My reading of the tea leaves, and base instincts for having observed such things already, is that Facebook is fading, and leveraging Instagram as its primary social media vehicle for the future. I have no stake in either, which are, of course, owned by the same company.
But FB seems more and more like a toxic wasteland of Covid deniers and malcontents lying in wait for someone to say something — anything — so they can unload disdainful sanctimony and questions about one’s intelligence, sexuality, and value to humanity. It’s like the old Usenet.
But then what do I know. It’s too big a machine for me to comprehend. not just FB or IG or any specific platform but the totality of this monstrous, ever-filling Sea Of Shit. I don’t know that he ever uttered those words in that order but I can hear the voice of Joe Frank, seething in steady but surely increasing rage, that the Internet fills his rooms with oceans of wasted time, wasted words spoken and typed as the waters of wasted time rise first to his knees, then to his ass, then ever upward, drowning his nation in a suffocating, noxious, toxic Sea Of Shit.
The flooding of the world has created new and freshly-named bodies of water and land masses. The Sea Of Shit is fed by the River of Hate, which itself trickles from the Mountain of Anger. Smaller bodies of water are named for degrees of loneliness and malcontent: Lake of the Stagnant Masturbator. The Pond of Textual Scum. Children of the future will gather at the Eddy of Ritual Humiliation.
Has that not become our world? At every click of a mouse lies a punch in the face, a spittled blast of righteous ignorance.
I don’t know but I am going to New Jersey today, exact destination undecided at this moment. It’s been strange waking up at 5am, before daylight. It feels wrong to see the sun rise. But that is far less wrong than seeing the sun come up while still sitting at the bar, as was my regimen for a very brief span of time.
The after hours scene was a fun underworld, if I can call it that. The sex workers showed up around 4 or 5am, a long night’s work behind them. Allegedly a minor cast member from The Sopranos was sometimes present but I never figured out who that was.
What killed it for me was the cigarette smoke. I’d emerge from the clandestine back door of the bar with my clothes smelling like a freshly shat asshole, my eyes blood red and tearing up. The rising sun felt especially cruel on my eyes on these seemingly endless walks of shame, coming home from the after hours bar.
It made me ask how I endured growing up in a smoking household, not to mention the enclosed space of the cars where both my parents smoked. Then, as at the after hours bar, one did not complain about inhaling that shit.
