I bring to you today an amalgamation of rants all centered of Facebook. I am a user of the social media monster, but I am partial. I joined Facebook back in 2009, when you had to use your real name to register. I was about to have back surgery and I wanted a way to keep in contact with my Scout troop. I was the Scoutmaster and I wanted to make sure everyone kept on pace with their advancement. I thought I’d be out for weeks. I was back the following Tuesday. But, I was hooked.
In that short week of “recovery”, I was able to reunite with old school friends, keep contact with concerned Scouts and parents, AND I was able to start a farm! I do miss Farm Ville. Everything seemed so innocent back then. I mean, all we did was reach out to others we may never have heard from again and let everyone know what we had for lunch. That, I do not miss (the lunch part).
I am, however, a Facebook addict. Yay, I made it to the first step. I don’t check it hourly like some people. I check it like every five minutes that I’m not doing something else that keeps the phone out of my hand. It’s the third thing I check when I pick up the phone in the morning. First, I check my email (the garbage account that has more than eighty thousand emails in it). Second, I check the local news app to see how many people got shot in the Central Ohio area the day before. Morbid, I know. Then I check Facebook. To be more specific, I check for alerts to see if anyone has commented on my snarky comments.
I make a lot of snarky comments. I’ve never been outright called a Troll
Ok. I digress. I have a hard enough time typing on a laptop keyboard with these sausage fingers of mine, but when a mental malfunction makes me have mistake after mistake it just pisses me off. Why, when a word has a double letter in it such as follow, do I double the damn letter before the letter that needs to be doubled? I end up typing foolow. It’s so damn irritating. Yes, I had to go back and retype Irritating. Is my brain too fast or are my fingers too slow? so frustrating!
Anyhow, I’ve never been outright called a Troll, but it would probably be appropriate. Maybe I haven’t because what I say is either very funny, extremely poignant, or incredibly honest. I do love to make comments when something strikes me as interesting, funny, or an incredible load of crap. I seldom make posts anymore. If I do, it’s probably because someone mad me mad. I do, however, share a lot of other posts, especially with my wife. I mean, kitten videos are made to be shared, right?
What I won’t share are the posts that drive me insane. Today I saw another anti-Trump post. It’s not that I’m pro-Trump or anti-Harris. It’s that I come to Facebook to escape all of that nonsense. I know, I know, well just block them. But, what if they say something I can make a snarky comment about? Facebook to me should be like opening the Sunday paper and reading the comic strips. That was until they started preaching at us too. Keep your politics where they belong: large dinner gatherings with friends and in bed.
I belong to a number of writing pages. Some are writing in general and some are poetry themed. A post in one of the writing groups this morning was from a woman trying to promote her books. That is a no no in the group. You get one day to promote your book on the day it comes out. That’s it. She sneaked around that rule asking people to help her promote her book and to possibly buy them as well. Why? Because she was trying to raise funds to escape an abusive situation. Before you judge me as unsympathetic, hear me out. Her abusive situation was where she lived. Not who she lived with, but where she lived. London. Yes, that’s right, the city of London is abusing her because she has poor social status because she lives in London. See where this is going? No you don’t.
She claimed she has disadvantages because for the last twenty seven years she has been poisoned. Anyone who was unsympathetic to her or told her she was out of line with her post was accused of being unempathetic, and therefore, how could they be writing books with characters people could relate to. She then went on to name famous writers who she deemed empathetic. Brilliant minds who could relate to her plight. One could only hope she was doing character research, because this would make an incredible book. Kind of like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: 2. You know, One Fell Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest and Bonked Her Freaking Head. Honey, we all want to make money with our writing. The publishing game is an abusive situation. Stop drinking the poison and start writing the story. On a side note, her books looked awful.
Lastly, because I’m in a time crunch, is the poetry page I follow called Poetry Autopsy. That’s what the poems need is an autopsy to figure out what killed them. This group is supposed to be a critique group. On Monday’s they call it something like Brutal Criticism. It’s brutal alright. I never claimed to be a great American poet. Or even a great Keller Rd. poet, but My GOD! My seven-year-old granddaughter can write better than most of these people. That’s no hyperbole. She has actually written a few poems that make those look like a chicken pecked something out of a rhyming dictionary.
That last statement is my gripe. Poems. Do. Not. Have. To. Rhyme. They can, but these people think everything has to rhyme. And they are brutal rhymes. It’s as if they lined up all their rhyming words first and then wrote the words that will precede them. I have not made any comments to them about it, Someone claimed a person called their poem the shittiest poem ever written. The accused’s wife said he didn’t say that. I did reply to her and ask why not? If you truly cannot recognize you have written a horrible piece of poetry, I feel for you. You are special in a clean window kind of way. Yes, I can be mean.
All of that being said… Let’s get back to what Facebook was meant for. Let’s reconnect with old friends, share kitten videos and bring a smile to someone’s face, and after the autopsy, let’s spread the remains and all of the political manure over our farms and watch them grow.
Let’s talk soon…
The Renaissance Maniac 