Privacy in Obscurity (Resisting Facebook)

So... Long time guys.

Let me begin in just saying there's something extremely creepy about Facebook. Like, really creepy, as if when we crucify our identities for the privilidge of poking the crucified with pointed sticks and crowning them with thorns. To display oneself reminds me a bit of Barthe's discussion of the Strip Tease, something tantalizing that you don't get every little detail of someone's life, but every friend's wall post, or lack of relationship status, or event update is like the removal of another peice of clothing, more scintillating, more eroticizing, yet you just don't want to know EVERYTHING that's going on; nakedness after all is the destination we never want to reach. Tich Nhat Than said that to understand someone else fully and completely (nakedly) is to truly love them, there is no other option if we have full complete (transcended) understanding of one's being. If that is so, everyone wants striptease, that never ending unveilling of discovering "just one more secret" (just one more hit), our addictions never satiated. Surveillance is television, reading, books, video games, all the same kind of (un)enjoyment of wasting (non)time that we're becoming obsessed with. Either we're going to have too many people wanting to be policemen, or no policemen on the streets. In either case national security will be better than it ever was.

I have 800+ "friends" on facebook. That's 800+ pages of gender, sexual, religious, political, social, photographic identites, scattered lives and personalities constructed out of pre-made building blocks. 800+ desperate attempts to link myself to the real world in some futile, gasping, drowning way (god forbid I sat myself down with a red plastic cup of piss-shit beer and sat in the corner of darkness where waves of sound would replace my words with "what?" "I can't Hear You" "Want to go somewhere more quiet?").

My friend was contemplating suicide after a Sigur Ros concert (________wants to know: is there life after a Sigur Ros concert?). I perscribed her some medication (Album Leaf, Mum, The Notwist) but in going through my 5226 song medicine cabinet I found a little bottle named "Esmerine".

Suddenly facebook is not a weird socialist panopticon game, but a memory floating back to a girl who got hit by a car instead of meeting me for tea. The song sounded of old age, of a time fresh out of high school, of not knowing how to take girls out on dates and throwing up in dorm toilets. I cut out a little piece of the sound-thought patterns in my head and put them on a little plate and handed them to the girl who smiled and gave me a 6 song CD of a cello drifting in a post-apocolyptic sea four years ago. Maybe she'll be confused at the offering, and proceed to inject secrets from the spider's weave of friends, events, groups, secrets. But for me, maybe 800+ pages of room keys and syringes isn't really a bag of keys and needles, but something lurking in this strange world of potentiality, where jokes are still funny and songs are still unfamiliar.

I am extremely aware that no one reads this blog, which is comforting in its own right. But someone could, and I have links leading here in various little crossroads of the internet (facebook included). So I'll stash my little secrets here, leave a little plate of them out with a little sign that says "help yourself" in the middle of a prarie of ghosts and obscurity. These secrets have nougat though, so if you are allergic or do not like nougat I propose you try some of the chocolate covered rants. They are a little old however.