So far I’ve toiled hard to not become one of the denizens wasting hours on social networking sites. You know the sites and maybe some of you readers may be big-time users. The Facebook, the Myspaces and now the Twitter. They seem like traps to me along the information superhighway, capsized peach crates propped up at one corner with a carefully positioned twig, a moist strawberry or slice of cheese visible in the shadows near the back. If I can only just get past that flimsy twig . . .
My defenses broke down because I was invited to view a photo album of a friend’s trip to Fiji. The album was only viewable on Facebook, which forced me to log-in and compose a password combination of seven digits or letters. It was simple enough and I hadn’t planned on telling the site anything about me or establishing my own profile. Just a simple in an out job to see a few photos of colorful jungle parrots, maybe a bathing beauty or two or three on a white sand beach, strangers in an cabana bar with bloodshot eyes, and yes, all that was there. There was also an enticing link to a list of Facebook profiles, photos included, of people who the site said I had graduated high school with some twenty plus years ago.
Some faces I recognized at once, some were completely unknown, and many plied that neutral zone of mental space between either poles. These photos elicited unvoiced thoughts like these:
“Yeah, I kind of remember him.”
“Jesus, did she get fat.”
“I was sure that guy wasn’t going to make it past 25. Guess I was wrong.”
“Where did that dude’s hair go?”
I found the profile of my best friend my senior year. I hadn’t really heard from him or seen him since our sophomore years in college because we went to two different schools and that’s just the way life goes. I’ve never been the type or temperament to have lifelong friends.
So my friend is one of the world’s leading authorities on nineteenth century European philosophical thought, specifically Kant and Nietzsche. He is a full professor at a liberal arts college back east and travels all around the world talking about earnest and pondering deceased white guys and the things they thought so much about. For some reason, he’s a big hit in Cairo, talking about his field of expertise. The thirst of thinkers in the Nile delta must be unquenchable. My old friend is also a big hit in Caracas and visits the faculty at the universidad there for several guest lectures, light discussions on morality and the lack of an empirical basis for time independent of both materialistic substance or human perception.
I think back to that time around our second to last meeting. I would head up to his campus because his school was generally esteemed as a party school and mine was not. We each took a tab of acid on the tongue and talked for that hour before the LSD started to hit. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about but for some reason I recall distinctly us chatting about what we planned to do at school and in the years after. He said something about studying philosophy or, if that didn’t work out, psychology. He appeared uncommited to anything, a typical free agent freshman/sophomore, like he would just flow with the current of life to wherever it took him. I privately wondered how the study of philosophy would ever prepare one for life out there in the world.
And somehow that current of life propelled him to a place where people know of him, look forward to his lectures, make travel arrangements for him, wait for him to turn in their grades and comment on their dissertation proposals. I think it’s wonderful and I knew he would be a success even with a father who liked hitting the bottle much too hard and much too often.
I partially filled out my own Facebook profile, but the site refused to accept my first name as I wanted it to appear. I tried several times, but Facebook wasn’t having it. This refusal broke the social networking spell that was being so subtly cast. I had no real need or desire to talk with these people who I don’t really know now and probably didn’t know even then. Why fool myself into thinking that I did? I immediately closed my browser and went on with my day, unburdened by this set of old faces trading e-mail addresses and recollections of lakeside keggers and tripping sessions brought on by vinyl floor tile. It was all in our collective deep past, but really did those things even happen?
