Down on the Farm... Part 1

Being as how I’m contra-social, and equally being possessed of a deep desire to live an ethical life I often find myself in the position of bouncing off things other folks take for granted. For example, the now common “Friend Request” there on Zuckerberg’s farm.

I didn’t put a paw down on the farm to my own intentions, it was the publisher and publicist who thought, demanded actually, that I should have a footprint in the “social media” machine. The entire point of my presence there is to advertise my writings. And that, odd as it might sound to you, is why “friend requests” are a bit of an issue to me.

Ok, you don’t need to watch out for the heat, you don’t need to buy condoms by the case and KY in five gallon buckets to load in the painted pink dildo-tipped grease gun you zip tied to a cordless drill motor turning an off center lead banana for a flywheel ( to use on the really tough cases), but still… when your motive is advertising is it ethical to accept a “friend request” from people you actually know world of real life? The folks who really are your friends? The idea itches, not tickles, and not in good places. Feels a bit to close to prostituting the very idea of friendship to me. But then again, I’m a geezer who has been contra-social longer than most of these good folks have been alive.

Somehow I’m seeing ghost images from a nightmare: a classroom, large display in the front of a room where shows a complex geometric grid representing some N^th dimensional matrix of associations, accompanied of course by several dauntingly simple equations from perhaps advanced calculus, and that droning voice of damnation which is the professor… perhaps marketing, perhaps mathematics or statistics, saying… “The first through third order interstices represent a friend, which is NOT to be confused with any state of emotional bonding between corporeal individuals capable of transmitting burden of life…”

Yea, nightmare. I’m right there with you Leonard (Cohen)… “I’ve seen the future brother, it is murder…” Or worse. Oh, well. There’s always gasoline, gunpowder and whiskey for a safety net.