Suck It, Zuckerberg

I just finished The Boy Kings by Katherine Losse, a former insider at Facebook, and it helps confirm a belief that I've had ever since seeing The Social Network: Mark Zuckerberg and his helpers are exactly the sort of people who would start a social-networking site, because they lack the real-life skills to actually make social connections in real life.

Maybe that's a bit harsh, but I think the cold, utilitarian mode of the website doesn't leave much room for human interactions, and for a long time I was cool with that. Because, cavet emptor, I'm exactly the sort of person who would be attracted to a website that keeps people at arm's (or computer screen's) length, even if I see them in real life.

My own Facebook story goes back to 2006, when I was starting back at college and everyone at Clemson was asking me if I was on Facebook. I had a MySpace account because, for the years when I wasn't seemingly moving in any forward motion towards a life of my own, it seemed like I would be left behind in the rush to become something, and I was insecure enough to think that an online profile, however miniscule, was preferable to no online identity at all. You can be anything you want to be online, the internet seems to promise, taking the place of traveling roadside elixir salesmen in talking up the tonic that is online communication. It's just a click away.

So I joined Facebook and haven't looked back...except when I have, and wondered what I became.

Facebook in those days was more user-friendly (sorry, but Timeline is shit. Absolute horrific horseshit, and reading Losse's book confirms for me the belief that Zuckerberg et al. don't give a crap what we as users think about it), and I used it alright. I sent friend requests to people I barely knew from some English class where we might have one social interaction tops, whilst discussing Wuthering Heights. But online, we could become "friends," which meant something (though I don't know if any of us ever knew just what). We could write on each other's walls (my inner comedian could be released full bore on display for the world), send messages if something more private needed to be said, and God help me I poked poor girls to death when that was still a thing (is it? I haven't poked in ages, and don't intend to start back now). But I don't know that it really solved the existential loneliness I felt at both being part of the circle and being apart from it. I didn't live on campus, and I had a job, so my weekends and "free time" were not my own. In those early days, Facebook more often than not made me feel less of a loser because, while I didn't have the time or resources to hang out as much in real life with my friends, I could still stay "connected" to them, revel in the same Beer Pong photos as they did, and it was okay.

Facebook, to be fair, is not evil; no technology is, unless the person using it does so for evil purposes. But it does facilitate something that the internet is infamous for, the sense (however real or imagined) that actions don't have consequences. You can poke someone, the internet says, and they might respond, but it doesn't mean that it has to mean anything (unless you're flirting online, then it's loaded with all sorts of meaning). The internet is meant to be a conduit for communication, but the extent to which we let it replace real-time, face-to-face (as opposed to Facebook-to-Facebook) interaction says a lot about us individually. There have been times when I thought nothing of sending a post to someone that could be misconstrued, or read wrong (I have a sarcastic sense of humor, something which can get lost nuance-wise in the cold, digital display of the spoken word), and there have been times when I thought that Facebook told me more about a person than he or she (usually she, because like every guy I've tried to friend-request girls I liked, and most of the time they accepted, and this led to me imagining all sorts of things that weren't there because it was easier to write on their wall than talk to them in person) said to me. Facebook enables that part of us that's afraid of rejection, that wants to be loved without doing the hard work of connecting for real.

Now, to be fair, I don't intend to delete my Facebook account anytime soon: for one thing, I do have honest-to-God connections with real people that I know in real life but don't get to see anymore, and in that sense social networking really is social. Keeping up with someone's life might still creep me out a little bit (or appeal to the creepy part of me, whatever), but for people who were or are important to me whom I don't get to see for "real," it comes in handy. And while I've never met A.J. Jacobs or Will Leitch or any of the other famous people who accepted me as a "friend," I admire their work and hope that, maybe, in the course of my chosen desire to write for a living (I was interested in sharing myself that way long before social networking came along), I can field friend requests from people who read something I wrote, liked it enough to seek me out, and merely want to show that they like my style (without being prone to breaking into my home at three in the morning because they think we're "soul mates"). The internet still works in making me feel less lonely, less disconnected from the real world (i.e., anything that's not Walhalla). But I'm more careful about it.

