Royko for that matter, but art, craft, and skill are part of what I’m doing here. I’m writing, and I enjoy it, that’s what this is about.

I would have a hard time justifying the time and effort I put into this, were it just about the roughly eight of you gracious enough to drop in on a regular basis. But making this blog, to me, isn’t just about the posts or the audience. It’s about thinking and writing and photographing and editing and publishing, about the joy that comes from creating. And it’s about more than just producing any particular work of art or craft, it’s about cultivating the artist and craftsman. I’d find value in that whether or not I ever showed this to another soul.

So the blog stays. Lucky me, lucky you.

Perhaps I’ll change my mind about all this tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see the value in the social media revolution, and decide that the rare, beautiful gem one occasionally finds in it makes all the digging and sifting through mud worth it. But for now, my distilled sentiment on such things is that social media can blow it out its web-two-point-ass. I’m just a blawger, I suppose.

Years ago, I used to play poker with friends every so often. This was well before the current Texas Hold’em craze, so we’d play Draw, Stud, Black Mariah, Low-Hole Chicago, Screw Your Neighbor, what have you. Everyone would buy in for $20, chips would ebb from one side of the table, flow the other way, mass in one pile then split into several, as chips are wont to do.

After an hour or two, we’d end up playing either Guts or Ace-Two-Three for the rest of the night. Both games involved playing for the pot, such that one winner takes the pot, one or more losers match it, and it could grow pretty fast. Inevitably, someone would go in (often with a great hand but not always) and lose a pot that would bust ‘em. If they didn’t have the cash to cover, the table had no choice but to let them write an IOU, otherwise the people that had lost real money wouldn’t have a chance to win it back. So, if the busted player didn’t win their IOU back, someone else would own their paper.

Now here’s the thing about IOU’s on our table. If you had to write one out, well, that was that, you were in the hole and we were okay with that. If you held someone’s IOU, you could sell it to someone else at the table for chips, and the bidding depended on whether or not people thought you were good for it. There were some fairly hilarious scenes where someone watched indignantly as their IOU’s were bought and sold for fifty cents or a quarter on the dollar. In some cases, someone might throw down with “I’ve got twenty Woody-bucks for whoever gets me a beer from the fridge.” Woody’s credit rating was less than stellar.

But under no circumstance was it okay to put someone else’s IOU into a pot in lieu of money. The pot would take your IOU if you were busted, but not until your last chip, dollar, and penny was gone, because everyone else was putting real money on the table. The rare attempts to pull such a stunt resulted in shouting and ridicule, with the offender sheepishly replacing the note with chips or cash.

So here we are, with several “too big too fail” companies, bloated with mountains of IOU’s, trying to force we-the-people to buy them with real money that we get from our I-get-up-every-goddam-day-and-go-to-work-for-a-living wages, at what they say is a fair price. For my family of four, they want us to put up somewhere between eight and fifteen thousand dollars to buy these IOU’s at full face value. And we’re going to have to do this because they took these fucking IOU’s from anyone and everyone, over and over again, and were calling them “chips” the whole fucking time.

These Diamond Jim motherfuckers, these blow-thirty-grand-on-coke-and-strippers Wall Street scum, want my real wages in exchange for their shitty IOU’s. The wages I earn by going to work five days out of seven, fifty weeks out of every fifty-two. The wages from which taxes are taken to keep our roads in repair, to fund my children’s education, to give some relief to folks in a jam and a boost to folks who need a hand getting on their feet. The wages that they all said couldn’t support the tax revenue that might give us single-payer health care, subsidize college tuitions, or build up a respectable transit infrastructure.

Well fuck that. Any bill that comes out of Congress seeking to rescue these dishonest, avaricious sociopathic sons of fucking bitches without getting an equity stake, and without giving me my pound of flesh, is unacceptable. Otherwise, I say we let the whole fucking thing collapse.

I like Bernie Sanders take on it. Too big to fail? Too big to exist.

Y’ever get the feeling that all the hubbub about energy independence, even if earnest, is missing the mark?

James Kunstler’s got that feeling:

The reason our energy debate is so hollow and idiotic is because we can’t face this basic reality. The fantasy-du-jour among both political parties is that we can become “energy independent.” By this they mean we can keep on living the way we do by means other than oil. This is just not true. We have to make profound changes in everything we do from the way we inhabit the landscape to the way we produce our food. Lately, the only change we’ve shown any interest in is changing what our cars run on. But that is not going to rescue us, not even a little. Our inability to talk about anything else except the cars will drag us down into poverty and turmoil.

I turn to the estimable Lawrence for my response:

Peter Gibbons: Yeah. I guess… I don’t know. Sometimes I get the feeling like she’s cheating on me.

Lawrence: Yeah, I get that feeling too, man.

Dennis Perrin is watching the Democratic Convention, and makes a valid point in the midst of all the Blue Lovin’.

I’m happy that Michelle Obama found success in her life and loves her family, but why the fuck should I care? Her husband presumes to exert state control over me and mine, spending my tax dollars for expanded war in Afghanistan, continuing misery for the Palestinians, narco-war and repression in Colombia, among other wonderful projects, and I’m supposed to melt because his wife can read hackneyed, Hallmark copy from a teleprompter?

I’m still feeling cranky, so I’ma take a little break until I can post something without having to be wound up to do it.

For instance, I enjoyed this, XKCD loving the world, and I oughta be glowing with sympathetic well-being. But all I can think of is:

I hate your iPod
I hate your SUV
I hate your brand names
That shit on your TV
Avarice and ignorance,
So much for democracy

Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada

You can see where this is going, and that’s not what I want this to be about. You deserve better. So I’m going to recharge a while, and I’ll be back when I have something nice to say.

I’ll still see if I can post something reasonably entertaining on Friday though. I mean, that Fu Manchu / Steve McQueen thing was pretty cool, eh?

[UPDATE]: As long as I’ve got a post up dedicated to crankiness, fuck you very much Tom Coburn. Will the good people of Oklahoma please come pick up your Shitbag Senator? Thanks much.