I am not a Socialist!

This past weekend I took the final steps in stepping back from most social media. I cancelled both my twitter and Facebook accounts. I have for years considered these places to be creative suckholes – I could feel my own creativity draining from me – but actually cutting the cord is very difficult. Many of my friends use these platforms to stay in touch. It’s the place to get Bloom County comics 1^st. I’ve used it to promote my music, my comics, and even to send my oldest child to Siberia (that was successful by the way – they’ve since come back). But I just can’t do it anymore. All I have left is Tumblr and this.

And LinkedIn. And yelp. And WeMe. And…  CHRIST!

In cutting the cord for twitter and Facebook they both treat your account deletion like a divorce. I still have 30 days to change my mind before everything becomes final. I can come back at any time until November 14^th and it will all still be there. All NINE YEARS of posting. Nine freaking years.

I didn’t realize it because I had forgotten, but the reason I even joined all these social networks in the first place was to promote my album eleven/eleven. The single “Jennifer” was doing very well and I wanted to share it with a wider audience. That only kinda/sorta what happened.

I ran into friends, which I expected. Some of my friends are real social mavens – even back then some had over 1,000 Facebook friends and now they had access to me. I don’t mind that really – you can’t choose your fans – and if they can put up with my ranting then more power to them. Lots of people I knew in high school started friending me. LOTS of them. Many I only barely knew. A couple I actively HATED.

I have no desire whatsoever to relive my high school days. There was no “glory days” or any of that bullshit – I’m honestly surprised I survived at all. Fuck ‘em. I didn’t get into social media to reconnect with my past. But a fan’s a fan – I only blocked one or two of them.

The Obama era came along and I discovered a number of people I knew tangentially were racist motherfuckers. I purged them. I ranted angrily against things and for things. I have always been politically active and screaming into the Facebook void was a good way to make points and get into arguments. Oh, boy, did I get into arguments. I am a LIBERAL and proud of it.

I finally reached a point where I realized I was angry all the time, and it was affecting me. So I went through and purged again – this time actually cutting real friends and people I respected (including a decorated war veteran to whom I apologized personally) and whittling my friends list down to what I thought was a manageable few. Okay, a manageable 150 or so.

It was better for a while – even fun – but then old habits creeped their way back in. I got into fewer arguments (I do have Republican friends, good people one and all and we’re a feisty bunch) but it was workable. I felt more relaxed, and got to work on music again. I discovered that my anger had crept into my music and that what I had been producing was kinda terrible given what I wanted to accomplish, so I started over. I wrote a whole new album, and I think it’s among my best work. Social media was still a distraction but nothing serious.

As I liked to tell people, paraphrasing the great Walt Kelly, Don’t take Facebook so seriously. It ain’t nohow important. Like many of my friends, I kept personal information off of social media. I don’t have it on my phone, and I’ve never linked my address book to it. Same with twitter. I don’t have Instagram or… what’s the other one… Pinterest.

Then came Trump.

This motherfucking spray-tanned son of a bitch. Yeah, it’s a spray tan – probably from some brand long out of business that he bought all of their old and now-expired stock. Look closely – sometimes it gets in his hair. This walking gravity-sucking lie machine. This master manipulator of social media.

He calls himself the healthiest person on earth when he clearly has the profile of a man one cheeseburger away from stroking out. He says that he never said things that are on film, tape, and TV. He contradicts himself in the same sentence at times. He lies about EVERYTHING. He believes that everything Obama did was bad, no matter what it was, and is trying to reverse it. He wants to turn west coast military bases into coal import/export stations, because those of us in Washington, Oregon and California don’t vote his way.

This motherfucking cheeto-stain porn-star fucking Manchurian Candidate by way of Russia and Saudi Arabia whose number one defense of anything bad he has done is “I didn’t do it, YOU did it”… won the fucking election.

And he hasn’t shut up about it since. Or about anything else for that matter.

I now have friends predicting and upcoming civil war in the U.S. I have family that has moved overseas (or at least to Canada) and I’ve considered it myself. Trump, and his affect on everything, is every fucking place you can go on the internet. And that’s the final straw. I tried fighting for a while, slipping into my old habits and being angry all the time, especially as toadstool-dick insulted whole swaths of the population that now include every member of my family except me – the lone white male who isn’t Jewish. He’s even insulted the only member of my family who supported him.

I have watched people of faith chase after golden (spray-tanned) calves. I have watched whole segments of people insulted and belittled. I have watched people I know defend the indefensible. Defend what they KNOW can’t be defended. I have watched as people who consider themselves centrists become radicalized by the Clown-in-chief. I have spoken with them. Argued with them. Consoled them. Cracked jokes with them.

But you know what? I just want to be a musician. Write songs, write prose (and the occasional rant), make records, and hopefully have hits and sell records. When you do these things it takes up a lot of your time. When you involve 1 person on social media that time increases. And for every person you add it increases exponentially until you reach the point that something you are doing has to go away. I have fallen horribly behind on things that matter to me, and I actually can tell when that happened – fall of 2016. Hell, there are TV shows from back then I haven’t caught up on. Books I haven’t read.

Books I haven’t read…

Those of you who know me personally know that I’m an avid reader. 50, 60 books a year. Often more. Until the past two years. I haven’t read one book all the way through this year. I miss it. That was the wrong thing that had to give. Social media drove me away from those things and I can’t have that anymore. Something ELSE has to give, and I decided that it has to be Social Media.

I can’t have it in my life and still be a recognizable version of myself. So, goodbye Facebook. Goodbye twitter.

Of course, I’ll eventually be back. I’ll need them to promote my NEXT album. That’s the way of things these days. But it’s going to be different – focused on other things. Focused on my music career.

I hope.

Cheap Shots:

Can one of my Facebook/twitter friends share this picture?

To my friends: Called it!

Donald Daters. Oops, it leaks…

Poor judgment? “Harvested”? Look, until two days ago I didn’t know there was a place on Earth where it was legal to hunt baboons. Now that you’re out of a job, don’t you just feel like a… (insert joke here). Warning: if you’re an animal lover you might want to skip this one. Or drink three shots first.

Maybe he was just cleaning his bone saw and it went off.

Maybe he’s somebody’s chum.

Dear Fuckboy Nazi Gavin McInnes: 誰だと思もっている んでしょう?

Come on now. Really? The drunken host of Match Game ain’t violently overthrowing nuthin’.

We need this in the American version now.

What it’s like to referee your own election.

My own take on all this has been, from the very beginning, who gives a spit?

Thief.

“Deficit Schmeficit as long as I’m rich.”

Treason? Probably not.

I’d light a candle, but I’m afraid of getting a blue screen. What. Too soon? In all seriousness, my condolences to the family. He turned out to be okay – post Microsoft.

Could you be drawn to this?

Dear 45, he ain’t Kanye.

Maybe you could try a disguise? Like, say, a Bow-Tie?

And because I love you, here’s some Liam Gallagher.