I was just reviewing some of the personal data that is kept in Facebook on my account, and it appears that I picked up my first Facebook Friend on the 20th of January, 2008. Ten years and seven months on, I have got to admit that I have wasted a lot of time on that platform and wile I have got a lot from it, I cannot say today that it is a high priority anymore. It has lost its allure. There’s no more lust in its luster. No more pizza in its pizazz. It is a lot of time spent arguing about stupid crap with strangers, and not a lot of time spent on being actual friends with people who who have not time for real life interactions. I know people locally who don’t even have time for me, and seeing them there on Facebook just reminds me that they don’t.
So, I have decided to refocus my energies on real life matters. Those matters include the farm, more time with the family as I home school our girls, and even this blog, which unlike the narcissistic nature oaf Facebook, is less about image and impressions, and more about telling the tory of who I am, which I hope will be something my kids can keep for the future when I am gone, and they want to know about me. That said, I have seen four Facebook Memorial Accounts just today. They seemed a substitute for visiting graves. What a world, when we don’t even visit the dead. Why bury the bodies in a plot then? As impossible as it seems, I am going to join them one day, so I want to step away from the Facebook platform and step back into something I experienced more of in the years before it, real life.
A blog risks becoming a personal echo chamber with one voice screaming out in a rant against the world. This blog was started before I joined Facebook, and has served that purpose for me at times. It may never get a single visit, and unless I get comments and such, I may never know. But if traffic were what I was after, I could just go back to Facebook and set my profile to a memorial page, and watch the visits come piling in. Nope, that is not really what I want.
Many years ago, the sister of an at the time friend once comment to me that I was only good for a one liner. That’s all she said. Nothing more. It was so shallow of her. But as it is with the things that stay with throughout the years, I hope I have lived to prove her wrong. Well, she’ll never know, and that doesn’t matter. But I hope that I am not the shallow one-liner type she implied. But, if she is right in the end, then I don’t really care, as long as I can give all that I am to my kids, and as long as I can give a little more to Missus Bacon. I do still enjoy the one-liner. Too bad that girl was too poor of wit to understand how much is required to give a summation of a complex situation in a single line of humor. Too often the waters run shallow where a black stone beneath gives the illusion of in eternal depth.
Speaking of reflecting pools, there is so much that has happened over the last decade that I have put on Facebook, and not here. One of the highlights has been working with a Facebook group of Ex-Mormons. I joined the group many years ago, and eventually became an admin of it. When I joined, there were 246 people in the group. I am stepping back with this new direction, and the group has reached over 3700 members. The growth is not so much that it has been unmanageable. But I had to get a little help in the last year. I sought diversity, it is true, but more importantly, I sought people who were intelligent and kind, and could maintain a certain atmosphere in the group, which group admins very much affect. You see, people come to that group and they hang out for a while, and soon they find there are others who experience things they are going through, and they can turn there for help in dealing with their own situations. They find sympathy, humor, support, wisdom, knowledge, and finally, confidence to move forward in the most stifling of situations. Often they say it is the best group on Facebook. My role as an admin in all this is keeping out the people who conflict with this atmosphere, by vetting those who request to join, and by removing those who are malicious. I let the members do the rest, for the most part. I don’t feel there is much more to it than that. Sometimes it has taken the courage to tell someone when they are behaving badly, and try to let them correct that, then remove them if they cannot. But at the end of the day, the group is there for a lot of people to find peace, not for one person to cause trouble. And what has to be done is done.
But the reason I need to step away, even from this wonderful space where people understand each other and open their arms to new people who are feeling very lost at the time they join, is because I am at the point where I no longer identify myself just as an Ex Mormon. I’ll have plenty of time to identify as the ex-living. No time now to identify as an ex-anything-else. Or in the words of the Reverend Jon Bon Jovi, “I’ll live while I’m alive, sleep when I’m dead.”
Look! So far, writing off Facebook has taken me half a dozen paragraphs. Ten and a half years glued to something will do that to a person. I have made a lot of friends there. I have found there are a few people I just cannot tolerate at all. I have found a few people I absolutely adore who cannot tolerate me. In all, it has left me a 47 year old, socially inept person. I don’t know where that is going to leave the generations whose whole lives are being uploaded to Facebook. Maybe they will live on past their own deaths when their pages are turned not into memorial pages, but into virtual simulators that mimic their existence. One more reason to not visit their graves, and one more reason to not recognize the power of death, or the value of life. It is somewhere in there that The Matrix is booted up.
I’ll apologize up front if my many lines of text here turn out to be a few repeated lines chanted like a mantra about something like firewood. I have chosen to live a life whose focus is not the enrichment of others. Rather, it is self preservation, through hard work, and chores that seem more suited to about 150 years ago. Maybe I was born out of my era, but I do live a life I enjoy. I want Missus Bacon to do the same, and I am struggling to get our debts paid and us to a point where ew don’t cost so much to live from month to month. I know she would rather be here, spinning yarns, raising her llamas, baking, cooking, and creating every day. I just don’t know how to sell anything for enough to pay for everything, or vice versa. And we are not getting younger. We are grandparents these days! A new generation of family has begun.
I chant my mantras because those are my goals. I repeat them to reinforce them. I reinforce them so I accomplish them. I don’t know any other way to do it. Call it obsessive. But I am a lazy bastard who apparently has done a lot in his life.
It’s 2018 on the Peasant’s Manor Farm in Fairview, Idaho, right now. What time is it in the rest of the world? Or perhaps they’re asleep, all dreaming of each other in Facebook.
Kelsey J Bacon
Fairview, Idaho