My ass and your Facebook

One of the other reasons I got away from blogging for a long time, in addition to the relentless shoulder piss-ups and various other idiocy, is that I have become beholden to the ridiculous Facebook god.

This is just so stupid, but I can't stop it. I love posting "updates," which unlike an update you might see on the AP wire (I am a newspaper copy editor, if you are new here) in which they tell you how many more are dead in the latest bus plunge in Mumbai, these are "updates" on what is happening in your life RIGHT NOW.

I now have 400 friends on facebook, a few of whom I actually know, which means I receive updates on people's "status" (not whether they are married or gay or whatever, not that there is anything wrong with either of those situations one way or the other) almost continuously. I remember belonging to a stupid Web chat board about something or other about 10 years ago, and one guy was always chiming in that he was eating something or other, or what kind of soda he was drinking, or what shade of beige his latest turd was, and it seemed just damned pathetic.

Now, it turns out he was years ahead of his time. These status updates keep you posted re everything that goes on with these folks every damned three minutes, which is amazing when you think about it because if they are looking at Facebook chances are they aren't doing a fucking thing to begin with, and then they feel a pressing need to "update" you with whatever they are doing, or pretending to be doing, at that very moment.

All this is tres stupido, to coin a phrase, because they often aren't really doing it at all. An example: A few minutes ago, I posted on my "status" that I was playing a particular fiddle tune, which I had been a few minutes before I updated my status but certainly was not doing at the time I posted the update, because how could I be posting an update on stupid Facebook and fiddling "Waynesboro" at the same time?

This would be mind-blowing stuff it was 35 years ago and I was sitting around at a Dead concert with a head full of peyote and bloviating about the whole riddle of time and space and all that other shit we used to talk about to impress ourselves with our own intelligence. (You see, I am most certainly no less of an asshole than anyone else. I want to make that perfectly clear.) Today, minus hallucinogens and after all these many years of my humbling fucking existence, it doesn't seem interesting or important.

But really, sitting around and doing these Facebook updates is about as productive as playing spin the bottle with yourself, which of course never did anyone any good.

But I can't look away from these things, these dumb goddamned "updates," and the worst part is that people can even comment on your updates, and you wind up getting involved in extended electronic conversations about trifles, things that you were doing at the moment a little while ago that weren't even at all important or interesting. Or, worse, things that you were pretending you were doing, and if that is the case for God's sake do us all a favor and go plant your head under an elephant's ass and beg it to sit down as hard as it can.

Oh, by the way, I am having a beer and going to bed after I get finished with this. I'll post an "update" after all that plays out and let you know how it worked out for me.

Would you like saliva with that?

I don't mean to make it look like my return to blogging is going to be a daily thing. I like to write this blog when the need arises, and it just so happens that the need is arising just one solitary day after I went charging back into the waters here.

I will try to be brief about this, but someone really disgusted me today. I mean really, totally, completely, horribly. And I cannot get past it right now, so I guess the best thing is to tell you and let you get disgusted, for misery certainly loves company, and I think the same thing goes for being disgusted. If that makes sense at all. So we will embark on a little disgust together.

There is a small supermarket not far from my house. I feel bad for people who work in supermarkets as cashiers. I did it for six years when I was a young man and was trying to launch what sort of passes for a "career" as a journalist. It is a horrible job.

But this woman at the market did something today that I consider repulsive. I have seen other cashiers do it, too....she is not alone in this repugnant habit, and somehow it has to be stopped.

As you know, most markets insist on putting your groceries in crappy plastic bags that split open like a cheap pair of pants after you visit a Chinese buffet. And I guess these bags tend to stick together, or are hard to get apart or something, and you will occasionally see cashiers actually lick their fingers to get the bags apart.

That's right. They produce a little bit of spittle, put their hand to their mouth like Gaylord Perry in his prime, and then pick up the groceries to put them in the bag, disseminating (perhaps an unfortunate word here) saliva on the very food that you will be eating. How nauseating is that? Why don't they just french-kiss your green peppers, or suck on the peaches a little bit before they put them in the bag? Or how about depositing a phalanx of your personal germs and phlegm on the package of hamburger, which was probably wrapped too loosely by some guy in the meat room who was half asleep or half hung over or whatever? You can almost imagine all those filthy personal germs just strolling right on top of the meat and having a real bloody picnic as they await the chance to roll down your throat and strangle the life out of your digestive system?

Please. If you are a grocery cashier, or some horrible twist of fate makes you one someday, keep your hands out of your mouth while dealing with other people's food.

The rest of us thank you for your salivary discretion.

I Is Risen (Thanks, Bill)

You can thank Bill in Texas for all this. That is, if you care to thank anyone at all for this horseshit.

Let me explain, as if there can be an explanation for any of this. I used to write a blog in this space. Then things got all sort of, you know, fucked up, as they used to say down at the cannery when I worked there.

