Social media, a knife, and no editor

Also, I'm in El Paso but that's not really relevant

It took almost two weeks before I stopped feeling the urge to check Facebook.

In spite of everything I know about myself and about the way social media is designed to worm its way into the apple cores of our brains, I was still surprised at how strong Facebook’s pull was. I took my “Facebook vacation” for a couple of reasons. First, I was bored with it. I was seeing the same people, the same groups, over and over and over and over again. I like those people, but c’mon. Second, I had a suspicion something was going on. I was looking at my feed out of habit, a FOMO compulsion that was making me psychologically queasy. I didn’t like the way it was making me feel, and knew it was time to cut myself off.

This wouldn’t be a problem, I thought. I’d let my brain reset, and come back with the hope that my algorithm had reset, too. I know social media is designed to tap that addiction button, but I’ve thankfully never been hooked on anything. The temptation to check Facebook would be there, but I’d just delete the app from my phone and let it pass.

Within the first hour I was reaching for the phone before remembering my hit wasn’t there anymore. The next day I was actively telling myself not to check. By the end of the week I was wondering when the urge would finally fade.

A little less than two weeks was the answer.

I won’t lie. I did lean on Twitter to smooth the edges of my withdrawal. It was the carrot stick taking the place of a toasty, quietly crackling cigarette (a teenage indulgence I still occasionally miss). But for some reason Twitter doesn’t get its hooks in the same way its social media sibling does. It made me wonder what the difference was, and why one took up more mental space than the other. And I think I figured it out, sort of.

Friends.

Thanks to Elon Musk and Kanye, I’m trying to transition from Twitter to some other platform. My wife was asking why I couldn’t just drop it, and I told her I couldn’t because I would lose contact with everyone I knew online. Let’s ignore how sad that sounds out loud. The point is my world gets much smaller without social media.

And I hate that.

Luckily, the people I’m closest to are also the people I most in touch with, through text and emails and phone calls in addition to social media. But there are people I’ve been interacting with for years, and only through some app or website. Maybe a lot of these are just surface relationships, bringing surface pleasures to my life. Maybe.

I would miss them, either way.

There are other concerns, of course. Twitter and Facebook are how I keep up with things; comics, movies, music, trends, news, art, labor movements for god’s sake. It’s how I make contacts for my podcasts. In a lot of ways, it’s how I learn. And so I wrestle with my values, which tell me I’d be a hypocrite if I stayed, and with what feels like selfishly refusing to give up a useful and often enriching resource. It’s annoyingly tough, especially when there are no real alternatives that work in quite the same way.

I hate that, too.

Right now, I’m trying to round up everyone I can so I’ll be able to drop Twitter completely in the next week or so. I’m toying with the idea of going back to Facebook, though it’s probably just as bad on a variety of levels. I’m still on Messenger and Instagram, because maybe I am a hypocrite. Then there’s Discord and Mastodon and going back to blogs and, hell, this newsletter.

All of this is to say my digital footprint might get smaller fairly soon.

I’m not so sure I hate that.

•••

So here’s a quick story I would’ve put on Twitter. It literally happened just a couple of hours ago.

Sandy and I are visiting my family in El Paso, and since it’s for the next month we rented an Airbnb. We’re still working, so we were both typing away on our laptops at the kitchen table. And we heard a muted “thunk!” from the other room.

We brought our cat Carlitos with us, so Sandy went to see what kind of trouble he was getting into. Half a minute later Sandy shouts, “What the hell?!” and “Max, come here and look at this!”

I figured Carlitos outdid himself in knocking something over, but there in the wooden bottom frame of the closet area was a FUCKING STEAK KNIFE. STUCK POINT-FIRST IN THE WOOD.

My first thought was, what kind of Halloween shit is this?! But as we looked closer, we could see something was weird about the handle. I thought it was broken, but Sandy said no, something is stuck to it. We used a tissue to handle it, looked at it more closely, and saw it was two strips of Velcro tape, one stuck to the knife handle and the other obviously—until recently—stuck to the wall above the frame inside.

I think someone rented the place, was weirded out by the slightly shabby neighborhood and all the brown people, and decided stashing a knife seemed like a good idea. Sandy thinks someone was weirded out by the slightly belligerent drunk lawyer who lives next door, and thought stashing a knife was a good idea. Either way, that’s going to be an awkward note for the rental guy.

•••

Some links of interest:

This article about Los Bros Hernandez is slightly pretentious (“quotidian” is used twice, “bildungsroman” once), and overly breathless, but it’s still a nice overview of the creators and what makes Love & Rockets special.

Now that Namor is from a Mesoamerican culture, how is his name pronounced? Remezcla and IGN have the answer (and it’s pretty bad-ass).

The director of The Nightmare Before Christmas is kinda fed up. Believe it or not, that’s not Tim Burton.

•••

I’m writing this as it comes out of my head, during quiet minutes between work, and without benefit of editing or a re-read. I feel it’s better just to get this out instead of trying to apply polish. Forgive me for any typos or rambling sentences.

Be kind, to yourself and others. See you next time.