Facebook (2008)

Written in 2008

I don’t much care for it.

We’ve lived through the home computer revolution; the internet and web revolution; the social networking sites’ revolution attempt, and it’s all down to selling things. Selling ideas, selling TV shows on demand, selling snapshots of lives. Buying, or stealing, or downloading, or lying, and everything new and changing.

But amongst this polished newness: old faces popping up.

Older faces.

This is a shock.

Old faces.

Wrinkled, and distressed, versions of those I remember, ten years back or more when we all truly were the new breed. Strange, digitally enfeebled versions of the new faces and bodies and minds and dreams and daftness-chasing goons and happy adventurers now waving croak-happily to say hello again, to catch up. I can’t be fucked saying no to it either, despite not talking for fifteen years or whatever and whatever may have happened before to sour matters, it does no harm to join in, smile sweetly and bat polite questions back and forth awhile.

But it’s not possible to catch up, not really.

Here online’s a family guy, balding and bright, and with the eyes and grin of the dealer from whom I used to buy, and get ripped off for, oddly sticky slabs of hash, when hash was good and grass was the poorest of poor relations in the pre-hydroponic days where a drought was a serious problem.

The questions I really want to ask aren’t apt; how can you distil a journey of fifteen years into ten minutes, into a couple of hundred words, or into a banter over a cheating-both-sides game of online scrabble?

You can’t, and I don’t want to either. Cause these faces aren’t the same, and neither is mine. I’m shocked looking back at the photos. I don’t recognise myself anymore. I’m too healthy in them, too full of ideas (unformed but no doubt brilliant and if you forget one, no matter cause there’s another coming over the horizon) and too full of unfocused excitement about the near-present. And the future, as I was always fond of saying, would take care of itself.

And as the baby-coddling and still-sexy ghosts of the past pop up to spam me about Musicmatch Quiz Profile Games I bleed a little because these faces regained confuse me. These pictures of the past they, and I, post are one-way vortices that lead to a worldview I can’t change and don’t want to aside from to say:

You will one day know that those days are gone, and it will be ridiculous, and you will laugh with gritted teeth.

And I know as I always knew back then that one day I would need the young faces to sneer at me and say:

Shut the fuck up, granddad, I’m immortal.

Now when I look in the mirror I can, if I squint my eyes, and my brain, squeeze out of this moment and somehow remember when everyone was alive, and everyone was alive – here and now it’s too early to expire, and too late to regret too. Cause here we all are, and these faces and rashes of return are important, vital, reminders of mortality. It gets harder, and harder to resist it, so I dive in again because all I have done so far has wasted enough time for what I have done to appear significant by sheer weight of hours spent wasted on fluff and bluster.

Tonight, my temples grow tight and my ankles ache.

Cause I know, or hope, or dread, that one day, in fifteen years of wherever-next, I’ll look back at myself through the fug of the intervening years, and wonder exactly why I was so worried, so nostalgic and so still-filled with angst and indecision, but this time it won’t be about how old I look, or other people look, it’ll be about how young we still were, and how I felt – but didn’t ever quite grasp the nuance – but how I felt so lost but deep down hoped, or knew, that this feeling was down to the fact that somehow I was on the verge of a new chapter.

The difference between the current past and the future-past of now, is that in the current-past it always was the now, and I would never even dream of fifteen years hence; but now, fifteen years from then, I am terrified of the fifteen-year future where I feel the walls closing in on me: either of finally turning coat into a dreary and humdrum stagger to dismay and broken-hearted weariness, or of wilful, ever-more-tragic lost chasing of something vague and equally wearying and sad.

I don’t much care for it.

There must, and will, be another way: to marry the flash and lightning of those pictured years with the quest to adventure, and to realise that knowing nothing is OK as long as you smile whilst you try. And to find the energy and the vitality to believe that a photo of a pint in a long-demolished pub is as worthlessly beautiful as that of the toddler in the playground fifteen years previously; that there is as much a difference between those two iterations as there is between I back then and the older I of right now. And in that future-now I might, and probably will, wish for chances to chat with some of these faces, these reformed, revisited compadres, but they may be gone forever.

Or maybe I will; I wonder what version of myself I’m selling right now?