I SELF-IDENTIFY AS A TOOL

  I’m a left-winger.

  I have a friend who makes a living because he understands the ways Americans think about politics. Every once in a while, I sit with him at an oyster bar and he tells me about how this stuff works. He says what I’m doing here is called “self-identifying.” 

  This means it feels important to me to say out loud that I’m a leftist. And that’s true, it does. 

  But while I am a leftist, or at least I self-identify as one, that doesn’t mean I’m a rube. By which, I don’t think that I’m right and the other side is wrong. 

  My political thoughts and feelings are important to me, but they are nothing compared to the rest of me. 

  I’m a writer (songs, prose, fiction, lists of crap to pack for a trip, whatever I have time for), and I’m also a child of addiction, a fan of Dylan and Lou Reed and William Burroughs, and a lot more besides.  

  This all means that I’m fascinated by the way people think. It started out with me mostly hating people for it. Then- over time- it grew into a grudging admiration, and infatuation, and now love. 

  I was once in a car with Eugene Chadbourne for eight straight hours without stopping. At the end of the eight hours, I glanced casually at the gas gauge and I saw that red dot that pops up for people too stupid to take the “E” seriously. There was no more gas in this car at all. We were rolling downhill, luckily, and I steered the car into a gas station and it died right next to a tank. Another win!

FACEBOOK SHOULD BE PUT ON A RAFT, SET ON FIRE, AND PUSHED DOWNRIVER TOWARD VALHALLA

(Author’s note: I’m begging you to read this entire piece before getting angry at me. If you’d prefer not to commit to that, I ask you to please just not read it.) 

As far as I can tell, everyone agrees that Facebook is awful. I’ve never seen anyone praise or defend Facebook. This consensus exists, despite the vast hordes of people who are on Facebook every day. I’m speaking anecdotally, but I have just looked up the statistics, and let’s just say that you probably know more people who aren’t on Facebook than you know people who have been struck by lightning, but it’s not a blowout. 

  This reminds me of the period in the late 70s/early 80s when I couldn’t find anyone who would admit to having been a Bee Gees fan. This despite the Saturday NightFever album having gone 16x platinum, a sales figure so high there isn’t even a name for it. 

  For my part, I see Facebook as a wonderful and convenient resource, when I want to reconnect with people I haven’t seen for a while so they can get pissed off at me.