Done with Facebook

I am here to report that quitting Facebook is as difficult as quitting smoking. I haven’t had a cigarette in 12 years, but I recognize this bullshit: the vow, the reconsideration, the half-measures, the baby steps. I quit smoking about 300 times before it stuck, and it took something bigger than me to do that. With smokes, it was my beautiful cat Jack dying of cancer (he did not smoke). His protracted illness pushed me to full-time smoking again, a major step back, and I told my partner “I need this, one more time. Let me smoke until it’s over, and I’ll stop forever.” I smoked my last butt as I cried and buried my boy in the backyard. And that was it.

Facebook was just entering my life around then. I was suspicious of it, but liked the idea of being findable, easily, by former students and old enemies. I bought into it, really, when my good friend Derek died suddenly: the collective mourning (he was very loved) happened on Facebook - the sharing of memories and coordination of memorials - and it was very powerful. “This is something real,” I thought, and mostly surrendered.

It was never an easy relationship, but it was very full. I did in fact regain contact with old friends and students, and restarted relationships with family I didn’t see offline. I don’t remember when FB started to really sour, but it did, as we all know, and I tried leaving - for a year at one point. It was important in both causing and grieving the sham presidency of *45. It was important to me in allowing a forum to share the comics I was making - for a time FB was the only place I was publishing them.

But it has sucked for a while. At one point, inspired by Hank Green’s “it’s a baby” post, I thought I should stick with it and watch it evolve into its next phase. But as friends have either left the platform or gone silent, I have found it both empty and irritating - and, with Fuckerberg’s obnoxious dodging of scrutiny by changing its name to Meta, gross.

I still kept going - but last week a stubborn battle that has been rolling for years came to a head: Facebook continually asking me for my phone number “for my own security” had been pissing me off for years, but I just ignored it. Now they’re sending me notes telling me I’ll lose access if I don’t comply. To be clear: my phone number is NOT a secret. It’s all over the place. But the strong-arming, and the lying about why - they turned out to be the last straw. I’m going to not comply, and I will be locked out until I comply, on May 19th.

It’s good. I needed something to push me off. I don’t like moral grey areas - I like to take stands - and facebook made everything grey. I am taking the same opportunity to leave Twitter, and to at least temporarily stop reading the news. (I will keep Insta if they don’t force my hand there - I am not addicted to it, and do still think it’s a positive space.) I want to wake up in the morning and just be, and decide for myself what I will pay attention to.

I’m posting my email and phone and address in my FB profile banner, so that if anyone really needs to reach me, they’ll be able to. I don’t know what will come next. I miss Web 1.0, to be honest. I miss a lot of stuff. But I’m really, really genuinely tired of having antagonistic relationships with companies and products that seem to hate me - Mac, FB, google. I want to withdraw, as much as possible.

I’m not posting this on Facebook - I don’t care to hear the mocking that comes with that. I’ll join the next good, well-populated, non-sociopathic social media phenomenon, after a good period of watching other people try it. Mostly I hope to spend more time reading. :)

Ford Nation

I've been off FB for a month or something now, and I did not miss it one second, until today. Today I wanted to commiserate about our Ontario election last night, and couldn't. That's a specifically emotional groupspace, and I missed the comics, one-liners and articles that would have let me feel my people feeling what I felt. I missed that. Facebook is good at that. 

And how do I feel? I know that you, missing my wit and insight, have travelled over here to my house to find out. I feel the way I do when something bad that happens a lot happens again. Sort of shocked, but not. I thank Donald Trump, that wizard, for over-preparing me for this. I can't really worry about a looting thug with sociopathic tendencies who DOESN'T have nuclear weapons. What's he gonna do? Wreck schools? Hospitals? Seen it. Fuck over the poor? What else has ever happened? Doug Ford is going to loot, in that way that rich people loot, by selling everything to their friends, cheap. Doug Ford is gonna get you a Deal.