I tend to spend less than an hour online every weekday, checking emails in case something important happens (usually not; like you, I get all kinds of spam promising a larger penis. How did they know that I had that problem?). I spend maybe five seconds checking my Facebook if someone posted on my wall or sent me a message, a few minutes more thinking up a witty saying or real-life emotion to do as a status update (as of this writing, and due to a week of listening to Talking Heads, it's a song quote), and maybe gaze longingly at pictures of my niece, who is one of the best things to come into my life in a while (there are a few others, but I won't name them here). I'm good with a few minutes spent there, and yes I'll post this link to my wall, so other people can find it and read it at their discretion. I don't worry so much about "dying unappreciated" as I did when I was younger and more pretentious. But I do still want to see a book with my name in the author's place someday, fiction or non-fiction (or both, as all the anti-Obama books seem to me). So after saying all that about Facebook, I'm gonna post this to it anyway. Humans are contradictory animals, something that I don't think Zuckerberg and the techno-geeks can fathom. You can't solve us with a mathematical formula; we just are. So suck it, Zuckerberg, for creating this addictive and now-essential tool that we all use, even when we hate ourselves for using it.

Jesus Christ: The Greatest Pro of All

I took that title from a line in Walker Percy's Love In the Ruins, which I bought a few weeks back and read over a couple of days this weekend. Hooray for putting things off until you don't!

Anywho, I have TV again...or at least more variety. Allow me to elaborate at length:

At the tail end of the TV season last May, a thunderstorm came along and knocked out a significant chunk of my channels. This was no problem initially because, as I said, the season proper was winding down, and summer reruns and summer "shows that didn't make the schedule during the regular season" were all I really seemed to miss out on. I could still get in a few channels here and there, and I had my reading to keep me occupied. I was good.

Until about last week, when I'd finally had enough. I'd had enough of not getting in channels that I liked just because they were pleasant background noise to my reading or napping (PBS's block of home-improvement shows are far less glittering, but they get the job done). I'd had enough of not getting to watch ESPN for at least a fix of "Sports Center" because it was one of the channels that went in and out. But mostly, I was tired of being stuck with the History Channel as the one that came in the best (of the ones that came in), and because the last time it had anything "historical" on it, Clinton was in the White House.

If you spend enough time watching the History Channel (and God knows I have, perhaps way too much), you begin to think that every workplace has "hijinks" and "kooky characters" who exist solely as a conduit through which the audience can enjoy themselves (though not because they feel better about themselves in comparison, which explains the sadomasochistic appeal of "Toddlers and Tiaras" and the entire block of MTV programming). When you know that "Couting Cars" is the auto expert guy from "Pawn Stars," it's only a matter of time before the go-to gun expert at the shop gets his own show.

God help us all.

Anyway, I'd like to go further, but I only have so long on the computer I'm on, so I gotta wrap it up. No TV: live-able, but barely once the fall season begins. Read more. Avoid TLC. That is all.

Mitt Happens

No, I did not catch the premier of Clint Eastwood's new one-man show, "Angry Old Clint Eastwood Yells at a Chair." I have better things to do with my time, such as reading The Hobbit and wondering why my left earlobe swelled up to the size of a Goodyear tire last week (it's shrinking now, thankfully, and I'll spare you the details because I understand if you're about to eat lunch or something). But I can appreciate why Republicans liked that better than they did their own freakin' candidate.

Watching the GOP try to convince themselves to love Mitt is about as funny as it was on my side, back in '04, when our pretty-boy rich-guy candidate made even wearing a Red Sox cap look awkward and unnatural. John Kerry has a smidgen more charisma than Mitt, however, and it helped that his wife was batshit crazy. Ole Mitt just can't win in the personality sweepstakes.

That being said, the guy could win. White people don't respond well to a black man in the White House (yeah, I said it!), and to be fair, Obama hasn't exactly done what he said he'd do (though the GOP kinda forgets that they're the reason why). I can see Mitt winning in November...and I'm okay with that.

Doom-and-gloom predictions are fine when you're young, or when you're convinced the other guy is Nixonian in his lust for power (Richard Nixon is the most fascinating president to me because he's clearly the most evil. Granted, all the facts about Rutherford B. Hayes aren't in yet, but I doubt anyone past or present will ever top Tricky Dick in the Asshole Presidents Hall of Fame). But I just don't see that this time around. Mitt is like Dubya minus the accent; he's about as comfortable with real, living and breathing people as a serial killer is with a woman who isn't his mother or a prostitute. The dude just doesn't have anything to him that merits being concerned, because his political philosophy is "whatever you say, dear."

Mark Hamill earned my fandom yet again (after all, he did send up himself in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) when he compared Mitt to "the Thing," an alien that can imitate humans without itself being human. I agree with that comparison whole-heartedly, minus the whole "destroying mankind" bit (though I would imagine Mitt would be uncomfortable around Kurt Russell if Kurt's brandishing a Petri dish and a flamethrower).

