a luddite comes around

Too hot to do much more than sit my darkened apartment and listen to the lady downstairs scream at her bawling kid about-- christ, some shit. Can't quite make out the angry patois above the sound of the shouts and honking horns a couple of streets over, the bass from some reggaeton band playing down-block on a stage sponsored by a spanish radio station. I made it back home to Spanish Harlem today sometime around noon, still wearing the black shirt and black tie that had looked so good the night before but that was now wrinkled and stifling and may as well have been a camel hair coat, and found myself in the middle of the 116th Street Fair, known above 110th Street as Puerto Rico Day and below it (and by the gentrification set) as Oh God, Oh God, Close Up All the Shops.

I've been feeling every bit the shut-in as of late, spending most of my time plugging away at a bottom of the barrel post-production job and then spending the rest chipping away at the first few chapters of a novel, so I walked through the fair for a bit, past food stalls selling chorizo and cheese-filled plantains and mozzarepa and booths offering diabetes counseling alongside free packets of Tide. I grabbed a plate of rice and beans but the heat got to be too much so I came back home and sat in my apartment naked with the windows open and the blinds drawn. Then the woman downstairs started in on her kid, you little motherfucker, so I dragged myself into the living room and stuffed some earplugs into my ears and started a-bloggin'.

No, not exactly. First I checked Facebook. Checking Facebook has, in the two weeks since I semi-reluctantly joined up, already become a shamefully high priority -- and one which, like any of a number of other monkeys on my back, I just can't seem to shake. I have, over the last few weeks, given up with varying degrees of failure coffee, booze, sex, and videogames. The idea was that these things were too great a distraction while I pound away at the book, but the five minutes of Grand Theft Auto that I allowed myself this afternoon (which stretched into a full hour and a half, when the battery in my controller died) marks a colossal failure of will on all fronts -- and the triumph of witty sophistication and raw animal magnetism on one in particular -- within a single 24 hour period. And now Facebook. Jesus.

Ah, but truth told, wasting my time was not the reason I shunned Facebook for so long. No, the reasons for avoiding Facebook -- and social networks in general -- are similar to the reasons I don't like strip clubs. When I was 15, my friends tried to take me to a strip club across the border from Brownsville in Matamoros, Mexico. Octopus or some such, something vaguely pun-based. Octopus was full, or too expensive, or we looked too young, or we weren't dressed well enough, but for whatever reason we were turned away at the door by the chuckling bouncer so we drove through Matamoros until we found another club down some back alley, somewhere we could get into because my friend knew somebody. It was dark and hot and the stage was particle board laid out on top of a bunch of cinder blocks, upon which several women writhed distractedly about to the small tinny sounds of an old boom box. Walk into the sad, empty club and the women flock toward us, sit us down, ask us if we want anything and my friends buy me a lap dance. A woman starts rubbing her tits in my face, but I can't take my eyes off of the track marks running up and down both of her arms, and now I don't go to strip clubs.

My first experience with Friendster, too, left me gun shy. Initially it seemed like a lazy way too keep in touch with people while I was in Japan and would have evolved in due course to drunkenly entering the names of ex-girlfriends into the search engine as per usual, had I one day not typed in the name of my very first girlfriend and been brought to the page of a bald, scowling, tattooed lesbian. So, Friendster account left to die on the vine, Myspace passed up completely, the various life-paths of other ex-girlfriends and old flames unexamined. And you know what? It's better that way.

Then Facebook, and again I'm the guy explaining that he'd rather not go to the strip club, ha ha, see there's this thing that happened, but as the annoying din of talk about super-pokes and Scrabulous grew ever louder, not joining Facebook became in my mind a matter of principle. Then fuck, shit, yeah, one day I signed up. I was probably hungover and drinking a grande iced coffee while playing Burnout Paradise at the time, too. Happy?

And initially it was...well, shit, it was pretty exciting. Haven't talked to so-and-so in years, can't believe such-and-such is married, or divorced, or has kids, or any of the number of things that you come to find out as your social network slowly spiders outward to include people you haven't seen or talked to or thought of since high school. But beyond the voyeuristic thrill of peeking in on the lives of the bank of familiar names in the lower left corner, of glimpsing the faces of your childhood friends, fatter or thinner, or bearded or with different hair, but unmistakably theirs despite bearing the weight of a full decade of adulthood -- beyond all of that, there's the promise of doing more than simply gawking at, say, the fact that Ana's son is now 15, or that Troy owns three companies.

I don't know if it's something unique to Facebook, something fundamentally different from the catch-all clusterfucks of Friendster or Myspace, or if it's merely that I'm now old enough to fully appreciate what it means to have lost contact with people I once cared a great deal for, but the best and most terrifying thing is that it has brought me a poke away from re-establishing contact with people I had no idea I missed so badly. Sappy, yeah, but no less true for it. And yet so far I've balked at actually saying much more to those people than "Friend me," which seems to be the Web 2.0 equivalent of calling up someone you haven't talked to in years and asking them to loan you a couple bucks. Someday soon I'll muster the courage to do something more meaningful than scrawling snark on their wall. Until then, I'll simply marvel at how we've all turned into a bunch of 30 year olds. Not forever, but just for now.