"You Should Get A Blog."

"You should get a blog," people tell me.  Yes, certainly.  I should also perhaps put out a zine, or publish my own newspaper.  Maybe I could start engraving my words on stone tablets.

The issue is that I don't particularly want people to read what I have to say.  I write, like most writers, because I have to.  I write because it's 2018 and I want to keep up with my friends.

For the past nine years that's been Facebook, which sometime around 2009 ate up the world and shat on it.  I hate Facebook.  I've never not hated Facebook.  But I love my friends.  And that's how Facebook survives and thrives.  It cannibalizes our feelings for those we love.  You want to talk to your best friends, your family, people you've lost touch with but wish you hadn't?  They're on Facebook.  They're all on Facebook.

The thing is, Facebook itself - all social media, but particularly Facebook - is monstrous.  Should I attempt to persuade you of this?  No, I don't think so.  You choose to believe it or you choose to deny it.  I've tried for so long, so long, to deny it.  I've been part of the problem.  I will always be part of the problem, but I can't be part of this problem, in this way, any longer.

But to do that I've had to cut off all of my oldest and dearest friends.  I'm not sure I have the strength.  Facebook, of course, will always welcome me back with open arms.  More than that, they want me back.

There's some sinister parallel to mental illness in my mind.  Like the depression, it will always be there.  It can wait, will wait, forever, for me to have a moment of weakness.

I need to keep writing, and I will.  For now here is where I will put things.  At best I hope I can encourage other people to stay strong, to resist social media.  If not that, I hope for a while I can do the right thing and avoid doing the wrong thing.