What an e-mess this is!
Have you seen me lately, running around like a Mountaire chicken with my noggin cut off? That’s me, frantic, clothes wrinkled, gray roots showing, flying around town getting my chores done so I can go to my home office and spend all day, every day, not reading, not writing, but social networking so I can sell books.
But today I had a flash that hit me like a pail of cold water, which, was actually refreshing because it was 106 degrees out. Nobody’s buying books because they, too, have no time to sit and read or iron or get their roots dyed because they, too, are spending their entire lives social networking.
UNCLE!!!! I cannot Facebook, Twitter, web page, Branch out, or LinkIn one more time today. I’m having a nervous breakdown and all I can think of is how to describe it in 140 characters or less. I have become seriously unglued and the only cure, as my book publicist says is to “step away from the e-machine,” which is funny because she instructed me to do all this stuff in the first place.
Frankly, I’ve been social networking for years, writing columns about my life and pretty much being an open book collected in three open books. But, unless there was a point to it, I never stooped to writing I had a pierogi for lunch or my dog had the trots unless it was part and parcel of a larger, hopefully amusing, story.
The magnitude of social media messages I get daily about what people are eating, wearing, and sadly, eliminating, is stupefying. What books they are reading, of course, is important, but it is clear to me from the posting that nobody has time for that old fashioned trivial pursuit. Noooo. Now we are tweeting and twirping non-stop, damn the torpedoes full 4G speed ahead.
I thought I might get a respite a couple of weeks ago when, on a 100 degree day in July, I was homeless. Not that I was sleeping in a cardboard box in front of Nicola Pizza, but technically, for the week, I had no home.
For a combination of good reasons, my July vacation was moved to August, after I rented my house out for the July dates. So there I was, on a day with a 110 degree misery index, dehydration warnings, and Route One pavement-buckling, sitting in my RV encamped at the Steamboat Landing RV Park just a few miles from my occupied home.
Outside my rectangular aluminum shelter, roads melted, steam rose from the sand, and you could charbroil a hamburger on the dashboard of my car. Ha-ha, as we lay frying, indeed.
But, thankfully, there were life-saving factors, like ice-cold Yeungling and the fabulous air conditioner, blasting away as I sat, portable e-machine on my lap, in my cool RV, social networking like my life depended on it.
Remembering I was at a campground with a pool, I donned my bathing suit and ran over for a dip. Ahhhhh. But I felt guilty! I am a dip. I should be working, networking, e-talking, net-blabbing and otherwise surfing for promotional opportunities, not dunking in this delicious pool. Frankly, what I really should be doing is surfing at the beach, which is where I live, after all, but I never see it because I am too busy surfing the freakin’ net.
Look, I’m capable of creating great feelings of guilt for just about any reason. Hell, it’s in my DNA. But even I know I have reached a new level of manufactured angst with this kind of guilt.
Step away from the e-machine. So I did. I went out to lunch (No, unlike tweeter freaks, I will not tell you what I ingested). Hell, I’m semi-retired (hah!) for pity’s sake and I’m guilty going out to lunch? Even chain-gangs get lunch.
But when I got back, I got yelled at. Not by my publicist, not by my boss (me), but by the graphic of an owl on the Hoot Suite program I use to tweet, twitter, blather, and blog.
“You have been inactive for over an hour. I was bored, so I decided to take a nap. Let me know when you get back.”
Jeez, even cartoons get to nap. I haven’t had time to nap since kindergarten. I considered not telling the owl I was back, but since I’d failed to tweet for an hour and a half I was afraid the web would put out an all-tweets bulletin on me, declaring me AWOL, MIA or otherwise having left the information highway.
When I pushed enter to refresh my screen, I could see my Facebook page. And, in the upper right corner was the oddest thing yet. Under the heading Friends You May Know, there was a profile picture of composer Stephen Sondheim, with a note saying You have eight mutual friends. Really? Eight degrees of separation between me and Stephen Sondheim?
I clicked on the mutual friends and found two people I know who really might be actual friends of the Broadway legend, but six others who, like me, are merely drooling fans. No, I do not believe I should bother to “friend” my pal Stephen.
And that’s where Facebook gets interesting. When I get a friend request from somebody whose profile says “you have 253 friends in common” I know it’s probably another writer and our mutual readers. Fine. But when I get a request that says you have 12 friends in common, it might sound like a lot, but it’s probably that you both frequent the same dry cleaner. I have so many Facebook friends for the book biz I no longer know who I actually know and who I virtually know. So if I’m at Cloud 9 and you say “Hi” and I fail to come up with your name or your connection to me, please cut me a break. My brain has been completely addled by the e-machine. I admit it. I’m an e-mess.
Which brings me back to my original point. Am I’m destined for the Betty Ford Clinic for tweet addicts? Am I about to be committed for a third degree text offense? All this tweeting and blogging has got to stop. Or at least be put on hiatus. Which is why, as you read this, Bonnie and I have taken off in The Bookmobile for parts North, heading for a quiet, relaxed, cheap and easy vacation. I will allow myself about 45 minutes a day to report to you via the e-machine. Til then…I’m signing off. Over and out, real and virtual friends. The e-machinist has left the building.
Fay Jacobs is the author of As I Lay Frying—a Rehoboth Beach Memoir and Fried & True—Tales from Rehoboth Beach. Contact Fay Jacobs