Timeline

I get it now.

I get it.

Facebook wants you.

It wants you so, so bad.

Zuckerberg is lying on his bed of money, rubbing money all over his money-- he's rolling around, flicking his taint (whoa-- money!) and he's just dreaming about... well...

Y.O.U.

He wants you, and your youness.

Facebook is his baby and his daddy and his bitch, and now he wants you to be his daddy and his baby and his bitch.

Oh, dirty little baby bitch.

ZUCKERBERG WANTS ALL THE BABY BITCHES!!!!

No, seriously.  He does.

At first, I didn't get it.  I didn't understand what it was all about.  I mean, Facebook changes interfaces as frequently as I change pants.  That is to say, about twice a week.  Gross, I know, but who has the time to take the belt off and take the wallet out and the Burt's Bees and put it all on another pair of pants every day?  I mean, come on-- it's not like I'm shitting in them.

So, right-- Timeline.  I didn't understand what the big deal was.  Until today.  I happened to look at my Timeline-- well, my Timeline preview, because I'm way too antidisestablishmentarianwhateverthecum to change it over myself, so I'm just going to wait until they MAKE ME DO IT.

(They're making me do it.  It's like rape.  Zuckerberg's raping me with his money cock.)

So, I scrolled all the way down to my birthday-- May 12, 1980-- where my Timeline begins.  And there's nothing there because, well, obvs-- Facebook didn't exist in 1980.  And then it hit me.

My kids.

My kids were born on December 15, 2011.  FACEBOOK EXISTED WHEN MY KIDS WERE BORN.  My wife and I (because we're STUPID NARCISSISTS) put up pictures from the hospital bed, pictures of our children in their little incubator pod weird thing.  The first picture ever taken of them, something that should be private, to our family, got a hundred fucking thumbs ups-- many of them from people who haven't spoken to me out loud since middle school-- and I guarantee you the last thing they said to me probably wasn't nice.

People who are born to adults of the Facebook generation are going to have their whole lives on Facebook.  From the first minute.  Their first spit up, their first shitty diaper, their first breastfeed, their first roll over, the first time they bring their goddamned little grubby hands to midline.  We're constantly clicking away at our babies' lives, as Emily Webb says, "every, every minute".  And it's all there, on Facebook.

Timeline is gonna MOTHERFUCKING OWN US.

When my kids become fourteen, (apparently, that's the age you need to be to get a Facebook account) they're going to get access to all the pictures of them, from the very first one at the hospital, and they're going to put them all up on their Timeline and every moment of their live will be chronicled, cataloged, categorized.

And... I don't exactly know what that means.  I'm not smart enough to know what that means.  I'm not paranoid enough to know what that means.  I don't know if it's the end of something, or the beginning of something.  Is it the end of privacy, or is it the beginning of oneness?

All I know is this-- Facebook doesn't need to see my Middle School Years, and I don't think it needs to see anybody's Middle School Years.  What does it want with every moment of our lives?  Does Facebook want to fuck us or own us or drop us or eat us or what?  It's beginning to seem like a Maurice Sendak character, only without the charm.

Timeline: you need to be stopped, and I think I'm just the man to do it.  I'm after you, Zuckerberg.  Just as soon as I change my status.

To Shill a Zuckerberg

My favorite line in "To Kill a Mockingbird" isn't one of the real clinchers-- it isn't the heart-pounding moment in court where Mayella Violet Ewell screams that Tom Robinson raped her, "and if you fine GENTLEMEN aren't gonna do nothin' about it, then you're nothin' but a bunch of lily-livered COWARDS!" It isn't part of Atticus Finch's beautifully-crafted closing argument, his calculatedly passionate, unfortunately intellectual plea to spare the life of an innocent man, guilty only of being black in Maycomb.

My favorite line in "To Kill a Mockingbird" is said by little Scout. It's late at night, and Scout, in her comfortable, casual way of relating to the reader as if they were a friend, says, "Tired, I wanted Atticus."

It's a plain statement of fact, unashamed and unadorned, spoken by a child. Short, soft, and beautiful. What man wouldn't be sent straight off to Heaven knowing that, when his child is tired after a day of unrelenting reality, all she wants is to curl up in his lap and rest her head against his tweed-vested chest, and drift away asleep? I can remember reading that line as an eighth grader over and over again thinking, "I know just what she means." Even at fourteen, I wasn't too old that I didn't remember or appreciate the power of older arms enfolding you. Now, at thirty, I cannot wait until I can provide that selfsame comfort for my own child.

It's hard to imagine now that, when "To Kill a Mockingbird" was first written, and even when the film was first released, that it was a book and film of controversy. It is, of course, quite impossible for us to fathom how an educated, white lawyer defending a poor black man accused of raping a white woman could be controversial. After all, cases like that in one way or another happen without registering a blip on the controversy meter. And that's not to even mention the secondary controversy arising from Atticus Finch raising two children on his own-- single, middle-aged fathers were hardly the norm in those days.

Driving to work yesterday morning, I heard a review of "The Social Network" on NPR. It was an enthusiastic review. NPR latches onto certain movies with all the zeal of a rabid dog (remember the one that Atticus shoots down in the street?) and "The Social Network" is the latest artificial-butter-slathered flavor of the month. Amongst other things, the film was referred to as "controversial."

A film about a couple of petulent, privileged, white 20somethings and intellectual property law.

Now, I haven't seen it, and I'm probably not going to (I'm a curmudgeon, remember?) but I wonder if the notion of the word "controversial" has changed due to a paradigm shift in our culture, or our perceptions, or our morals. Maybe it's just a word thrown around without much thought, intended only to pique interest and sell tickets. I don't know. When I think of controversial films, I think of "In the Heat of the Night." I think of "Mississippi Burning." Of course, controversy and race do not always have to go together, but perhaps for my own personal definition of "controversy," it seems that they do go together-- or, in my mind, should. I wonder sometimes if we are so deluded, or even diluted, as a society that we mistake manufactured drama, or conflict, for controversy.

It's kind of like the difference between melodrama and tragedy-- a distinction that the chair of my alma mater's theatre department tried to drive into us one day during Intro to Drama.

"Running over a cat is melodrama. It's only tragic if you're the Crown Prince of Denmark and you run over a cat and it turns out the cat was your brother and you're married to its sister and you go crazy with guilt just as you're about to ascend to the throne and you drink poison, throw up into your daughter's mouth and kill her and her unborn child who would have grown to be your heir."

Mark Zuckerberg ain't no Crown Prince of Denmark. I'm tired, and I want Atticus.