I can't honestly say that a Romney presidency would be a bad thing, on the whole; as much as I don't want it to come to pass, I wouldn't leave the country if it did. In my lifetime, Dubya is the only president who ever came close to being a dickhead of Nixon's caliber, and he only got that far because, with Dick Cheney next in line (and probably in charge), no one was gonna take a shot at him. It's important to study history because then you realize that we've had some mediocre presidents. Here, I'll name them:

Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
John Tyler
Rutherford B. Hayes
Martin Van Buren
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover
William McKinley

So, if Romney gets in, I'm betting he gets on the Mediocre list (Nixon and Harding are on the "criminally bad" list, Reagan makes it as "actor-in-charge bad," and Dubya is in a category all of his own). That's my hope, anyway. With a douche like Paul Ryan in the co-pilot seat, however, it could end up being a lot worse.

If you'll excuse me, tickets for Eastwood's new show are going at a pretty penny. Gotta place my bid now.

A Confederacy of Dunces Couldn't Keep Me Away

New Orleans is long past my rear-view, the Superdome is majestically behind me (sweet Jesus, my entire hometown's downtown could fit in there), and I'm possibly on the contestant list for eighteen months (still unsure, if I never hear from them I guess I know for sure).

Boy, is my brain tired...

The "Jeopardy" try-out, I'm not at liberty to divulge the questions (excuse me, answers) but I feel pretty good about how I did. At least, I think I did good. Driving out of NO later that afternoon (following a trip to a riverfront mall where I spent way too much on an Eli Manning Giants shirt, but I don't regret it because I felt on top of the world), I could safely say that, win or lose (or draw) I was glad that I got the opportunity to go.

On the way back, we stopped on the Gulf Shore (at Gulfport this time) to take in the beach. Only thing is, I was still wearing my fancy Jeopardy clothes, so I couldn't really get in the waves or anything (well, I could have, but then I'd be hoping I dried out on the long drive back). There is a good photo of me that resulted, looking like I'm keeping the beaches clear of illegals while looking fashionable. Alabama wasn't any more interesting between Mobile and Montgomery, so I drove that stretch while my sister rested. Atlanta was banging at ten that night (we lost the hour that we'd gained back on the border between Alabama and Georgia), and the next thing I remember is waking up just as the familiar sights of my street went by. Needless to say, my sis and future bro-in-law crashed at the house that night, and we all got a fairly wore-out night's sleep.

So I'm back, and I'm glad I went. I would love, love, love to get on the show, but I got a pretty good trip through a part of the country I'd never seen (all of it, even the boring parts, was worth it). I've got a few souvenirs, some memories, a lot of cameraphone pics, and an experience that will be hard to top. But it will be harder to go back to "sad bastard Trevor," at least for a good long while. Because who the hell thought I'd get a chance to try out for Jeopardy? Anything is possible...even finding a real, non-tranny woman on Bourbon Street.

Okay, that might be impossible...

Bourbon Street Is Decadent and Depraved

Second day in New Orleans, first full day of sight-seeing (and only, as myself, my sis and her finance plan to abscond with the loot...I mean, leave town tomorrow after my Jeopardy try-out. Yeah, that's the ticket), and I know that technically we didn't do a whole lot of venturing beyond Canal Street and a side-jaunt down Bourbon Street, but we got to do more than enough.

The trip down was much better than any previous long-ass trip in a car during which I was a participant (I think it helped that we were all well past the age when farting in an enclosed space was a source of amusement, though that did not preclude any involuntary passing of gas). Georgia minus Atlanta was rural but pleasant (our path through ATL was nice because we didn't have to deal with traffic. My thinking is we won't be so lucky tomorrow). Alabama was notable for a couple of things: the fact that my future brother-in-law and I wore Clemson shirts in Auburn was not received kindly by the locals at a Firehouse Subs there (much harsh stares and possible brandishing of nooses could be inferred), and the stretch from Montgomery to Mobile (which I took over on after my sis expressed exhaustion at having driven so far, because she thinks I drive too slow for the interstate) was devoid of anything besides trees, more trees, grass, the occasional wild goat, and trees. Not even a fireworks warehouse billboard to liven up the scenery.

That particular stretch of Alabama answers my question "why do people take drugs?"

