Wide Open Mind

     Of late, my life has been a montage set to the Willie Nelson version of "Don't Get Around Much Anymore." Lack of spending cash has all but destroyed my social life. It has not, however, impeded my exploration of online social media.
    I'm on my third go-round with Facebook. I quit the first time because Facebook insisted on filling my inbox with gossipy junk ("Felicity just commented on Gerald's status update!") like a hyperactive, attention-starved fourth-grader passing notes around the classroom. My second departure was occasioned by friend requests from dozens of people whom I don't want to know and never did, gate-crashers at my private party. Now I have my Facebook settings figured out; there are virtual bouncers outside the party now, who fill their downtime by ripping up the electronic junk mail I don't wish to read. Also I avoid a lot of the billboard tackiness of Facebook by using Facebook Lite.
    The problem with Facebook is that it wants to be the new AOL -- the lens, the portal, the heavily-sponsored periscope through which millions of people view the internet. It wants you to conduct your entire social life on its pages. That might be tolerable if Facebook were not such a pushy, inconsiderate host. Taking profile pictures and using them in ads, without permission or even notification? Lame in the extreme, and enough to remind us that Facebook is only throwing a party so it can try to sell us time-shares and Tupperware.
    Thus I prefer Twitter. I need not tolerate a hard sell to use Twitter -- hell, I don't even have to visit the Twitter homepage, thanks to the widget at the bottom right-hand corner of my browser. And now that my tweets are automatically forwarded to Facebook, I spend less time at the commercialized Facebook homepage. Win-win.
    Another reason to prefer Twitter: it allows me to hear not only from the people I know, but the people I would LIKE to know. Geography and poverty make it impossible for me to hang out with Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry, Ken Tremendous, Felicia Day, Tim Berners-Lee, Eddie Izzard, Diablo Cody, et al -- but on Twitter they will gladly enlarge my life with little updates on what they are doing, thinking, and eating. This feels like a great blessing to a guy who can't afford to go out for drinks on Friday night...
    Facebook reminds me of Microsoft -- it draws attention to itself (mainly by sucking) and tries to lock you inside a closed mindset. Twitter reminds me of Apple because it executes a simple but useful function so well that you quickly forget the tool and focus on the ways in which you might use it. I wish all my friends would ditch Facebook and join the tweetstream instead.

     She got into drugs, then into booze, nearly let it kill her, straightened out, now tries to be the kind of teacher she needed back when. He went to engineering school, where they taught him how to get rich and respected by theorizing new ways to kill people for their oil. She got engaged, then dumped, then engaged, then dumped, then married to a guy who'd been engaged and dumped, now sends me messages asking for news, never found a man to compare with Dad. He got into finance after years of running the family sub shop -- now pays for his nice house with rapid computer-based trades, buys a sandwiches for lunch. She makes conceptualist art that speaks to a continued interest in smoking weed. He went out west with Dad's money "to make movies" and probably just spent it on coke and the women he'll never call back. She has a position of authority at a women's college and I say That's perfect, a role model, she was always a role model. How many attended the reunion? You're asking the wrong person. 

    Tourists take the sun home for winter, and a great gray scrim is pulled across the sky. Occasional dull-colored snow sifts down streetward. To compensate for diminishing light (and kindle spending) the merchants and city workers dangle strings of lights on storefronts, over sidewalks, in the skeletons of trees. In Longfellow Square, the poet on his throne of stony achievement is obliged to hold a red-bowed gift box in his lap until New Year. Gloves and hats and bulky jackets turn figures on the square into boxy wobblers, hydrants swathed in layers of knit. The wind asserts itself against them. Days are still getting darker. Thirty shopping days left.

     ...And so music returns to Thing-A-Day, howsoever slightly. This is one of those piano ditties that I write without really thinking about it, and eventually record when it proves stubborn enough to stick in my memory. Will there ever be words? Will a bridge ever be written? Time will tell.

First thing

figure models