My Private Shame

It has been a longer time between posts than I had anticipated or desired, but I have been dealing with a personal problem that has snuck up on me and taken me quite by surprise.

I feel it best to go public with this right away in hopes that getting it out into the light will help me to more quickly tackle this problem with therapy, support groups and — hopefully — some good... ehrm... effective drugs.

What I have developed, dear readers, is an insidious psychological dependence upon an artificial crutch, something which I find I must take in ever increasing doses to help me get through my day with a sense of sanity, yet I know the more I rely upon this crutch the more truly insane I become.

I have an addiction, dear readers. I am addicted to Facebook.

As an alcoholic unwittingly starts down his path of madness with the first sip of the nectar of his undoing, it all started innocently enough about a year ago. I signed up just to see what the Facebook hubbub was all about. A couple of my friends from the internet radio station Flashback Alternatives were on it, and I “friended” some of them, and was inundated with silly apps, which I mostly ignored. And then it was all I could do to remember that I had an account, and about once every month or so I would log in and see that nobody had really tried to reach me, but rather I had accumulated dozens of movie quiz requests, snowball fights, pillow fights and pokes.

Then one day I checked online and ran across a woman whose husband had been a casual friend of mine about whom I had not heard a peep in the 29 years since I last saw him, right before he was graduated from high school, two years before I reached my senior year. I received a friend request from her, which I accepted, and from then on names of other people I had not seen in more than 20 years began popping up on her friends list and in my friends request box!

I quickly became fairly adept at creating clever status updates. I played along with the memes. I actively looked up people with whom I wanted to reconnect. I furtively logged on at work, making sure to keep the office e-mail page ready — or, even better, some photographic work — easily accessed with the click of a tab in case a supervisor or the company owner happened to walk past my very public cubicle, and I clicked over many times in an hour just to see if anyone commented on my latest status update or on my comment to theirs.

And, once an obsession now managed with balance and care, Farrago suffered. Many times did I sit at the computer, thinking of the post I wanted to write while my fingers danced out my Facebook login and password across the keyboard, and I would be once again sucked into the network vortex of status updates and comments, random memes and Super Pokes.

And now Farrago looks like a forlorn, neglected child, both the object of my pity as an abandoned waif, and of my derision as an unwanted responsibility, as I repeatedly turn my back on it in favor of logging in to Facebook and feeling the warmth of all those fingers reaching out to me, and I lie in the corner tucked into the fetal position, drooling on the floor.

But I must fight this unnatural draw to the nefarious Facebook. Yes, she has her claws in me now, but I know her grip will loosen when she believes I am hers alone. I must remain aware, within my electronically assisted nostalgic stupor, of that grip, and of when it loosens, so that I can wrest my mind free and run to the light of day-to-day responsibility, of balanced and diverse free-time activities, and when I can resist the lesser memes and concentrate on only the really cool ones, like the “Your Album” meme, where you go to Wikipedia and click on “Random Article,” and the title of that articled becomes the name of your band, and then you click on “Random Quotes, and you go to the bottom of that page and take the last four or five words of the last quote on the page, and that becomes your first album’s title, and then you go to Flickr, click on “Explore the last 7 days,” choose the third photo on the page, and that becomes your album cover art, and then you create the album cover with Photoshop or another graphics program, and...

Oh, dear god.... This is going to take a while....