Mississippi was a revelation; as a kid who watched Mississippi Burning at a tender age, I've always been under the impression that you don't want to make a Mississippian angry (also, they still have the Rebel flag on their state flag). But the Gulf Coast, at least, was awesome; sandy beaches with gentle tides coming in, not at all like the Atlantic at Myrtle Beach (also, a significant lack of tacky tourist trappings at Biloxi, where we stopped). After that, it was on to Louisiana and New Orleans...where we happened upon Canal Street overrun by young college-age men in red dresses. Either it was some sort of charity/fraternity thing, or their drag queens have really quite trying.

Culture shock, thy name is New Orleans...

Today was a little better in that regard, NO is both urban enough to feel like a big city and Southern enough to be weird about it. I know we won't be doing much more while we're here (the Jeopardy thing is in the morning, and we all miss my niece something awful), but I want to come back, at my leisure, and see all the stuff that's here. It helps that none of us had an agenda (i.e., "I wanna see some big tourist trap!"), but I will be back sometime in the future. While wandering away from the excess of Bourbon Street (best way I could describe it: Clemson on a Thursday night, magnified by a large percent. The country boy in me is coming out, but really, apart from a trip to NYC and a passing familiarity with DC, ATL, and Greenville, my frame of reference was pretty small before now), I happened upon a little bookshop that had some long aisles I wanted to wander down, had I more time. Alas, I bought a book by a guy about New Orleans jazz because I figured that's what you do in New Orleans (plus, I already own and cherish a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces). This city is amazing, and while we did a lot, we just scratched the surface.

Anyway, long day ahead first of Jeopardy, then driving home (not sure if I drew the short straw on that yet, though it's the least I could do). Tom-Tom should be programmed to take us through a more-wild-goat-infested part of Alabama on the way back (or steer us to the nearest Jareds Galleria of Jewellry), and I pray for patience while trying to navigate through ATL, whether as driver or passenger. But hell, this has been a kick-ass trip all around, and whatever happens with the show, I'm glad I got to take it.

Could've used some Skinimax on the hotel cable, though ;-)

“Rednecks”/”Birmingham,” Randy Newman, and Southern Identity

The thing about the South is, we know we’re idiots. Not that we ourselves are stupid, but that’s how we’re viewed by the rest of the country. No one ever says someone from Oregon is an inbred cracker, for instance. Midwesterners may be boring, but they never had a major network television show dedicated to glorifying bootleggers running corn across Iowa county lines, for instance. No, we Southerners have a lot to answer for, but we’re not the idiots that a lot of people think we are.

Sure, there was that whole slavery thing (really, we’re sorry about it. White people have had a long history of being too lazy to do things when they could just get someone from another group to do it, for less pay). And we dropped the ball on integration for about, oh, a hundred years. And we still embrace the big, dumb, and loud when it comes to politics (Dubya is one of us, like it or not). Randy Newman is one of us, too, a New Orleans boy by way of Los Angeles and back again. So on that basis alone, I give him a free pass on “Rednecks.”

If you haven’t heard it…first off, he uses the n-word. He’s writing from the point of view of a typical good old boy (in fact, that’s the name of the album the song comes from, though I got it from a best-of compilation), and I can see where it wouldn’t necessarily be high on a lot of people’s playlists because of that (I saw him on “Austin City Limits” refusing to do the song, because “why do you think I can’t sing it?”). In that sense, he’s echoing Mark Twain, who used the n-word with such stunning regularity that people still have issues with “Huck Finn.” I didn’t get the whole controversy until I actually read the book, and then I understood. Twain sets a record for using the n-word, surely, though I’m afraid he might still be lagging behind any association of white people in the South (or the North, for that matter) who like to dress up and scare non-white people. Larry the Cable Guy fans, for instance.

The South is defined via pop culture as backwoods, infested with toothless morons who live to drink moonshine and knock up their first cousins. And with any groundless rumor and unwarranted stereotype, this one has basis in fact. We are backwoods, and proud of it. We went to freaking war with the rest of the country with maybe one gunsmith in Selma and a couple of fellas in Waycross who could whittle rifles real good, of course. When “The Dukes of Hazzard” is the single most important television show set in your neck of the woods, and “Deliverance” was filmed just down the road, you tend to be self-conscious.

Of course, we’re not all idiots down here. I recently read a couple of books by Lewis Grizzard, a Georgian (but we won’t hold that against him) who was pretty funny and insightful, even if I suspect him of having political views that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with (side note: I get tired of people lazily using “liberal” as a pejorative. Come up with something more clever, such as “practitioner of fellatio on small woodland creatures,” for instance). As he points out, and as Newman does in “Rednecks,” racism isn’t just a Southern thing. Y’all Yankees got nothing to brag about, basically is what each is saying.