I AM disappointed. I took some hope from the idea of an NDP groundswell. I imagined that Ontarians were clever enough to smell which way the wind blows. I prepared my heart for the shock of EITHER outcome. It could have been nice ... [sigh] ... but also: I think I'm sort of OVER it. I have read and heard so many ideas that are bigger and smarter than this silly cycle of corrupt Liberals and sociopathic Conservatives, that I can't believe that an NDP win would have changed the world much. 5% Better, maybe. I'm really feeling a couple of things: 

1. The revolution, if it is real and a thing we're considering, can only be spiritual and cultural. I'm not interested in indulging my fantasies (suddenly kill everyone who has a billion dollars and then just act like it didn't happen) because I know what fantasies are.. 

2. There are thinking people and non-thinking people. However lovingly I think we should behave towards the Junior Adults among us - VERY - who vote on single issues and consider only what is in eyesight, I'm not pretending to be equal anymore. I'm not discussing social issues with someone who can't see one move ahead, who can't imagine a second perspective. I'm not going to berate them, either. I'm just not going to engage. 

3. I want to shut up. I want to immerse myself in the ideas of other (thinking) people, to swim in conversation without being active. I'll hold my shit for places like this, where hundreds of people from Facebook flock to read my words because no one else can do it quite like me. 

Enough Politics, We Remember Your Trump Comics

I've finished making two little books - the 8th issue of the true adventures of jepcomix (yes I regret choosing that long name), which contains the story of the time M and I lived with a crazy dying cloud lawyer; and Squarehead, a 32 page comic about my 7th grade exchange trip to Trois Rivieres, Quebec (sucked!). 

I'm going to print them nicely, for the first time, in a 6x9 format, nice covers, good paper. This is the first time I've felt like the work deserved more than the Photocopy Treatment - and the first time I've thought, I should do something to promote them. That's interesting to me - i've been actively at it for about 14 years, so it's a milestone. I think I'll try to get into a couple of festivals, maybe. Marjan will dig that, cuz ... more travelling. 

(Sir Duke is playing right now. I had to stop and enjoy.)

SCHEMES

Here's my dopey plan: jepcomix 8 has a really colourful cover, which might make people notice it. Inside, not a bad story, and an advert for Squarehead. I release that soon (that involves giving it away to about 9 people around the world, maybe to sell, maybe to review). THEN, a few months later, take Squarehead over to The Beguiling and see if, maybe, all this work means they don't chuck it into the Zine pile.

Then: apply to TCAF, and maybe fly to Chicago (where I will go in and offer to buy everyone at Quimby's and Chicago Comics a beer, because of their generous openness to Zines and minis of all kinds) for one of their conferences.  

I thought about re-engaging the Religion theme again for an ongoing strip like That's Me in the Corner or Fights, but couldn't muster the energy. All this meditation is sort of sucking my Rage Mojo, sort of cooling my Hate Engine. I guess I'm glad, but ... I don't want to write about meditating. 

I think, rather, that I will pour some energy into the comic I imagine when I'm paddling out around the Leslie Spit, about a mouse and a ball who become friends and try to understand their huge world, together. I've got so many silly ideas about this story, and writing it won't interfere with this Retiring, Uninterested, or Above-It monk thing I'm trying to cultivate: all pictures and nature and imagination.

The first story I wrote about them - the fraught project that took YEARS too long Because:Assholes - won't have much to do with the newer idea, but that's good. That's honest. I spent many years on projects that weren't worth the time. I want, as the man said, to live deliberately. Apparently this involves some pretty silly stuff. You know, for kids. 

Anyway, shut the fuck up already Jeff. I saw Solo, it was fun. I saw Deadpool 2, and it was very funny. I read that Chinese sci-fi book the Three Body Problem - very cool. I am right this second listening to that first Darkness single (I Believe in a Fing Called Love), which still does the trick for me. Oh - song's over: next is Jay Z and Alicia K singing about

New York. I love this song. Toronto will never make a song like this until Toronto says Suck a Dick to the provincial rest of this province. Suck a dick, Ontario. Doug Ford, I'll fight you anytime, you Good Ol Boy, you fraudulent piece of shit, you shitty older brother. Call me.

Love, 

Santa