I lost my password, repeatedly, then kept supplying the wrong address to get it sent to. At least that is what I think happened. And you may remember me complaining about some ailment that I think was called fucked-up shoulder. Well, this turned out to be a corker, let me tell you. I had one operation on it that hurt to beat the fucking band twice, and if that wasn't enough the surgeon decided it was still FU and had at it again like five weeks later, before the morphine haze cleared from the first time he stuck me.

Please do not read anything negative about the surgeon into any of this. He is a nice guy and did a crackerjack job of returning the use of my right arm, as did the cute young physical therapists who yanked my arm around and whipped the living shit right out of me three times a week for nearly 10 months afterward. When those women were tormenting me, I could not help but think that some assholes would probably pay $200 or so for some beautiful young woman to crawl around on their back and pull their goddamned arm until sawdust came out of their armpits and their breakfast dampened their undergarments, and I was getting it for an $8 co-pay.

I hope the doc went to Tahiti with the money he made off me, for he bloody well deserves it. Anyone who can put up with an asshole like me for a patient deserves every penny he gets, in spades. I would even mention his name, but believe me, anyone in the medical community does not want anything to do with an endorsement from the likes of me.

So back to the story of how this blog became a fart in the cyberwind. I was still suffering from this shoulder business, which made working my regular gig painful enough without spending more time at a computer, and then dealing with the password business, and life in general, and my various vices (to my credit, I do not smoke, but I do damned near everything else, and don't bloody care if you know it) and well, you know how it is. I gave up trying to get into this blog and figured it would remain as sort of a Flying Dutchman on the Internet, to be spotted by a few unfortunates along the way whose lives would run aground on the rocks within hours of having wasted time perusing it.

And then, guess what? My left shoulder got the same fucking thing my right shoulder had. It is called frozen shoulder, and if your heart can stand it you should look it up. If you do a Google search on "shoulder" and "excruciating," you are sure to find it. At least this time I recognized it for what it was early on, for once you have been through frozen shoulder, if it sets in again you hotfoot it to the doctor within minutes and beg to either have it dealt with or have a .45-caliber bullet go through your brain, for no one deserves this, not even George W. Fucknut Bush, and in his case I would laugh until I pissed myself frontward and backward at nearly anything awful that happened to him. Anything except frozen fucking shoulder, that is.

So Liz took me to the hospital, sweetheart that she is, and the doc put me out and went to work again. The nurses even recognized me. Can you believe that? I think they recognized me because I set the world champeen record for morphine injections in the hours that followed the last two operations, and I was so fucked up that God knows what I said or did to them. I have always wondered what all those people in the operating "theater" say while you are out of your mind on whatever that is they put in you to put you "to sleep." But I guess that is something best not thought about.

So now I am recovering from this operation, and instead of having cute young women crawling all over me and yanking my arm around while telling me I "can do better," I now go into an Olympic-size pool while a muscular young fellow named Ken pulls me around. He is a good sport and a good therapist, and puts Grateful Dead on for me while he does it, which tickles the shit out of me because there usually are other people in the pool and they usually are all over 130 years old. I am sure they have no fucking idea that it is the Dead they are listening to, and probably think it is some kind of death metal or something, which would suit them because death is not far off in any of their cases, metal or not.

Ken can talk your fucking ear off, but I enjoy listening to him. He is a terrific therapist, and seems to really be helping me get better. So I have to thank him, even though there is a small part of me that would prefer the young women be tormenting me. I am not sure what that says about me, but it sure as shit can't be very good.

So anyway, I gave up on the blog and started spending a lot of time on Facebook. I think Facebook is great. I have hundreds of "friends" on Facebook, which is a pisser to me because among all these friends are people I love, people I hate, people I don't give a shit about, people I don't know, people who don't know me and people whom I can't for the life of me recall how I became "friends" with them in the first place. But I shoot the shit with them about nothing, and waste a lot of time, and if I could somehow harness a way to make money at wasting time I would be a fucking skillionaire by now, let me tell you.

So in the course of "befriending" all these people I ran across Bill in Texas. I do not know Bill, but we do the same job at different newspapers in the same newspaper chain, and know some of the same people, so we became friends. I guess Bill was checking me out, which of course I do to people too, so I hold no grudge about that. And in the course of doing so he found this blog and mentioned it, and asked me why I wasn't posting here. It was embarrassing, sort of, to tell him I don't post here because I am such an asshole that I lost my password and didn't have the energy to try to recoup it somewhere.

But having Bill tell me he got a kick out of this horseshit motivated me to get the password back, and I managed to do so and am back in business. I have a lot to tell you, for in no way did the world become any less fucked up than it was when I went on hiatus, so I guess I can get back on the stick and start making amends to the people who actually looked forward to this nonsense.

So thanks for stopping by, and I hope not to let you down again. I have made disappointing people my life's work, so if it happens again, let me give you an unsincere "sorry" in advance.