On the flip side of that coin, “Birmingham” is both a gentle poke at the Southern attitude (who in their right mind would call Birmingham the equal of Paris or London?) and a celebration of said attitude (well, it is the greatest city in Alabama, when your competition is Montgomery, Mobile, and maybe Muscle Shoals, where Stax Records was located or recorded or was somehow or another connected to Muscle Shoals, I’m blanking on which of those options is the correct one). Once again, Newman inhabits a character, a regular working guy (the kind that Mitt Romney knows well, because he fired them a lot), a guy who don’t want much out of life except to work at a steel mill and go home to his wife and his dog Dan (the meanest dog in Alabama, naturally). Newman, by the way, is Jewish, something that still seems alien to a lot of Southerners even though they’ve been around since the beginning. But like any good writer of fiction, he inhabits the roles of both the redneck of “Rednecks” (who, after the jaunty first verse about how stupid he is, proves himself to be smarter when he talks about the North’s “enlightened” policy of putting blacks into ghettos in major urban areas) and the common man of “Birmingham” (a guy who really doesn’t have to answer to anybody for anything), and he does so with that rollicking, easy-going vocal delivery that “Family Guy” parodied so well in their Y2K episode (you know the one, where he’s writing songs about Lois getting an apple from the tree, because he just sings about whatever’s going on around him).

God help me, I love to listen to “Rednecks,” even though I wouldn’t do so in mixed company (it’s easy to see where someone might not get the premise of the song and think that Newman is actually espousing the views he posits, or at least they just don’t like the use of the n-word in the song). “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground” is a Southern-ism, and it’s appropriate for my hometown as much as it is for anywhere else. But as much as I take joy in that part of the song, I tip my hat to Newman when it comes to the second verse, because it would be easy to take pot-shots at the South without acknowledging that the North isn’t the land of opportunity that it was promised to be for freed slaves after the war. A dirty little secret about American history is that while many abolitionists were in it for the liberation of the slaves and wanted them to have every opportunity to make a good life for their families, some were secretly doubtful that the black man lacked the “mental capability” to live independent like the white man. Of course, this was a view that the slaveholders shared, because as long as they thought of the slaves as “children” it was easier to justify to themselves the conditions under which they “owned” them. Newman makes it clear that, yeah, us Southerners have a lot to be ashamed of with regards to slavery and segregation, but Northerners need to ask themselves why the urban landscapes of cities such as New York and Chicago suddenly became less desirable for white families to live in once blacks and other minorities started moving into the inner city. The distance between what we believe and what we do is something that this country needs to work on.

Must Be the Money

"Jeopardy" is a little over a week away (or is it two weeks...no, August 13, which is a Monday, so...wait, how do I carry the square root...I may be in more trouble than I think), and in all the time I've had to think about the ramifications that possibly appearing on the show could have (assuming I make it past the audition stage in New Orleans...in the middle of hurricane season. I am a master of timing), my own personal philosophy about wanting to be on the show has changed over the years.

When I first started trying out for the show (online testing), I was interested in acquiring a record total, something not quite in the Ken Jennings territory but close (in other words, I didn't want to have to work again). Now, as I actually stand on the precipice, I'm more inclined to believe that money doesn't buy happiness (though it can buy you peace of mind...hey, maybe I should write commercials).

Granted, I still want to do well, very well indeed, should I be picked to be on the show (and the waiting period could last long enough that maybe I'd actually have something approaching financial stability whenever I get on, but I wouldn't bet on it). But in life in general, after having seen up close (from a very non-likeliness of participation in the riches viewpoint) how money and wealth don't always mean your problems go away, I just want to make enough out of life to not owe anything when I'm gone (many, many centuries from now) and to take care of my family, should I happen to have one (working on it as we speak, though I've said that for years now). Most of all, I want to be able to avoid the pitfalls of believing that, if I just get this or that opportunity to make money, all my worries will be gone.

Just take a second to check out any of the news outlets devoted to celebrities, the ones who are famous for being famous (or Kim Kardashian); theirs is a whirlwind circle of seeking attention by being fame whores who get paid to be fame whores and who don't really contribute anything to society (unless you count reality shows as contributions to society, and I'm inclined to disbelieve that notion). Who wants to do that, really? All the money in the world, and the minute the cameras shut off it's like you're nothing. Until the eventual reunion show.

God help us all...

Anyway, looking forward to the trip there and back (I always wanted to see Mississippi, though preferably through the rearview mirror), and I'm hoping at the very least I have a hell of a (responsible) time in the Big Easy.