There are a myriad of good reasons to quit Facebook. Spending any significant amount of time on it, which is in fact, any amount of time on it - it is nefariously designed to keep you on it for as long as as your battery holds out. Mercifully, iPhone batteries lose their charging capacity the moment you walk out of the Apple Store a cool grand lighter than when you walked in. Facebook is a digital labyrinth and it's turning us all into monsters. Spending any significant amount of time on Facebook is tantamount to drinking from a catch basin. First, we pipe all of our refuse and garbage into it. Then, having relieved ourselves in the vain hopes of sympathy, we go and drink from every body else's pipes. It's as delicious as it is soul-crushing. Our masochism binds us together. Earlier this week I was scrolling on Facebook. I was a little thirsty, I guess. Thirty five minutes later I found myself stopped dead in my tracks watching a video of a man asking a question I have never considered in my entire life. The video began with him putting on socks. First, the left sock. Second, the right sock. Then, he put on his shoes. First, the left shoe. Then, the right shoe. A voiceover then asked the question, "is this how you put on your socks and shoes every morning?" Suddenly the shoecladden feet were naked again and the sequence began to repeat. I was about to scroll away when I realized that the sequence beginning was not a repeat, but a slightly different sequence. First, was the left sock. Second, the left shoe. Third, the right sock. Fourth, the right shoe. The disembodied (and digitally created) voice asked the same question, "is this how you put on your socks and shoes every morning?" Big bold letters flashed across my screen: 👍 for #1. 🤩 for #2. Click subscribe for more great content. The percentage was staggeringly in the camp of the thumbs up crowd. That didn't seem surprising to me. What was both staggering and surprising was the amount of responses. There were tens of thousands of comments. Somebody is making money on this, I thought. Thoughtlessly I descended into the labyrinth to read the comments left for a 30 second clip asking the world how they put their socks and shoes on in the morning. There were no interesting comments. Someone posed the question, "What kind of a sociopath puts their socks and shoes on in left sock, left shoe, right sock, right shoe order?" This pointed question was followed by more than the singular question mark that I have ended the paragraph with. The commenter's flourishing ending also included a number of exclamation points and emojis. I stared at the miscellany of punctuation to see if a pattern emerged. Having concluded that it was purely random I moved on from the whole sock and shoe video entirely. The gratuitous punctuation has been omitted for both aesthetic and personal reasons. I don't know if I'm personally ready to embrace the emoji as part of literary aesthetic theory. Besides, I've already included two of them in this little essay. Earlier this week I was chatting with the server at the little restaurant near where I work. It's in the same building and we both work for the same company. That's not really important except for that I can have as much soda to drink as I please throughout the day. It would be an amazing perk were it not for the fact that they serve Pepsi. I shouldn't drink as much soda as I do anyway. The bargun has a sodawater option. The bubbles scratch the soda itch. While she has witnessed me drinking this plain soda water (over ice) for months now, she had never addressed it - because it didn't need addressing. This week, out of the blue, she says, "You are lucky I like you, Chris. Because you drinking plain soda water like that, this is a sociopathic tendency that rings all kinds of alarm bells." She was smiling as she said it, but I don't think she was joking. Erin and I went mountain biking this morning. We came back to the apartment to clean up before going out to do more things. Who knows what the future will bring? I sat down on the couch, my buttocks thanking me for the cushioned seat after a few hours on the less cushioned seat of a mountain bike. My thighs are not as grateful. They are still on fire. As I sat waiting for her to finish up I put on my socks and shoes to get ready to go. Left sock, left shoe. Right sock, right shoe. As I finished tying the right one I sat up bolt straight in shock. A disembodied voice, less algorithm, more ghost, whispered, "This is a sociopathic tendency that rings all kinds of alarm bells".
Categories